It’s been pretty quiet here, I know. I’ve got a half-written essay that I want to finish but there are lots of other (mostly good) things going on, and there just hasn’t been time.
One of those new things is a book of short stories, which I’ll be telling you about soon enough and which is scheduled to be published in the Fall. Here’s a little taste of that. And here’s another.
Meanwhile, I did manage to read around 85 books this year, more than half of them poetry. Unusually (for me), I read more non-fiction this year than fiction. Partly that’s because my next project (after the book of stories) is probably going to be about creativity, and I’ve been reading a lot about that subject.
Anyway, for those who are interested, here are some of my favourite reads of 2025:
Poetry:
Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective
Karen Solie, Wellwater
Carl Phillips, Then the War: Selected Poems
Dobby Gibson, Hold Everything
Hagit Grossman, Trembling of the City
Bren Simmers, The Work
Ronna Bloom, In a Riptide
Fiction:
Alejandro Zambra, Chilean Poet
Jacob MacArthur Mooney, The Northern
Heather Birrell, Born
Alissa York, Far Cry
Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through the Slaughter (Why hadn’t I read this already?!)
Non-fiction:
Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Maggie Helwig, Encampment
Miriam Toews, A Truce that Is Not Peace
Ann Sillman, Faux Pas
John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Ira Wells, On Book Banning
Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence & Justice
Summer is over but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to dream about it…
Hello friends,
It’s busy season here for me, with the school year fully under way, my work with the Centre for Creativity building (including an exciting new partnership with the Toronto International Festival of Authors!), the re-launch of Parchment, and the Jewish High Holidays making a scramble of my household and my brain. I have started writing a new HPM essay, but I may not be able to finish it for a little while. In the meantime, let me spread the word about a cool online poetry class that may interest you.
Seems nice enough, doesn’t he?
My friend Kevin Spenst has been teaching poetry workshops and classes for over ten years, which means he’s had the pleasure of seeing the successes of people he’s worked with. As he puts it, “Books are being published and I get to hear the brilliance of voices in full bloom.” One of the texts he uses is How a Poem Moves, so if you’re following this blog, you’ve already done some of the homework! If you’re interested in working with him asynchronously in Poetry 2 for ten weeks starting October 9th, here is the link: Poetry 2
Happy Fall, and Shana Tova to those who know what that means!
Dobby Gibson and I were at Indiana University together in the mid-90s, earning our MFAs, but I don’t think I’ve seen him in person since. Still, we’ve kept rough track of each other on social media, as one does. Dobby has done very well for himself, publishing four collections of poems, mostly with Graywolf Press. He looks a little like Tobias Menzies, or maybe my memory of him has blurred as the years have passed so that I half-believe I’m recognizing a former classmate when I see Edmure Tully or Prince Phillip onscreen.
Do you see it?
But Gibson’s poems are nothing like the sincere, brow-furrowing grumps Menzies seems to portray. There’s more mischief in a Dobby Gibson poem than there is in a month of Menzies. This is from Hold Everything, his most recent collection:
Small Craft Talk
In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music
is the kind of thing poets like to say to prove they’re on your side
but no one is on your side forever not even a poet
although a poem can be if it’s able to disarm you enough
to submit to its peculiar logic as if you’re hearing the song
of your own mind sung into being so that you become yourself
by becoming more like another self like the friendly bank teller
who became the bank’s greatest thief he gave away his entire plunder
to neighborhood children so the judge who sentenced him to life
couldn’t look the jury in the eyes as he retreated to his chambers
to fold his black robe over his chair and sign his final decision
I’ve always wished life were different which he left on his desk beneath a coin
before climbing through the window and turning back into an owl
— from Hold Everything (Graywolf, 2024), used by permission
For those of us who teach or study creative writing at academic institutions, “craft talks” are a common phenomenon. I’ve given them, I’ve listened to them. Whatever your view of MFA programs, one of the things they support is a vibrant market for craft talks, and so they persist. In my opinion, craft talks are no more toxic for the environment than Hallmark movies or manga cartoons or sports blogs. And, every once in a while, a craft talk can reveal real insight into how a writer imagines his artistic practice.
Still, this isn’t exactly a craft talk. It’s a poem called “Small Craft Talk,” and we’ll see that it’s not necessarily beholden to the patterns and expectations that a typical craft talk would be, even if the title suggests that it might.
The title may also remind some readers of Anne Carson’s wonderful little book Short Talks, which was published in 1992. The fun of that book is that the ostensible subject of each “talk” has a very loose hold on where the poems go. Her “Short Talk on Walking Backwards,” for example, ends up with this assertion about the dead: “They are victims of love, many of them.” How did we get there?!
So even before we begin, I anticipate a gap between what the title of the poem claims it’s going to be doing, and what the poem will actually be doing. Playing with these expectations might be a part of the poem’s subject, and even part of its “craft.”
We begin with the assertion that there are languages in which one word can be used to refer to “music” and “dream.” Now, I’m no linguist, so maybe I should keep my doubts to myself, but I have never heard of this correspondence before, and have no idea which languages the poem might be referring to. The speaker doesn’t name them either, so I can’t help but wonder if he’s lying. I know of languages where the word for poem and the word for song are the same (Hebrew and Arabic, to name two), and I wonder if there’s a bit of a wink toward that common tidbit of poetic knowledge. But that’s not where the poem starts. It starts by connecting music to dream – so is this “short craft talk” going to be some sort of discourse on the trance-like power of fusion jazz?
Before we go too far down that rabbit hole, though, the second stanza qualifies, or maybe undermines, the claim as “the kind of thing poets like to say / to prove they’re on your side.” Instead of learning about how language works, or how dreams correspond to music, we find ourselves being told a secret about one of the ways that a poet might operate. A craft talk, as promised! The conspiratorial admission feels like a pulling back of the curtain, like a Penn & Teller routine, in which the techniques of magic are explained to an audience while the trick is still, at the same time, being pulled off.
If Penn & Teller can explain misdirection while practicing misdirection in order to pull off an even more spectacular misdirection, so too can Dobby Gibson invent a possibly-true fact about language as a way to discuss how poets ingratiate themselves to readers, to “prove” they’re “on your side” in order to… wait, in order to do what exactly? The goal of a magician is to perform illusions that entertain and delight. What is a poet’s goal?
The next few couplets seem to go back and forth between admitting that a poet isn’t really on your “side,” though maybe a poem can be, sometimes, but also maybe not? And what does it mean to be on someone’s “side” in a poem anyhow? This isn’t a class war or a football game, where you have to choose.
We’re also halfway through the poem and haven’t really gotten anywhere yet, though it feels like the speaker is making tentative gestures towards an idea about craft. The language is vaguely academic, the tone fairly formal, not too far away from the kind of craft talks you might hear at an academic conference. And creeping under the caginess and double-speak is a familiar and resonant claim about the power of poetry to be “the song // of your own mind sung into being / so that you become yourself //by becoming more like another self.” For me this idea of “your own mind sung into being” recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “The Poet,” in which he claims that “the young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.” The idea that a poem might give voice to our deepest, truest selves is a resonant one. I suspect we’ve all encountered poems that seem to articulate our feelings in phrases we wish we had been able to think of ourselves.
So perhaps, despite its doubts and qualifications, the poem does seem to be making a claim about what poetry can do. But there’s still the question of craft, of how the poem achieves these aims. Craft talks are usually focused on the how of poetry, whether it’s a nitty gritty investigation of line break usage, or a practice that helps solve a common creative problem. And while the idea that a poet might open a poem with a false fact about language seems like a beginning, it’s not a fully formed idea, is it?
Then the poem takes another abrupt turn and imagines a bank teller. Notice that the section here begins with a “like,” so the whole bank teller story is an extended metaphor for how we’re supposed to feel when we read the poem, “becom[ing] yourself // by becoming more like another self.” Might I become myself by imagining myself as the double-dealing banker? Is the bank teller’s “revealed self” the one who gives away his plunder or the one who steals it from the bank? Also, is this a true story? Given the poem’s track record thus far, I kind of doubt it. Does it matter? But I can’t help it, I’m curious – how does a bank teller become a bank’s greatest thief? It pulls me in, no less than the dancing gorilla in the Penn & Teller bit.
But wait, the thief isn’t really the main character in this story either, it’s the poor judge who appears two stanzas later to sentence him “to life.” Note how once the poem discovers its judge, it zooms in and takes a full four lines to describe his actions: he can’t look into the jury’s eyes, he retreats to his chambers, he folds his robes, and he signs a paper. Considering how many twists and turns the poem has taken until now, the slowdown feels remarkable. We enter the judge’s deliberation, and prepare ourselves for the way he will react to his disillusionment. The idea that this scene is the last straw for him, that’s enough for this to be his “final” decision, starts to sink in.
Because in the logical world of courts and justice and crime, a sentencing judge has a job to do, even if he is sympathetic to the motivations and perhaps even admiring of the techniques of the Robin-Hood-like criminal before him. A judge has an obligation to pass down a sentence. We seem poised, despite the poet’s efforts to say clever things about art and poetic craft, to end up in a world—a courtroom, a craft talk – trapped by standards, traditions, and tendencies that need to be followed despite the way they pull us away from a satisfying resolution. As he climbs through the window, wishing life were different, I wonder if the poem is going to end in the ultimate expression of despair.
But a poem is not a craft talk, is it? And while poems certainly have traditions and tendencies, one of poetry’s great strengths is that, as long as it has us “on its side,” a poem can sidestep rules and ignore traditions. It can go anywhere, including fly right out the window. So maybe we don’t have to end with despair. Or, more accurately, maybe the poem can ingest our judge’s despair and transform it into something evocative and beautiful. The judge turns “back into an owl” – it’s that “back” that I keep thinking about. How many active judges sitting on circuit courts around the world are really animals in disguise…? His resumption of his strigine form (I learned the word strigine today) doesn’t solve the problem of injustice or the frustrating disconnect between our ideals and practice, but it has given us a way out, if only on the page, and in our imaginations.
I could say more about some of the sweet nuggets left lying around the end of this poem – the owl as a creature associated with the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena; the mysterious coin that the judge has placed on the document – but let’s leave them for another day. What this small craft talk has revealed to us is something about poetry’s power to do something few other art forms can manage – it can undermine its own technique, get lost in explanatory discourse, follow and then abandon a storyline, and finally, quietly, almost miraculously, vanish into thin air. You want to learn about practicing magic? Try that.
Haim Gouri, “All Will Be Well, I Promise.” and Najwan Darwish, “’Who Remembers the Armenians?’”
I’m going to break my usual practice and tackle two short poems at once this time, for reasons that I hope will become clear. Both are poems I admire, poems that seem to be in communication with each other. And like all things when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, there is not really enough space for either of them.
These are not brand new poems – Gouri’s is from a collection published in 2020, and Darwish’s has been available in English at least since 2014. If you want something that acts more as contemporary witness to the moment, I recommend the harrowing work of Mosab Abu-Toha, and selections of Israeli poems on October 7 that you can find here and here.
But these two have been on my mind a lot, and so I’m spending some time with them here hoping they will resonate with you as well.
*
Haim Gouri’s “All Will Be Well, I Promise” has been circulating widely among Israelis since October 7. Published in a posthumous collection in 2020, but probably written in 2018, during an earlier conflict in Gaza, the poem seems to speak with special resonance for the current moment.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1923, Gouri fought in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and became famous in Israel as a journalist covering the Eichmann trials in the early 1960s. His international literary reputation has been eclipsed by his contemporary Yehuda Amichai, but within Israel Gouri’s work is perhaps even better known, partly because he often wrote in a more public voice than Amichai did. Gouri’s poems have been set to music that have served as anthems for Israelis.
I’ve attached the Hebrew for those of you who can read the original. The translation is one I’ve adapted a bit (with my wife’s help) from various versions (mostly unattributed) I’ve seen online.
חיים גורי, “יהיה טוב, אני מבטיח”, בתוך: ‘אל המקום האחר: שירים אחרונים’, הוצאת הקיבוץ המאוחד בשיתוף הוצאת דניאלה די נור, 2020
All Will Be Well, I Promise
Come, a bit of quiet. Come, a little boredom. You deserve it, Everything is so loud here, unfinished.
How are you? They ask me on the street, all kinds of people. I am how my people are, I respond, and then they heave a small sigh like sharers of a troubled time. All will be well! I promise. As if I were the secret keeper of the Messiah.
There are a couple of nice sonic notes here that I can point out — for example, the word for “promise” in the penultimate line is mav-ti-ach, which rhymes with the word for messiah in the final line, ma-shi-ach. So the poem clicks shut with rhyme. But earlier, there’s some internal assonance – good (tov) and secret (sod) – that for me gives the poem a somewhat more formal tone than what the English suggests here. Because Hebrew is a revived spoken language — rebuilt into a vernacular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries — it carries its ancient origins on its linguistic sleeve more blatantly than most other languages. I’ll get back to this.
In spoken Hebrew, one of the more common ways to ask someone how they’re doing (and the one Gouri uses here in line 5) literally means, “How is your peace?” Ma shlom-cha. “Shalom” is a richer word than just “peace,” though. It means something closer to completeness, wholeness, fulfillment. Israelis even use a verb form of the word, “l’shalem,” to settle a tab at a restaurant. Gouri here reminds us of the word’s basic origins, turning the word into a complex little wordplay – “I am how my people are” in the poem is shlomi k’shlom ami. Even in my transliteration you can hear how the shlom-ami acts almost like a mirror, or maybe a stutter. “My peace is like my people’s peace,” or maybe, “I am how my people are.” The speaker’s mood, then, is inextricably wrapped up in the “peace,” the completeness, of his community. And in a part of the world that knows precious little peace or fulfillment, a statement like that can only elicit the kind of “small sigh” that fellow-sufferers understand. What else can be said?
The other part of this poem I want to focus out is the ending. Yi-hi-yeh tov, “it will be good,” is a common Hebrew phrase that I’ve translated here as “all will be well,” with a nod towards Julian of Norwich, because in the poem it has an undercurrent of religious hope that I don’t want to miss. For a Hebrew poet, even a word like “good” can’t help but evoke Genesis (“And God saw that it was good”).
But who is this man who can make this sort of promise to his neighbours? And how does he see himself? Of course, Gouri was well-known in Israel, and like any public figure in a small country, his pronouncements on current events could carry special weight. We don’t necessarily have to associate the speaker of the poem with Gouri himself, but whoever he is, he seems to be some kind authority figure – after all, “all kinds of people” seem to be asking him how he’s doing. The “all will be well” he pronounces does a bit of a dance between the kind of typical language we might all use with our neighbours (“don’t worry, it’ll be ok”), and something that rubs up against prophecy.
This brings me to the comparison he makes for himself in the final line: “as if I were the secret keeper of the Messiah.” I’ve seen others translate this as the “confidant” of the Messiah, but for me the word sod, secret, needs to be included because of this connection to the language of prophecy. In Jewish tradition, the prophet Elijah is the one who can reveal all secrets, whether they are particularly difficult passages of biblical text or what will happen in the future. Elijah is also the harbinger of the Messiah, and so the comparison the speaker makes for himself could sound a bit grandiose. Or maybe he recognizes that his neighbours – all the people who approach him on the street looking for answers – see him in this role. It occurs to me as I look at the poem again that maybe the “quiet” and “boredom” he longs for at the beginning is connected as much to responding to his neighbours’ expectations as it is to the events they are worried about. Not an uncommon feeling for prophets of all nations.
But the speaker of the poem is not the secret keeper of the Messiah. The “as if” at the beginning of that last line is crucial. He says the words, “all will be well,” but he can’t know if all will be well. In fact it seems highly unlikely that all will be well. He puts on the voice of the Messiah’s secret-keeper, but he lacks Elijah’s access to divine truth. And so while his promise might reassure his neighbours, it doesn’t really seem to comfort him. The poem ends with the rhyme between “promise” and “Messiah” that always feels out of reach. Which makes the claim that “all will be well” both fragile, even absurd, and somehow more brave than it would have been if the speaker really knew that it would be.
*
Last November, in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and the Israeli response to it, a writer I know gave a reading here at the University of Toronto. This is someone with whom I have profound, uncomfortable disagreement about how to understand what’s happening in that part of the world. But I also have a lot of respect for her as a writer and teacher. In addition to her own work, she read this poem by Najwan Darwish and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“Who Remembers the Armenians?”
I remember them and I ride the nightmare bus with them each night and my coffee, this morning I’m drinking it with them
Darwish is a Palestinian poet born in Jerusalem in 1978 and with a growing worldwide reputation. (I should mention in passing that he is not closely related to the great Mahmoud Darwish). I have no Arabic, and so I can’t speak to the wordplay and sonic qualities here the way I can about Gouri’s poem. Instead I’ll start with the title. “Who remembers the Armenians?” is a quotation attributed to Adolph Hitler in a speech he gave in 1939. The implication of the rhetorical question was that if the Turks could eradicate a substantial portion of its Armenian population in the 1910s and face few diplomatic consequences for its actions, then what was there to stop Germany from doing the same to its Jews? The casual brutality of the question, as well as the contextual complexity of the allusion, makes the poem remarkable for me before it’s even begun.
The poem opens with a rejection of Hitler’s claim. The speaker does remember the Armenians, both day and night, whether he’s riding the nightmare bus or drinking his morning coffee. I have questions about this “nightmare bus” – is it a particularly unpleasant ride on public transportation, or a metaphorical rendering of the kinds of dreams that take us on bumpy journeys in the imagination? Or is the speaker himself in danger, riding a “nightmare bus” that has more in common with the experiences of the Armenians than has been revealed so far in the poem? We get precious little about the speaker’s circumstances; we just know that he not only remembers the Armenians, but that he is “with them” somehow, sharing their pain.
The poem also tacitly reminds us that, as it turns out, Hitler was wrong: we do remember the Armenians, we do remember the Jews of mid-20th-century Europe. And let’s not forget that, despite the atrocities enacted upon them, Armenians and Jews have continued to survive and thrive even after their experiences of exile and attempted genocide. So the poem sets itself up in opposition to Hitler’s rhetoric. But despite the empathetic connection, the poem can do little to shield or comfort those who were lost in these conflicts. The poet who drinks his coffee with the Armenians can’t undo their suffering, can’t return them to their homes, can’t resurrect the dead. As we sit with Darwish’s speaker, we might imagine that his remembrance, his expression of solidarity and identification (and, by extension, ours) might be some sort of comfort to those who survived the massacres. But it saves no one.
The unspoken resonance of these lines from a Palestinian poet is powerful, even if it’s not explicit. The poem wants us to draw connections between the history of genocide and the plight of the Palestinian people, as well as the reminder of resilience and survival. Whether or not we believe that what is happening to the Palestinians should be classified as a genocide will have an effect on how we respond to this. How can it not? But the poem is not obligated to make legal arguments, it establishes correspondences. I want to state, and sit with, my discomfort here.
Speaking of discomfort. As the poem rapidly closes, the statements of solidarity with the Armenians pivot: “You, murderer — / Who remembers you?” is both a triumph and an accusation. Do we, as readers, feel that we are being addressed in this final couplet? If so, what does that say about us? If not, then where is the murderer of Armenians who the poem is talking to? There’s a bit of “I bet you think this song is about you” cleverness to the move, forcing us to confront what may have been, or may still be, our complicity in the suffering of others.
And the question in the final lines – “You, murderer— / who remembers you?” strikes a deeply satisfying note in its tonal defiance. But the troubling answer to the question “who remembers you?” is… everyone. We all know who murdered the Armenians. You’re a Google search away from finding the names (with pictures and biographies) of the perpetrators of those horrors. And the man who is credited with uttering the terrible remark that is the poem’s title? You know his name. You know it as well as you know the names of any of his victims. That question of remembrance is just as complicated and fraught in this poem as the promise that “all will be well” is in Gouri’s.
Forgive me, I’m going to go on a biblical tangent for a minute. King Amalek is a recurring villain in the Hebrew Bible, one of the most hated of the chieftains who opposes the Israelites. In Exodus 17 Amalek ambushes the Israelites’ rear, where stragglers, the sick, and children are encamped, and the act is seen as a particularly egregious offense against God and civilization, a war crime. Because of this, the Israelites are admonished in Deuteronomy 25:19 to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget.” I’m not sure that Darwish is deliberately making this allusion here – Amalek does not appear in the Quran – but there’s a logical problem in the commandment, as there is in the poem – how can we “blot out a memory,” and then “not forget” to do so? Doesn’t the very act of reminding us to blot out Amalek’s name preserve his memory? And here I am perpetuating this problem – if you didn’t know about Amalek before you read this, you do now, and so his memory continues.
Darwish’s poem stands in this same kind of contradiction for me. It simultaneously evokes and erases the identities of the perpetrators of these crimes. Similar to Gouri’s promise to his neighbours, the question at the end of the poem has about it something defiantly aspirational, the idea that we might all sit one day under our vines and fig trees, when all will be well, trying and failing to recall those bloodthirsty scumbags who brought so much pain and suffering to the world. Let us pray for a day when we can’t remember their names.
Long time no see! It’s been a little over a year since my last essay. I’ve been busy with teaching at Victoria College, launching the Victoria University Centre for Creativity, and maybe even writing some short stories? Not to mention the world being on fire, of course.
However, the school year is mostly wrapped up, and reading Domenica Martinello’s new book Good Want got my HPM brain working again, and so I’m back.
Martinello is a Montreal-based poet and writer whose second book, Good Want, was recently published by Coach House Press. The cover image seems to be of a group of saints: each figure has a classic halo around his head indicating divine grace, and many have a monk’s tonsure. But the looks on their faces are anything but beatific. They seem to be giving each other side-eye, or looking down in despair. More like a clutch of moody teenagers than a gathering of holy men. It’s the perfect image for Martinello’s collection, which draws much from her Catholic upbringing, but which also delightfully evokes adolescent awkwardness, snark, and conflicted desires from the holy to the profane. I could spend a considerable amount of time with the title “Good Want” and the suggestions that spray out from it – it’s also the title of a terrific poem, one that’s too long for this project to tackle. But let’s leave the questions of which “wants” are “good” for now and get to one of my favourite poems from the collection.
Con
My first time
in a confessional
I was so small I
fit under the sink.
The lord’s house had no
air conditioning.
We had this in common.
I went through my Sunday training
resentful, sweating and pale
as a lump of mozzarella.
Provoked and prodded for weeks
before the booth, I balled
my fists, wracked my brain, finally
apologized for saying a bad word.
Repeated it gleefully
as the holy father told me,
That’s not how
confessions work.
My stomach growled
a low, evil frequency
only the kids licking their fingers
in the nearby pews could hear.
— from Good Want (Coach House, 2024), used by permission
I want to start by thinking about confession. Of course this is a poem about the Catholic ritual. The image of a girl struggling to come up with something to tell her priest, and then giddily repeating the sin by confessing it too enthusiastically, is a delightful bit of fun that could only occur in this context. But the poem itself is also a kind of confession. Clearly written from the perspective of an older self, the memory of that uncomfortable girl seems to be what the poem is revisiting. What’s driving the speaker to tell this story? In other words, what’s the poem confessing?
You probably know that there’s a whole group of mid-20th-century, mostly American writers called “Confessional Poets,” including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and others. These poets shook up the literary world by exploring intimate subjects – mental illness, sexual impropriety, family secrets – that seemed taboo for mainstream culture at the time. Confession, for them, implied admitting to something unseemly but true, something dark hidden beneath the surface of civilized life. The excesses of that poetic aesthetic have been well-documented – a sort of scab-picking that functions more as therapy for the poet than a meaningful experience for the reader. But there’s something undeniably powerful about it too, the raw emotion of poems that focus on pain, trauma, or embarrassment, the belly-clenching moments that we carry with us always.
For us today, it’s unlikely that the events described in “Con” will shock or appall the way some of Plath’s or Lowell’s admissions do. Even if you are a practicing Catholic, my guess is you aren’t too scandalized by what happens. But some of that visceral pre-teen discomfort translates, even for this reader who has never ventured into a confession booth.
One thing I love about the poem is how it subtly surrounds us with the expectation of wrongdoing. Even the way the poem begins — “My first time” — might suggest some less-than-holy activities until we continue reading and realize how far back into the speaker’s childhood we’ve travelled. Also, why is her family so anxious for her to go to confession? Do they think she has committed a lot of sins? Or is her recalcitrance itself a sin? Notice that the girl had to be “[p]rovoked and prodded for weeks,” which tells me that she held out a long time before finally caving in and entering that intimidating holy closet. Was her reluctance just fear? Or did she have other inclinations that there was danger in the revealing of secrets? Apart from her being small, that stubbornness (and ultimate obedience) is the first thing we really learn about her. Forgive me if I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s lifelong refusal to declare herself one of the “elect” at her church, despite considerable family pressure.
“No.”
So the girl has been compelled to confess, and now she feels compelled – “wracked my brain” – to think of something she’s done wrong. Even a saintly spirit would feel the need to dredge up some hidden dark thought in these circumstances, don’t you think?
Along the way, Martinello drops a few tasty morsels of heresy: first off, “lord” in the fifth line isn’t capitalized as it usually is in religious contexts. Let’s call that an oversight, or perhaps a subtle anti-authoritarian attitude in the adult speaker who is remembering these events. But the idea that lack of air conditioning is something the speaker and “the lord” have in common is a terrific bit of mischief. Other poems from Good Want refer more explicitly to family poverty, so I’ll conjecture that, for the girl, lack of air conditioning is an economic issue. I love that we can therefore imagine an idea being half-formed in her head that “the lord must be poor like me, which is why his house doesn’t have a/c.”
This is the aspect of the poem that I don’t want to give up on, that in the midst of the humour (and there’s more coming) there’s a serious unorthodox religious education under way, one that is as much a part of the girl’s coming-of-age as the physical changes that will also be a part of her adolescence.
A plate of resentful mozzarella
But first, a bit more fun. I’ll admit that the first image that really hooked me into this poem was the comparison the speaker makes between her young self and a “lump of mozzarella” – it’s just brilliant and hilarious. The unreasonable pallor, the damp greasy glow of a pre-teen’s skin, the sounds of the word “mozzarella,” the implied fat and salt and melt – I just love everything about it. Even the idea that mozzarella could be “resentful,” which makes no sense and makes perfect sense. The image vividly evokes the combination of desire (I mean, who doesn’t love mozzarella?!) and disgust that is the central experience of the book’s narrator. There’s also a bit of socio-cultural tension being alluded to in the evocation of an Italian, fairly bland cheese (don’t @ me) in a broader environment of French Quebec, where many of these poems take place, and which cherishes certain ideas about what constitutes good cheese. The pièce de résistance here is how, immediately after the comparison to the lump of mozzarella, the girl “balled / my fists,” so that the after-image of the cheese and her sweaty, chubby fists blur into each other. The line break makes sure we don’t miss it. Chef’s kiss.
When the girl finally thinks of something to confess, it shouldn’t surprise us that it has to do with language. We are in the memory of a speaker who is now writing this poem, after all. And once the floodgates are open, it’s hard for her to stop. But let’s give credit to the priest for not over-reacting to her “gleeful” repetition of her blasphemy: “That’s not how / confessions work” is a pretty mild response, considering, and it jumps out at me as something that could be referring to the poem as well. If “Con” is a kind of confession, then the priest’s admonition – that we shouldn’t just take pleasure from repeating and compounding our sins – resonates in a different way. Note that, even though we can easily imagine one of the words that is repeatedly erupting from the girl’s mouth, the poem refrains from sharing it. Maybe the adult speaker has taken some of her penance to heart after all?
This brings me back to the poem’s title. “Con” might just be an unusual abbreviation of the practice being described here. But “con” can also mean “against,” as in “pro vs. con.” Is this poem against confession? Also, “con” can refer to trickery, as in “con artist.” So is the poem implying that the confession booth is a kind of con, a trick that the church uses to control its parishioners? Or is the girl’s foul-mouthed penance a way of conning the priest into allowing her to repeat curse words? Maybe the poem itself a con, a trick that gets us readers to sympathize with her misbehaviour by sandwiching it between the family pressure to practice religious traditions and the heretical demands of a feisty child? Are we the kids licking our fingers in the pews in the poem’s final line, waiting for our turn at confession, or for the narrator to re-join our community of hungry hooligans?
“I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you to con your parts by tomorrow night”
One other possibility: “con” is an old-fashioned word for studying something very closely, often associated with learning it by heart. In Midsummer Night’s Dream Peter Quince begs Bottom and his fellow actors to “con” their parts in his play. Any good Catholic has, in this sense of the word, conned the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, maybe the Apostles Creed, etc. It’s a way of describing a knowing that’s in your bones, that’s ingrained and permanent, part of who you are.
For me, “Con” is at least in part about that knowing, about the way the girl (and the narrator remembering her) is assimilating her heritage — its traditions, rituals, and terminology — as well as the conflicted way she responds to it. The discomfort and the practice do not have to be mutually exclusive; in fact it’s clear that they function alongside each other. The mild scolding of the priest and the tummy grumblings, the quiet connection between her hot house and the lord’s, the rival expectations of family and peers, and the awkward awakening into self-consciousness. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “anyone who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days,” and this poem’s blurring of purposes between religious and creative practice is what, for me, makes it more than a funny memory of an embarrassing childhood episode. As much as this girl is coming into her own body, she is also coming into an awareness of the power of language, and into her spiritual self. The adult speaker of this poem may or may not go to confession as much as her family would like, but the memory and its resonances are vivid, ongoing, and even inspiring.
Some poems can be similar to performing confession, or perhaps to speaking to a therapist: we think through our past actions, re-evaluate, try to understand ourselves more clearly, and perhaps resolve to be better. “Con” reminds us that no matter how hard we try to use introspective activities to improve our spiritual selves, we still must pursue perfection through the trappings of the body, a body that hungers for touch, for air conditioning, and for mozzarella.
Dara Barrois/Dixon has been publishing books of poetry since the late 1970s and her work has drawn comparisons to poets from Wisława Szymborska to Frank O’Hara. Previously known as Dara Wier, she’s originally from New Orleans and is also the widow of the poet James Tate.
Capitalism
It makes me feel about as low
as asap makes me feel
as if someone is warning me
a snake’s in my path
only it’s a pretty snake
I’m in need of to make my life whole
there are so many kinds of us
coming in various versions of ourselves
and one another
there is, for instance, a type whose
bold sense of entitlement
is bolstered by an unquestioned
innate sense of righteousness
heady combinations
something calling for constant comparison
something sometimes useful other times
blindingly obliterating to beauty grace
love empathy sympathy insight courage
insight courage humor love grace humor
wit foresight generosity love humor truth
empathy grace sympathy empathy sincerity
grace truth beauty with courage
adventuresomeness surprise love humor empathy
kindness withholding judgment love humor empathy
recklessness generosity love humor despair
understanding love humor empathy recklessness
love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy
humor joy sympathy love kindness courage
I know you want to get right to the end, because that’s where most of the wildness, the pleasure, and the sheer cojones of the poem is. But before we get there, let’s spend some time on how she gets there, because there’s a lot to love along the way.
Let’s start with the title, “Capitalism.” My first thought was: uh oh. A title like that often leads to a Marxist screed which may contain accurate socio-political analysis, but tends to make for lousy poetry. But let’s also assume that Dara Barrois/Dixon knows that. If an experienced poet is going to tackle a subject like capitalism, then she’s got to know what she’s up against. So when the poem opens with “It makes me feel as low / as asapmakes me feel,” it’s the wit of “asap” that first attracts my attention. Ok, yes, it doesn’t sound like this poem is going to be a paean to Adam Smith, but alongside the tone of complaint I’m also sensing a bit of fun? And some sonic play between capitalism and asap?
A pretty snake.
The “pretty snake” that follows feels like another metaphor for consumerism’s attractions and dangers, though this one feels a little blurry at the edges – who is this person “warning me” about the snake? Is the snake dangerous, or a temptation, reminiscent of biblical midsadventures? Is capitalism the snake in the metaphor, or is capitalism the entity that tells us we need pretty snakes to make our lives whole? I’m reasonably clear on the general sentiment, but my sense is that it’s not just me who hasn’t fully worked out the details of the comparison.
I want to say something about this feeling of the speaker “finding her way” in the poem. I’ve often written in these essays about how I enjoy traveling through a poem without fully knowing what’s happening, that a bit of confusion or uncertainty can add pleasure for my reading experience. But in this poem it seems to me that part of the reading experience is accompanying the poetic speaker as she figures out what she wants to say. The uncertainty is hers as much as it is ours. There are poetic traditions that foreground this approach – the New York School, in particular, which included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Alice Notley, often emphasized this more organic, informal, style. It’s a different way of thinking about what a poem is — rather than a complete, perfectly-made language object, this sort of poem feels more like a visit inside an active mind. A mind that happens to be great company.
Of course, to a great extent this is an illusion – it’s no less difficult to compose a poem that feels off-the-cuff and exploratory than it is to compose a poem that is “perfect.” Ask a comedian about how hard it is pull off a “discovered” joke in front of an audience. But when it works, we feel a special connection to the human voice that’s generating the poem.
I detect this exploratory feeling most around the fourth couplet: “there are so many kinds of us / coming in various versions of ourselves // and one another.” I get “so many kinds of us,” and I suppose I’m ok with “various versions of ourselves,” but where are we all “coming in”? And after the stanza break, that dangling “and one another” – is that attached to “so many versions of ourselves,” so that we’re also coming in various versions of one another? Or is this “and one another” a transition to a new thought? Is this still about capitalism? Which version of myself is coming to this poem? I still have a sense that the speaker of the poem is feeling her way, searching, finished with her first witticisms about asap and the snake, trying to connect them to larger ideas about what it is like to live under the power of, but also in some sort of resistance to, our prevailing economic system.
An upright tulip flanked by heady combinations.
The poem seems to find one way by focusing on those who thrive in capitalism: “there is, for instance, a type whose // bold sense of entitlement /is bolstered by an unquestioned //innate sense of righteousness.” Notice that this is the only part of the poem that has punctuation – the two commas around “for instance.” It’s a strange choice, because while it’s certainly grammatically correct, it’s not really necessary – we wouldn’t be confused by “there is for instance a type whose…” It does slow us down a bit, though. And the tumbling sensation I got from the previous section is now cleared up. As for the analysis: I’ve heard harsher critiques of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, et al. – in fact this description seems almost empathetic: that “bolstered,” sitting right under “bold” in the previous line, adds a bit of sonic comfort to the characterization — like a pillow! And the “heady combinations” aside almost – almost – seems to forgive these men for their indulgences. I mean, who could resist the heady combinations of a “bold sense of entitlement” accompanied by an “innate sense of righteousness”? Could you? Maybe. But that phrase, “heady combinations,” does something else: it ends the discussion on this topic. The poem doesn’t want to descend any further into a rant about Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Harlan Crow or whoever, although I suspect it could. So “heady combinations” will suffice – who knows, maybe if we all grew up the son of a semi-criminal industrial magnate, we’d… oh, let’s just stick with the poem.
So now we mercifully shift back to the original subject: “something calling for constant comparison / something sometimes useful other times.” Fair enough. That “sometimes useful” reminds me that I’m writing this essay on a laptop computer that I own in part as a result of capitalism. It’s a measured opinion, not particularly doctrinaire, even a bit bland, isn’t it? “something sometimes useful”? Where’s the Marxist screed when we need one?! For me, in this moment, it feels like the poem has almost given up, the “something sometimes” just can’t go full revolutionary, is on the verge of throwing up its hands. If we can’t even say anything truly nasty about spoiled billionaires, how can this poem take on capitalism the way a 21st century poem should?! Of course I admire the poem’s ability to side-step some familiar anti-materialist clichés, but I can’t help wanting more.
But then there’s a breath, a stanza break between the two parts of the sentence – and the fulfillment of a grammatical promise: sometimes this, other times that. And in the second half of the clause, the tether gives way. “blindingly obliterating” opens the floodgates. You can hear how suddenly the temperature changes with those two words – compared to “heady combinations” or “sometimes useful,” “blindingly obliterating” has an energy, a brilliance, an over-the-top-ness that is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
Quick musical interlude: this moment in the poem reminds me of the gorgeous Chopin Nocturne in F, which I can almost play. It’s starts off as a moody, aching piece with a simple descending melody. There’s a B section that’s a bit more active and fraught, and then a return to the A. Nice. But instead of just closing down after the return to the opening motif, the piece just goes completely haywire, descending from a great height, floating on a downward draft from its original minor into major as if someone going for a contemplative evening stroll accidentally stepped on a roller skate and was transformed into a butterfly. It’s around the 4:10 on both of these recordings, if you want to listen.
Here’s one where you can get a good look at the performer’s hands:
And here’s one where you can see how the piece compels expression from the pianist, who I think also may be chewing gum?:
The connection for me between the poem and the nocturne is that sense of uncertainty in the early parts, the parts that are tentative, but which are slowly building up a kind of subterranean pressure, so that when it finally breaks out, you feel like you should have known that thing was about to blow the whole time.
Ok, so what happens? Nearly the whole second half of the poem is a list of abstractions. Clearly these are all concepts that capitalism is “blindingly obliterating to,” but it doesn’t feel like a complete list, or a well-organized one. And yet the chaos feels like part of the intent. Just as earlier we could sense the speaker searching around for a way to explain her frustration, why capitalism makes her feel “as low as asap makes me feel,” now we can feel her searching for the most valuable aspects of our lives that need to be added to the poem, as if to preserve them from complete destruction. It’s as if the poem’s careful, measured, and punctuated treatment of the “heady combinations” above have almost obliterated these deeper concerns from our vocabulary, and we have to rev the engines of our minds to find them again. Her desperation is what the repetition, and the incompleteness, conveys. This is what the poem has been looking for – it’s not that capitalism doesn’t have its uses and its logic, or even that there are other, more scientific ways to critique its structures. It’s that capitalism has no way to measure, nourish, or evaluate any of the aspects of life that are the most crucial to our existence. And that these values don’t come at us in a straight line, but in surges, in clumps, in cascades. Poetry understands this in a way that economics never will.
A few other things about the list you may want to know about:
Most of the alphabet is covered except for mnop, v, and xyz.
“humor” and “love” are the most frequently used words here (9 times each), with “empathy” next at 7 uses. “Love” also gets used as part of “loving kindness” so if you want to count that as another entry, “love” wins.
There are some darker aspects to the list: “recklessness” and “despair” appear as often as “insight.” Feel free to meditate on the significance of this.
“humor” is repeated three times in the second couplet, as if it is a springboard to other kinds of thinking, or as if humor is what the speaker returns to when she is doubtful or stuck. It also keeps us from taking this all too seriously. Doesn’t it?
I want to add “community” and “transcendence” to the list. And “friendship.” My guess is you probably have a few suggestions yourself. I have a strong sense that the poem wants us to participate in adding to its list of values and concerns, and that the ending on the page is less about finishing the task, and more about handing it over to us to continue.
Poems are not capitalist enterprises. God knows they aren’t very successful in any of the ways that capitalism would know how to measure. And yet they persist, and we continue to value them. By the end of “Capitalism,” I feel uplifted, upset, amused, touched, motivated, understood, even bolstered by how Barrois/Dixon has given voice to my frustration, my helplessness, and my fury.
I’m sad about the recent passing of Charles Simic, so I’m going to write about Dean Young. Young died last year, and along with Simic and James Tate (who died in 2015), formed for me a kind of triumvirate of surrealist dark comedy. They had a profound influence on my thinking about poetry, I met them all briefly in the early 1990s and never saw them again, and now they’re all ghosts. Who are their inheritors? Who will crack jokes with the executioners the way they did? Who will construct a brilliant bawdy prank as a thin disguise for generational trauma? Who will write requiems for the kazoo?
There was something wrong with Dean Young’s heart. He had a transplant in 2011 – Shock By Shock was the collection that followed. And so mortality, precarity, and a sense of being out-of-control are themes that show up a lot in the poems. But they don’t respond to those Big Ideas the way they should. They’re mischievous creatures. Which is why I love them.
The Late Work of Pinkham Ryder
My old friend stopped by
to see how my procedure had gone.
I’d arranged all the green rocks
of my collection, mostly fluorite,
at one end of the table
and was winding up the robots at the other.
Not bad for someone whose left hand
occasionally slapped himself
but I was in no mood to reminisce
now that the only decent café in town
had burned down. You had to drive carefully
in that area because engineering students
now wandered around like smoked bees
without a hive. I myself had to stare
at a dandelion blowing out its brains
to steady myself. Not that I’d mention it
to my friend who’s one of those people
who think it’s an emergency when you pee
purple or your head’s even a tiny bit
on fire or you’re talking in your sleep
which, by the way, I’m doing now
not that that inhibits my field command.
Robots, attack!
— from Shock By Shock, (Copper Canyon 2015), used by permission
The first time I read this poem I blew past the title, so let me do so again here before we start worrying about who Pinkham Ryder is. The poem starts with a friend visiting the speaker after his “procedure,” and the speaker seems a bit ambivalent about it (“I was in no mood to reminisce”). We don’t know if the speaker is Dean Young himself, or a persona of some kind, but I can’t help but connect “procedure” to Young’s transplant, although calling that a “procedure” is an impressive act of self-deprecation.
It appears the speaker has been occupying his time with small meaningless projects like rearranging his rock collection and “winding up the robots.” Are the small-motor skills that these actions require part of the speaker’s recovery? And why green rocks and robots? The green rocks might be a gesture of optimism – green is usually a colour associated with life and renewal. But it’s also a colour we associate with infection, which is one of a transplant recipient’s greatest fears. And the whole idea that I’m trying to manufacture symbolic meaning into these items seems like a bad idea. Either way, my hunch is that “one end of the table” and “the other” seem to be about as far as the speaker can reach during his recovery, the horizon of his world.
If that’s the case, though, why does he care about “the only decent café in town” burning down? Is it just another aspect of a general decline? It appears that the whole neighborhood is suffering from odd bits of upheaval. Who are these wandering engineering students? Are they in the neighborhood to repair, remake, or destroy? What sort of new world can they construct if they can’t keep themselves out of traffic? What the speaker does “to steady himself” – watching a dandelion “blow out its brains,” is also a problem. I mean, on the one hand, watching dandelions release their seeds into the world, when you have the time, is a calming and hope-filled activity, even if you are aware of what it means for your lawn. On the other hand, if you associate that image with “blowing out [their] brains,” then maybe calm and hope are not in the cards for you. But of course, the image is so inventive and funny, that I’ll never look at dandelions again in any other way. The poem has permanently transformed my understanding of this natural phenomenon. When spring comes, I’ll say to my neighbor, “There go the dandelions, blowing out their brains.” And my neighbour will inch away from me.
Speaking of discomfort, I want to think for a minute about robots. Robots, or “automata,” are older than you’d think – here’s an article about them if you’re curious. Robots can, of course, be helpful and fun. But robots always carry with them an aura of the uncanny. They are like us but not like us. They can do things for us but they can also go horribly wrong. For every benevolent R2D2, there are countless Cylons, Sentinels, Borg, and Terminators. In the context of a poem about recovering from a procedure, I wonder about small robots that might have helped to keep our speaker alive. But what invasions must he now stave off in order to maintain his sense of self?
That sense of the uncanny seems to permeate everything the speaker sees. He looks at dandelions and thinks of suicide. He is surprised when his friend is alarmed by alarming things like purple urine or personal flammability. There are robots on the table, yes, but is there a robot in his heart? Is his imagination alive and active or is he talking in his sleep? Is this whole poem just a fever dream or hallucination?
Maybe now it’s time to look up Pinkham Ryder. Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) was an American painter whose work from the late 19th century seems to be a bridge to Modernism. He often painted semi-abstract images of the sea, and was well-known enough to participate in the famous 1913 Armory Show that is credited with introducing Cubism and similar movements in painting to an American audience.
“Under a Cloud,” by Albert Pinkham Ryder, ca. 1900. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Here’s a remarkable thing he wrote in a letter about his creative process: “Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.” Nice.
Another thing worth knowing about Albert Pinkham Ryder is that there is almost no “late work.” Though his reputation grew in middle age, after 1900 his output almost completely disappeared, and his behaviour got more and more “eccentric,” though he lived until 1917. So the title of the poem, “The Late Work of Pinkham Ryder,” refers to something that doesn’t exist, unless the pile-up of trash and half-eaten meals in his home could be considered “work.”
So now the title starts to make a bit more sense. The ominous implication is that no new work is forthcoming for the speaker, or maybe for the poet either, and that his behaviour might start to get more eccentric. The delightful leaps of his imagination have been confined in his sickbed, and he seems on the verge of despair over the state of his world. His metaphoric observation about the dandelions is wonderful but he doesn’t even share it with his friend, whose concerns seem more prosaic. (He’s not wrong, though: I too would “think it an emergency” if my recuperating friend’s head were on fire or if his urine were purple!) It’s as if the fellow can feel his powers evaporating, and especially from a poet whose work is as absurd and lively as Dean Young’s, this worry feels desperate and profound.
But he’s not dead yet. The outlandish last line – “Robots, attack!” — is almost like the answer to a dare: what’s the most absurd last line of a poem ever written? “Robots, attack!” is not the utterance of a person whose creativity has completely abandoned him. It is a call-to-arms, an expression of defiance. It could be the cry of a villain mastermind on the verge of defeat, and I’m doubtful that the toys on his table will heed his orders, but who knows? He may be unhinged, he may have returned to a state of childhood where his mind is occupied with less prestigious creative activities. But for now at least, against the rational, the mature, and the medically sound, he will order the assault!
And if we are reading this in a poem, then we can infer that the end of our speaker’s creativity has been put off for now. In addition to Shock By Shock, Dean Young managed to write one more collection, Solar Perplexus, before dying from complications from COVID. The late work of Dean Young is as wild and inventive as anything he wrote, full of poignancy and humour. It summons all of the forces at our disposal to defy the fate that will ultimately plunge us into permanent silence.
ilog
/isa/: a circumcision
at bedtime my father liked to trace the rush
of the tenejero river into my homeland dreams
I crouched on the shore & watched the leeches lurch
the gnawing soil a foot from my not-yet-callused toes
upstream boys bawled at the quack doctor’s cleaver
before he shoved guava leaves into their mouths
magnguya ka chew until mush dumura ka sa titi mo
the rouge river has no shamans not any more just urologists
or whom to play up your pain
binata ka na di ka na supot
the boy becomes man
between my legs & asks if adulthood had to hurt
and I spit
these leaves at the rawness of an unhooded penis
— from barangay: an offshore poem (Buckrider Books, 2021, used by permission)
This poem requires a bit of translation before we really begin. But it doesn’t take much work to situate ourselves – Google Translate is sufficient. Adrian de Leon is one of a number of immigrant writers from the Philippines who have emerged in recent years, so we’re working mostly with Tagalog here. In this case, “ilog” is the word for “river,” the title of the poem. If you had the book in your hand, you’d be able to flip the page and notice that this poem is a series with four sections, and it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that “isa” is simply the number one, signalling the opening section of the series. So we have a longer poem entitled “ilog,” or “river,” whose first section is called “circumcision.”
If you were hoping that “circumcision” is a Filipino word for “splashy water” or something, though, I have some bad news for you.
Once we get to the poem proper, we begin with a moment of tenderness, a father tracing “the rush / of the tenejero river into my homeland dreams.” In my mind I imagine a father drawing lines on his son’s back while he falls asleep, a physical tenderness. But it could also be a narrative tenderness, tracing stories of the river into his son’s imagination. It’s notable that a poem about circumcision begins with a moment of affection between father and son, so we are located in love before we approach the more fraught subject to follow.
I couldn’t find the “Tenejero River” online, but Tenejero is a region of the Philippines around two hours west of Manila (again, thanks internet), and I’m pretty confident that this region is the setting for the memories being evoked. The title of the collection is barangay: an offshore poem, and “barangay” is a word that means something like “municipality” but also “neighborhood.” Feel free to connect to the official Barangay Tenejero website and learn all about it.
So we have a boy being reminded by his father of a specific region in his former home, especially a moment on the river. The next line, “I crouched on the shore & watched the leeches lurch,” is wonderful bit of music-making – all those ch and sh sounds evoking the water, or perhaps the damp soil at its shore. But I’m not sure exactly who’s speaking – is it the father, telling a story as a way of “trac[ing] homeland dreams”? Or does the father’s story about the river remind the boy-narrator of an event that occurred when he (the boy) was so young that his feet didn’t yet have callouses? That second reading feels more likely to me, though the possibility that the father may have a similar memory hovers in the background – either way, the boy with uncalloused toes is not yet ready for what’s happening upstream.
As a Jew and a father of boys I’m not going to get into a big debate on the merits of circumcision. It’s an old practice and one that is very meaningful for a lot of cultures and peoples, including my own. I’ve learned that in the Philippines, as in many Muslim communities, the ritual usually takes place around when boys reach puberty, rather than when they are infants. It’s worth pointing out, then, that Filipino men who have undergone this ritual will have memories of it that a Jewish man (who is traditionally circumcised when he is only 8 days old) will not. There’s a tension developing in the poem between manhood, pain, ritual, and memory that I will return to shortly.
If you really want to learn more about this practice in the Philippines, which is usually called Tulì, feel free to look here or here or here.
You’re welcome for not actually including an image here.
But however we feel about circumcision in general, it seems clear that the version of it being remembered in this poem was brutal. That phrase “quack doctor’s cleaver” is especially potent because of the abrasive sounds of the repeated hard consonants – because we naturally crush the o at the end of “doctor,” the phrase reads like a brutal row of consonants – DoCTRSCLeaVR. And holy moly, a CLEAVER? REALLY? Yikes. Even the way the doctor “shoves guava leaves into their mouths” suggests that the person performing this ritual lacks even a modicum of empathy. Aren’t there mothers around to celebrate the rite of passage? If a boy’s entrance into manhood is ritualized to include pain, does it also have to include such cruelty? We want to say no, that this is a backward, even barbaric version of the practice, and there’s an accompanying temptation to fall into a paradigm of the “old world / new world” that makes me suspicious. The poem is prepared to deal with this topic, but we have a detour to make first.
The next line starts and ends with phrases in Tagalog, with an English translation of the first phrase in the middle.
Ok, I need to pause on this subject for a minute. Recently there was a bit of a dustup online over how obligated a poet should feel to include translations or explanations of non-English words in their poems. An excellent young Canadian poet, Isabella Wang, uses Mandarin in her work, and made a bold statement on Twitter that “Readers, especially white readers, are *not* entitled to footnotes / explanations / direct translations of non-English words.” There was a reaction to the statement online, ranging from pearl-clutching to outright racist, and then a ferocious counter-reaction from Wang and her supporters. (Pro tip, by the way: do not pick a fight online with Isabella Wang. She’s better at internetting than you are, and her friends will skewer you like a marinated portobello mushroom.) One notable point was that when a poet uses phrases from French or Greek, there’s no similar backlash – see T.S. Eliot.
Underneath the knee-jerk reactions, though, is an important question about clarity in poems. How much of a poem should be available to us at first reading? What does it suggest when poets deliberately use language that they know will be foreign to many of their readers?
If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I’m a big fan of embracing my confusion when reading. Getting all the answers, especially on a first look, is not necessary for me to fall in love with a poem – in fact it’s often a sign the poem won’t stick with me. So, for example, when I’m not sure above if it’s the father’s or the son’s memory about crouching on the shore, my first response is to follow each possible answer as a way of expanding the possibilities in the poem, rather than get frustrated that I don’t know the “right answer.”
On the other hand, I do prefer when a poet leaves me some bread crumbs to follow, to suggest questions to wonder about, or a gesture towards a subject so we can learn more on our own. In Isabella Wang’s case, part of what makes her poems’ use of Mandarin interesting is that she herself is no longer as fluent as she’d like to be, so the way some of the characters remain untranslated suggests the same sort of disorientation that her poem’s speaker is faced with in the language that she is supposed to feel is her own. It’s a demonstration of distance that we are compelled to share with her. In other words, the confusion is part of the point. To me that’s interesting even if I don’t dig down to translate every word or character. Besides, in the 21st century, it’s such a simple thing to search Google Translate – or whatever other platform you prefer – to answer questions when they come up. Is that too much for poets to ask of their reader?
Ok, rant over.
In this poem, the placement of the English suggested to me that “magnguya ka” means something like “chew until mush” but the other phrase, “dumura ka sa titi mo” is left unstranslated. My first read-through I left it at that, and kept going. There was enough there for me to wonder about why chewed up guava leaves are a part of the ceremony. When I returned to the poem and wanted to dig a bit deeper, I was granted another gift — Google Translate reveals that the second phrase, “dumura ka sa titi mo,” means something like “spit on your cock.” (I will shamefully admit that I got a small adolescent thrill from getting Google to use the word “cock.”) But while I was online I also learned that guava leaves have anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties, so chewing them and then spitting them onto one’s penis is conducive to healing. The quack doctor, while brutal, also gives some good advice.
This is how the poem complicates the “backward old country” scene above. In the next line, “the rouge river has no shamans not anymore just urologists,” seems to suggest that the speaker of our poem has had what we can probably call a less traumatic experience than his older peers on the Tenejero. (The Rouge River, by the way, is in Scarborough, in the eastern suburbs of Toronto.) And I can’t help but see a bit of humour in the word “urologist,” which is so clinical and absurd after all the musical care that has been taken with language until this point. But also notice that “not anymore,” which reminds us that there may have once been “shamans,” or their equivalent, practicing rituals by the Rouge River. Whatever cruelty the quack doctor practices with his cleaver, it’s not genocidal.
guavas and their leaves
And it feels like the shaman’s voice echoing across the ocean that suggests the chewed guava leaves which the speaker “spits at the rawness of an unhooded penis” in the final line of the poem. Are chewed guava leaves better for promoting healing and protecting the area from infection than some urologist-prescribed ointment? I have no idea. Does it matter? Absolutely it does. In this poem, the guava leaves are an essential part of the ceremony that reminds the speaker of what the ritual is for: not just to mark his passage into manhood, but also to mark his emergence as an adult in his community, even in its diasporic context. Guavas, especially with leaves attached, are not always so easy to find in Canadian grocery stores, so someone had to make sure there were some on hand — perhaps the father, who has not been mentioned since the first lines of the poem, but whose presence lingers. Who would have made the arrangements with the urologist, who would have insisted on this ritual at all?
That’s the question that is left unresolved in this poem, the central question about the value of circumcision: or as the poem puts it, why “adulthood had to hurt.” On the one hand, entering adulthood (male, female or otherwise) inevitably will include pain – the burden of responsibility, the pain of loss, the whole catastrophe of grown-up life. On the other hand, couldn’t there be other, less invasive ways to usher a young man into his community? The image we are left with, of a young post-procedure teenager in the suburbs chewing guava leaves and crouching over to spit the mush into his own penis, is hardly one that evokes an ideal of acculturated manhood. Are these humiliations essential? Should they continue? Will the speaker of this poem, if he is one day blessed with a son, prepare for his Tulì in the same way that his father did?
Last point: forgive me, but I want to think for a minute about the sound of the word “penis.” It’s always struck me as an ugly-sounding word, though I’m not sure why – there’s nothing wrong with “Venus” or “peanuts.” Maybe it’s the hiss the word ends with. Or maybe, when we have so many other, more evocative and lively words for the male genitalia – in every language on earth – “penis” feels like a concession to the assimilated, “appropriate” man the speaker is being asked to become. I doubt that he would trade the sterile procedure he’s undergone for the quack doctor’s cleaver, but there’s something unresolved between the world of the river and the shaman and chewed guava leaves, and the “unhooded penis” that he now possesses. He will tend that wound for the rest of his life.
Hello all! I’m in Jerusalem, but I’m also working on a new How a Poem Moves essay. Be warned, though, the poem (a terrific one by Adrian de Leon) is about circumcision! Hoping to post this weekend.
How a Poem Moves 
