What Gets Left Out

Sussing out trends during a round-up of new Canadian poetry, Evan Jones reminds us that there is always unseen "variety" beyond the large reputations:.

In the 90s in Toronto, there were only two poets any young buck with his tail in the air talked about: Al Purdy and bpNichol. I remember because I was reading George Seferis at the time. Purdy and Nichol were opposites, sort of, in a way, signs of kids hanging out in different kinds of crowds. The one a poet of the nation and the land, of horse-piss beer and backbreaking days, the other zany, inventive, in cahoots with St. Ein and St. Anza. Purdy had shit on his boots, Nichol was barefoot. Both had lived in Toronto, at least for a spell. Neither was very good. But at least we knew where people stood, on one side of the fence or the other. Or, as in my case, wondering why all these people were standing round a stupid fence. These were the starting points, the gateway drugs, for many of the Canadian poets of my generation, following either Purdy into the country or Nichol into conceptualism. That such a small country—there are more Texans than Canadians—locks onto certain figures, invests in them, holds them up and hopes for more than the best, shouldn't surprise. The problem has always been what gets left out when there is only room for the select few.

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed

Jonathan Ball giveth...

"Starnino is a smart and savvy reader, with a stunning ability to attend to the smallest details. This fine sensibility allows Starnino, at his best, to recuperate the work of people that might actually need recuperating, like John Glassco, whose observation that “man ‘is destined for slaughter in the course of things’” won’t end up riding the bus anytime soon. Moreover, as everyone knows, Starnino shines on the attack. Here, he assaults Atwood, McKay, and Moritz. Although they are to some degree easy targets (Atwood for lazy languishment in simplistic political prose-with-line-breaks, McKay for devolving into self-parody, and Moritz for sham artistry), Starnino neatly dissects their development and the larger significance of the poetic trends they represent. At the same time, Starnino’s attacks are rarer, more nuanced, and fairer than in the earlier A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), and he has toned down the mean-spirited glee that sometimes surfaced in that earlier collection."

...and Jonathan Ball taketh away:

"The tragedy and triumph of Carmine Starnino are thus the same: once bitten, twice shy, he has avoided engagement with the avant-garde in this second collection. As a result, he has produced a better but less interesting book, because the real poets he should be grappling with are the ones that he does not understand, and so cannot engage. Everything Starnino loves in poetry—formal rigour, ambition, intellectual engagement with the world’s complexity, tactile and aural obsession with language—has become the domain of the avant-garde he hates."

My Ears Are Burning

I'm very grateful to poets Jonathan Ball and Maurice Mierau for agreeing to chew over my bpNichol essay which appears in the new issue of Maisonneuve.

"I have long wondered why Starnino insists on writing at length about things he appears to hate, but although he is critical here toward the end, a real fondness for Nichol and an appreciation for aspects of his oeuvre shine through. Finally, some willingness to engage, which I find lacking in his other writings on the so-called avant-garde, which often, as they do here, descend into straw-man bullying."

You can read the rest it here.