the green notebook

, fragments of a work-in-progress, (reading Milosz, Newlove, McKinnon, Sexton, Auden, Zwicky, Bringhurst, etc.

“The ABC book is a Polish genre,” writes the back cover of Czeslaw Milosz’s Milosz’s ABC’s (2001), “a literary form loosely composed of short, alphabetically arranged entries.” I’m intrigued by the structure, one I’ve seen prior, through the assemblage of short essays Canadian critic Frank Davey wrote on Canadian writers, collected in From There to Here (1974), or more recent essay-assemblages by George Bowering, whether Craft Slices (1985) or Horizontal Surfaces (2007). I’m sure there are other examples. Polish-American poet Milosz (1911-2004), a writer I’m aware of far more than I’ve actually read, but these short pieces intrigue. Across what feels like one or two hundred short bursts of prose, Milosz writes on everyone and everything, essays clustered in alphabetical order by title, which themselves suggest subject.

I like the idea of ‘troubling’ a narrative trajectory that might inadvertently emerge through the composition of such pieces, the similarities between providing echoes through an alternate order instead of a repetition if two or three are too close together. If one is writing essays or poems on multiple subjects within a particular thread, I’ve long thought a complete unit is more sustainable through the blend, although I’m fully aware that more than one sense of order might entirely be possible. For my purposes, I’ve preferred, through both poetry and fiction, to aim more for a weave than a singular line.

Milosz’s ABC’s, a volume with the same paperback design and physical structure of Milosz’s Road-side Dog (1988), a book I picked up in a bookstore on Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue, somewhere into the later aughts. This newly-discovered title was picked up mere days ago at Ottawa’s Black Squirrel Books, as Rose wandered the young adult shelves and found her own fortunes. There’s gold in them hills.

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Czeslaw Milosz: “The past is inaccurate.” I much prefer this particular phrase to that oft-repeated opening of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country.” I would presume that Hartley’s novel is most likely where John Newlove picked it up, adding a line-break and stress on the third word through italicization for one of his poems, later utilized as a quote by Barry McKinnon as the opening quote for The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 (2000). Robert McTavish, the filmmaker responsible both for the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove (2007) as well as the volume A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (2007), once told me that John had a habit of copying out particular phrases he admired from his daily reading onto index cards. He read a book a day, if you can imagine, including an entire summer of exclusively Greek history. It was from these cards that John could incorporate cribbed lines when needed, as he worked on his poems. “The past / is a foreign country,” John offered, pushing further layers of intention into that two-letter stress. However accurate or inaccurate, I lean into neither phrase exclusively, existing somewhere between them, although I’m still a decade or two away from where either Milosz or Newlove were when their declarations were written (although I’m not far off from Hartley, when he most likely composed his). Perhaps I am too young to know. Perhaps I have yet to.

Here is John’s poem in full, first collected in the above/ground press chapbook THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (1999), later falling into Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003) before into McTavish’s selected, a book we published via Chaudiere Books:

LIKE AN EEL

Hunting after myself in slightly used poems
is a heartbreaking chore. The past
is a foreign country and the quarry

is sly and elusive, a liar twisting
and twisting about the words like an eel
on a spear, dying, never to be known.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) famously wrote, in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” This is a phrase often pulled out to dismiss the importance of poems and poets, self-declared, so to speak, to remind or render impotent the form. In larger context, the meaning shifts a bit, as Auden offered a heartfelt and lyric meditation on the death of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a poet important to Auden’s writing, life and thinking. I would recommend finding the poem in full, simply for better comprehension of that phrase in context. For example, as the line continues: “it survives / In the valley of its making […],” a fragment of the poem I’ve heard Stephen Brockwell repeat, aloud. Without, of course, my realizing the source until now.

More familiar with the stand-alone, I always preferred to italicize the final word—“Poetry makes nothing happen”—offering less a matter of passive acceptance, Sisyphus pushing his perpetual stone, and, instead, into active possibility. Of what might happen.

*

“It is June. I am tired of being brave.” wrote Anne Sexton (1928-1974) as part of the poem “The Truth the Dead Know.” The poem opens by citing the weight of what she’s responding to, subtitled “For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 / and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959.” That’s a lot for Sexton to have processed across the space of short months. I missed who originally posted it, but the poem floated by on social media earlier today, with the offering that a single line from this often gets repeated this time of year, and why not post the whole poem?

My own father, gone a few years now. My mother, ten years prior. Both had their birthdays in June, but four days apart, although my mother the elder. Four days every year they would be the same age, and then she’d step ahead, once more. Just when he’d caught up. In the end, able to make an age she couldn’t. Am I the orphan now, as well? My birth parents still alive, although my birth father, hopefully, will never know of me.

“And what of the dead?” Sexton asks, to close out the poem. “They refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”

*

“Whether or not the poet is self-aware,” Jan Zwicky writes, “it is through integration of immediate perceptions with remembered images that the poem itself moves forward toward completion.” This comes from her essay “George Whalley’s Contemplative Mind,” a piece exploring the work of Kingston-born poet, scholar, naval officer and World War II secret intelligence officer George Whalley (1915-1983) in the latest issue of Brick: A Literary Journal. Her statement makes well enough sense to me. I would imagine an intelligence officer would have to be waist-deep into an array of self-awareness to be able to function effectively. I appreciate that such a rather direct and almost straightforward statement can include quite a range of poetic style, leaning well into the margins, and even into the concrete and visual. There’s much to parse through this essay, much to work through that will take longer than this single sitting.

I am currently at a corner table at The Royal Oak, Hunt Club, with a fresh pint, awaiting my pal b stephen harding, with whom I co-ran The TREE Reading Series, back in the 90s. The sun is warm through the window. The cars go streaming by. If we were ever to meet for dinner or a drink, be aware that I’ll always arrive early, perhaps even an hour or more, and with book and notebook in hand. Any opportunity to stop and think, especially with new reading material.

The space of an hour. The space through which to breathe, amid non-stop movement. Remember the wisdom of Ferris Bueller, John Hughes’ fictional 1980s teenager: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

As Éireann Lorsung offers as part of her remarkable and expansive essay “On the line,” online at Annulet:

10.2. The poetic line does not exist in isolation on the page.

10.3. The poetic line does not descend only from our traditions of poetic line-making.

10.4. I think we also, and some poets deliberately do, make the poetic line in response and relationship to the lines of the world.

*

Today Aoife has a professional development day, so we’re most likely lunch with her sister, my eldest, in the mall where she works. Rose is at school. We attempt to balance a household of sitting in our corners working and making sure Aoife doesn’t spend the whole day on her tablet.

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Robert Bringhurst, in his essay “The Bookseller,” from the same issue of Brick: A Literary Journal: “Bookstores, like libraries, extend the lives of books and broaden their travels. If the books are any good, this has a significant side effect: it enlarges the minds of civilizations.” And so, the question repeats: Are we keeping good company?

This Saturday morning, my weekly half-hour at RedBird, in Old Ottawa South, as Aoife attends her ukulele lessons. The cars go streaming by. At the end, her instructor, Doug, says she is ready for their scheduled concert in two weeks.

I caught Aoife in the backyard a few nights ago, just prior to bedtime. I wasn’t sure where she was. She was sitting at their picnic table for at least forty minutes, working away at something with paper and pencil. Once I managed to convince her in, she revealed a whole page of text that she’d written, although she didn’t know if it was a story or a song. Perhaps I should have requested she sing it.