the green notebook

, fragments of a work-in-progress, (reading Alina Stefanescu, Wayde Compton, Katie Naughton, the Montreal Poetry Prize + those terrible Alice Munro revelations,

In a review of Uljana Wolf’s “my cadastre” for Poetry Daily, Alina Stefanescu writes: “Maybe there is a little machine in this? In music, a serial pattern is one that repeats over and over for a significant stretch of a composition.” One would think the notion of serial, repeated patterns would hold the very definition of “lyric,” whether for musical or poetic structures. I’m all for the little machine, something entirely opposite and foreign to any notions of AI or ChatGPT. Little machines, or little ghosts, perhaps, within those, as suggested by The Police’s fourth studio album, a phrase and concept Sting lifted from Arthur Koestler’s non-fiction work on philosophical psychology of the same name, The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Apparently this is a phrase Koestler (1905-1983) himself borrowed from Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) “to describe the Cartesian dualist account of the mind-body relationship.” Everything in nature, after all, is both a whole and a part. Nothing is unrelated. It all connects.

From there, to Lisa Robertson’s The Men (2006): “Who are the men? The Men are a riddle. What do they want? Their troubles become lyric.”

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I’m rounding the home stretch of reading through two hundred and ninety seven submitted poems as one of the first readers for this year’s Montreal Poetry Prize. It has been a while since I judged anything, recollections of a decade back when I was a juror for a literary round via the Ontario Arts Council. When working toward a shortlist, the first job, which is relatively quick, is working two piles: the “maybe” pile, and the “obvious no” pile. I have to pick five poems plus and alternate, so the second round of jurying is re-reading the “maybe” stack to hammer into final selections.

It is curious to see the variety of elements that are included in this selection of poems. Historical entries, small intimacies, memories, dreams. The loss of a parent. Questions of faith, or language. Poems responding to pandemic, or the war in Gaza. Invocations. Of rescuing a bird, or watching the sun set. Errant rhythms and end-rhymes. Most of these haven’t any sense of form, but it is interesting to be reminded what the public think poems should be doing, what poems are for. They are for holding what can’t be held or said in any other way.

A handful of days I sat at Pubwells a decade back, sitting with those stacks of writing applications, working the same process as I do now. The jury was told we had only twelve slots for funding, and one hundred and seventy two applications. The “maybe” pile became the work. The “obvious no” selections were relatively quick.

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Yesterday, I picked up a copy of Wayde Compton’s 2023 Centre for Literature in Canada Henry Kreisel Lecture, originally solicited by and presented at the University of Alberta, and produced as the small volume Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (2024). The clarity of his text is quite remarkable, refuting presumptions around race and culture, specifically literature. “In simpler terms, the white avant-garde fails to see itself as an ethnic literature that ought to look at other literatures from that position, rather than from the position of being literature as such.” He offers pointed critiques of works that attempted to comment on race by Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Seen by many as being deeply problematic, the authors themselves considered these works to be anti-racist, somehow misunderstanding their own positioning—both writers are white—in context to those works, and even to the very presentation of those works. Compton writes:

            It is for this latter reason that I would call both of these projects failures—for the grief they caused through their provocations, but also for the way they inevitably centred upon Goldsmith and Place as the key discussants. They opened no discussions for people of colour that had not already been ongoing. Both writers tried to claim afterward a victory of sorts, merely by the fact that dialogue ensued. But the question should be about whether or not such a project causes productive discussion: for whom that discussion is productive; and at what cost this dialogue unfolds.

Not the centre, but one of an array of many squares in a quilt. There is no centre.

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I don’t know how to process the revelations in today’s Toronto Star, an article by Andrea Robin Skinner, published with the headline “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.” The piece is as straightforward as it is heartbreaking. As American writer Moira Donegan responds via the site formerly known as Twitter: “This scenario—in which a man sexually abused his partner’s daughter, and the mother sided with her pedophile boyfriend over her girl child—is a textbook-typical child sexual abuse scenario. Which of course only makes it more brutal and devastating, not less.” A common enough story, which is shocking unto itself. And the further price Andrea and her siblings paid over the years through protecting their mother’s career. As Richard Warnica writes:

Now, as they mourn their mother – the literary giant and Nobel laureate – Andrea and her siblings are no longer willing to stay silent. They want the world to continue to adore Alice Munro’s work. They also feel compelled to share what it meant to grow up in her shadow and how protecting her legacy came at a devastating cost for her daughter. The truth, they hope, will bring them healing and empower other victims of sexual assault and their families.

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Katie Naughton, in The Real Ethereal (2024): “Nietzsche saying all philosophy is autobiography, by error.”