There are three new reviews: I’ve reviewed Open Air Bindery by David Hickey, Jacob McArthur Mooney reviews Richard Outram: Essays on his Work, and Jim Johnstone reviews A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, the new book by Stephanie Bolster.

I’m also very glad to welcome Jacob McArthur Mooney and Ingrid Ruthig to the site as editors. Along with Alessandro Porco and Lori A. May, that makes for a crack team of open-minded, articulate folks.

On a different note, may I suggest now is a good time to subscribe to Canadian Notes & Queries, both to start the year supporting a fiercely honest Canadian literary magazine, and because the next issue will have an essay of mine and three poems from my forthcoming book, The Least Important Man.

These are carefully crafted, meditative poems and while they’re very rewarding they do much more than simply lead to reassuring places or record beauty. There’s the suggestion “even patience can be a kind of violence,” even as old people wage a battle with their bodies “so full as they are of old griefs and consolations.” If anything, the book strikes me as cataloging some of the dangers and pitfalls of having a complex inner life. Could you elaborate on that?

There is a poem by the American poet Stanley Plumly called “Lazarus at Dawn” which has a beautiful first line,“Your whole life you are two with one taken away.” That idea or feeling is why I need imagination and poetry in my life. Most often I want to attach myself to the world, to wholly belong in it and to be part of it, in a way that is quite simply not possible.

I say this because it is our separateness that makes every person unique, the world both surprising and extraordinary; and, in fact, what creates that powerful sense of attraction we feel towards people and things in the first place (because they are so different from us), but it is also a constant source of unfulfillment.

When I first conceived of doing Winter Cranes, I wanted to write a collection that dealt with the whole litany of experience—despair, loss, and insatiable longing, especially that particular emotion—which comes with living. But I didn’t want it to come out as some sort of manifesto either where these ideas took precedence over the images. Rather, I wanted these ideas to inhabit or to haunt the interiority of any new poems.

As people, we make from that cataloguing as you called it a kind of myth or mask that says this is our identity. This is who we are.

However, a problem arises when we pay too much attention to the inner chatter of the mind, it can lead to self-seeking and isolation from other people. Thankfully poetry has taught me to mind the gap. My imagination looks for resemblances and correspondences and suddenly a connection between what is happening in my mind and what is on the outside is satisfied for a moment, and there is a feeling of transcendence.

It is the same reason some people offer up daily prayers. People never pray just once. They pray often, sometimes multiple times a day, for it is prayer which creates a connection to something larger than themselves, restoring a sense of calm and inner equilibrium, and thus helps them to live their lives.

Writing poetry and reading poetry does something similar for me. Each helps me to live by breaking down the barriers that exist between myself and the world at large, and in the process, real or imagined, my life is made whole.

Favourite non-fiction book of the year: Finding the Words (anthology) features some very articulate Canadians speaking in a loosely themed way around the craft of fiction. I’ve started enjoying Best Canadian Essays 2011, where new series editor Christopher Doda and guest editor Ibi Kaslick have done great work.

Short stories: the Penguin Selected Stories of Maupassant, which collects some remarkable, simple stories that nevertheless manage to capture deeply perceived ideas about people.

Favourite novel: again, a classic will eclipse some very fine recent books, but I finally caught up with the white whale Moby Dick and thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly once I adjusted to the idea that the plot wouldn’t move quickly and began to luxuriate in the language and ideas. It builds to a completely gripping final few chapters that are actually over far too quickly without — surprisingly enough — necessarily touching on all the characters.

Favourite reruns: I revisited The Day of the Triffids. Also, I continue to rediscover the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, even as the character enjoys a surge in popularity, both in film and in the excellent new BBC series Sherlock.

Favourite graphic novel: Two Generals, a Canadian Second World War story that mixes major historical events with real family history to provide a fascinatingly detailed story.

Films: True Grit (2010) is from last year, but I finally caught this slightly warped, engaging, beautifully crafted film, and went out to buy the score too. Night Train to Munich (1940) is perfect, black-and-white Saturday afternoon viewing. The biggest disappointment of the year was Green Lantern (2011) which felt overwritten, and bland.

Favourite new musical discovery: Duke Ellington, and in particular Reminiscing in Tempo, among the first longer jazz pieces, and dedicated to his mother after she passed away. Ellington was devastated for months, and then wrote this quietly beautiful 12-minute piece. For more recent artists, Julia Kent is a new discovery of mine. If you haven’t heard of the show (for the “musically curious”) there’s a lot to be discovered on CBC’s The Signal.

Special mention — I spent three weeks squirrelled away in an office with the baby while my partner took on a job, and managed to read excellent collections of stories by a trio of Canadians: Rebecca Rosenblum, Carolyn Black and Jessica Westhead.

In other news, this photo is not simply my impression of Kenneth Branaugh in Hamlet, it’s my attempt to participate in Movember, in support of cancer initiatives. I thought I’d provide the link to the donation page here as part of an effort to avoid emailing people to death.

Please consider a donation. I’m only $5 behind one guy on my team. And more importantly, it’s a very good cause.

I recently watched a 2009, 3-hour BBC mini-series of The Day of the Triffids, and wanted to revisit the book after. I’d forgotten how many ideas are in the book. Wyndham has written a terrifying novel, for demonstrating how disturbingly easy it is for humanity to be bumped out of the driver’s seat, so to speak. Here, it’s the result of two events only a few decades apart: carnivorous, stinging triffid plants are created, and then a freak cosmic event watched by millions leaves most people blind, with rare exceptions.

He starts with this idea: if you could see, would you work to help the many hundreds of blind people all around you, or join whatever sighted people you could find? One is morally correct, the other far more likely to prove successful and save your skin. From there, he explores how habit can interfere with our ability to adapt to a world-changing crisis, what kind of system we should live in post-disaster, and even how to motivate children when a glorious former golden age is gone, possibly forever.

The mini-series touches on the first of these ideas, a simplified version of the second, and none of the rest. At the same time, a character who appeared in about fifteen pages of the novel is elevated to the status of major villain — just for the sake of having one, it seems — and goes around shooting his own henchmen, which leaves the audience wondering why anyone would follow him at all. There’s a new, more dramatic ending, and even the triffids get slightly different treatment. They’re crafty in the novel, able to sense movement and wait for people outside doors, but in the mini-series they’re given stingers that can smash a car window, so that unsettling suspense is replaced with frenetic action.

In short, the mini-series manages to be impressive entertainment, but only a diluted version of the book, despite a long running time. It leaves me hoping the series resulted in a few more people reading the novel — given the number of complex problems plaguing the world today, a British, slightly dated dry run for the end of the world is not only fascinating, it might actually be vaguely helpful to people, even if only in terms of their expectations, and having some slight level of familiarity with immense changes.

While your poems in Lost Luggage certainly have intellectual ideas in them, they’re grounded in some very organic imagery: fish, dragonflies, almonds, rain barrels, pine, fog and snow, crabapple wine. Considering your title, is it fair to say your book is at least partly about how we’ve left something important behind in modern, everyday life?

When I look back at poems I didn’t include in the final manuscript, this sense of having “left something important behind in modern, everyday life” is even more apparent.  I was trying to strike a metaphorical balance, but as you know these ruminations are subtle. The past is very much part of the present in this collection, though I would add that some  poems which do not appear on the surface to be part of the motif of having “left something important behind…” are in fact also about lost origins. Working from the etymology of words is for me a way of seeing what’s not there, and  is very often the source of the imagery in a poem.   “Ala,” “Church Demolition,” and “Roman Coins” are very much poems about lost or uncertain origins. I was also able to question value and judge hypocrisy with the strongest evidence being in the roots of the words themselves.

The organic imagery you mention is somewhat easier to explain. It is in part how I grew up, close to the organic and close to someone like my grandfather who even living in an urban center, secured himself a tract of land so that he could live like he did in “the old country.” Sometimes you would not have imagined that a city existed outside the little oasis he cultivated. Another reason for the organic nature of my imagery is quite simply that it’s a quality I have always admired in other poets. I remember in my early university years I was fascinated by everything new, new trends in literature and art, and in life. It wasn’t until I studied Martin Heidegger’s famous book Poetry, Language, Thought, in particular his brilliant essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” that I began to investigate origins in my own life. It was also at this time that I met the French philosopher Michel Henry, whose book La Barbarie (1987) had a profound affect on me, as did his idea that aesthetic experience returns us to the inner life of objects as lived experience.

So I would say yes to your question. Much of Lost Luggage deals with “how we’ve left something important behind in modern, everyday life.”  The heroism of reason and science can’t go unchecked. It seems clear that the hubris of technology has swept us up into a society of people pacified by gadgetry and indifferent to reality. I suppose poetry is a small reminder of that other life whose origins are being steadily eroded.

The story is straightforward: Harvey and his brother return home from playing to find their father has passed away of heart failure. The failure of the boys to completely understand – and the failure of adults to completely explain, over and over – rings true, even as the illustrations by Nadeau capture a world that’s slightly surreal to a particular uncertain child: walls sometimes go on forever, and patterns sometimes leap off dresses. Unfortunately, the only review currently on Amazon suggests American children may not be able to relate, but that’s simply rubbish. There’s nothing exclusively Canadian about the death of a parent, and an American child need only be told to anticipate a few French-Canadian names to completely understand the book. The feel of small-town Quebec is certainly strong here, but isn’t critical to a child interested in appreciating the book.

In another touch that feels authentic, Harvey escapes into the world of American hero Scott Carey, central character in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a film that would’ve been a popular success at the time (now a somewhat obscure, but still a well made and entertaining film). Harvey won Governer General’s Literary Awards for both text and illustration.

While I certainly feel saddened at the loss, what’s interesting about Layton passing away is the message it instinctively sends home to people: has your life been a worthy one? Will people mourn your passing like this, and feel you left the world better than you found it? Giving yourself the Layton test isn’t a new idea, but it’s a potent reminder to a distracted, materialistic culture that puts the economy ahead of all things, to such an extent that corporate tax cuts are justified as stimulus to the economy. Layton simply talked about direct government action to lift all Canadians out of poverty, and other promises that suggested a compassionate manager rather than a leader that would impose a personal vision on the country. People recognized Layton was out to make life better for all Canadians.

I wasn’t cheering for Jack Layton during the recent federal election. I think if Canadians had looked beyond a somewhat unpolished performance from Michael Ignatieff – who was not a career politician – they’d have seen a message of hope and fairness. I watched Ignatieff speeches on YouTube that were nearly half an hour, and was impressed with his sincerity. But however many barbecues and rallies he attended across the nation, the English language televised debates count for a great deal, and Layton delivered several knockout punches, at one point even eliciting a testy reply from Ignatieff that made me cringe at how it looked.  And it looked particularly bad next to the unflappable Stephen Harper. I’m not saying I disliked Layton, but if I was caught up in any one political story during the election, it was a Liberal leader swimming quite strongly against the current of unfair labelling and getting nowhere. It solidified my opinion that no party should be able to campaign before an election begins, as the Conservatives did.

At the time I watched the English language debates, I also subscribed to an idea given to me by every poll and election thus far: only the Liberals can replace a Conservative government. Didn’t Jack Layton know he’s going to come third? Shouldn’t he have spent the debate highlighting the Conservative failings? Needless to say, he declined to do so, and gave his party a historic result that may very well have been an NDP minority government if not for several other factors, including almost constant polls insisting on Conservative victory. Now that he’s succeeded in changing the deeply held belief the NDP always place third, Canadians suddenly see that we actually could’ve had him as our prime minister, and we realize this the same year we lose him forever.

But back to the one awkward moment at the ceremony: I hope the Conservatives attending the state funeral for Layton didn’t feel like they were the enemy, as I doubt Layton would have wanted it that way. Conservatives love their country too, and competing visions of Canada have always been at the heart of Canadian politics, or any politics. Having said that, I do think the country (and indeed, the world) is at a crossroads, and the Conservative view begins to seem like an increasingly misguided one. If the death of Jack Layton helps illustrate anything, it’s that no politician will be cherished and remembered for a legacy of corporate tax cuts, or standing in the way of clean energy.

I think Jack Layton knew there was a new energy economy on the way, and the sooner we begin real investments in solar and wind power (Germany already requires that new houses are built with solar power) the better. Clean energy is critical to slowing climate change, already beginning to have devastating results. History will show that some leaders stood in favour of progress, while others will only be remembered for delaying it. The Conservatives could learn a lot from this, and they certainly have time to think about it, with every opposition party in disarray. Maybe they’ll give thought to leaving the kind of legacy that inspires chalked messages of thanks and grief. The life and career of Jack Layton will inspire many to take up his cause, but if people across the country of different political stripes are giving themselves the Layton test, that’s also a remarkable final gift.

Ingrid Ruthig reviews Modern Canadian Poets, edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift, and our “Best of Blog,” series begins with I Am Corrupted, by Seth Abramson. Finally, poems by Nick Thran from Earworm, new from Nightwood Editions.

These are carefully crafted, modern and relevant stories, but they also feel somewhat like modern fables — characters are sometimes identified by role rather than by name, and drastic, symbolic things sometimes happen. What appeals or is useful about this style of fiction?

It was a way to escape a method of storytelling where Character was the primary element. For instance, when I named characters, they grew bloated in my imagination and seemed to weigh down my mind. As soon as I took away names, the characters shrank and my mind became active and playful. I think it was because I knew the characters would be easier to throw if they were tiny. I feel some hostility towards characters, so do like to hurl them away from me with force, but my arms are weak, spending all the time that they do merely typing. Being unnamed and tiny, as most of my characters are, they are quite easy to chuck around in a more equitable relationship with other elements of fiction. The characters cannot come clamouring for my attention just as I am working out something I want to say about Language or Form. They don’t have enough power to demand a flashback scene about the significant events from their past that account for their possession of certain subtle and turbulent emotions, which will now require fifty paragraphs to delineate. Shut up, you tiny creatures, I can say instead, while I hurl them away from me. I don’t empathize with them one bit, these squalling beings. I’m not a monster. It is just that they exist as formal elements, not real human beings. I do empathize with real human beings; I don’t empathize with formal elements. And I hope any readers of my writing might experience the same distancing or refocusing of attention away from Character. Many of the stories are about alienation, with characters disassociated from the community or the self, and I want the readers to experience this feeling in their own relationships to the characters.