The opening story in Survivors of the Hive by Jason Heroux (Radiant Press) has a newly minted private investigator interested in the idea “silence is on the verge of extinction,” in a story that pauses to note some of the banal details we use to keep silence at bay: “I looked at the screen. My tea had grown cold, and the movie was over. It was now the news.” Heroux prefers an irreverent, immensely readable approach in his writing but also plays with profound ideas, setting the stage for an impressive set of four stories.
A second story in the collection (“The No Problem”) explores a town people are compelled to say no against their will in various situations, and a series of experts are called in. There’s a flurry of interesting ideas at play here as various suggestions are put forward: “Make no mistake, this is a test, and what we do next could shape the evolution of civilization.” The story follows one particular expert eventually thanked for her time and sent packing – with an incomplete picture of the event – by an investigating agency. Heroux doesn’t overdo it, but includes the occasional poetic touch: “A loose eyelash lay on his cheek, like a comma without words.”
Next, the surrealism is kicked up a notch (or two) with a truly bizarre exterminator making a house call and triggering a somewhat vulnerable man in various ways, including helping to refresh memories of childhood. At one point the exterminator acts like a centipede in an effort to understand them: “I lay on my stomach, stretched out, started wiggling forward licking the walls. I found a little pile of poisoned powder and gobbled it up. After eating the poisoned powder, I stopped acting like a centipede. I vomited on the floor.”
The fourth (and longest) story really embraces the surrealism as a young man is pressured into judging a poetry contest, and finding he isn’t succeeding at it, asks his brother to take over. This story struggles a little under the weight of a number of ideas that are less developed, including tragic loss, brotherhood, time, corrupt contests, and talking objects. It’s repeatedly stated you aren’t an artist unless you’re incomprehensible, but I assume Heroux doesn’t believe this and is maybe poking fun at anyone with an intense distaste for the arts or those who use the arts as window-dressing for their lives, making (as Clive James said) “the pursuit of ambition look civilized.” But some of these ideas do link up in a satisfying way, and here too there are startlingly good moments in the writing: “He removed a comb from his pocket like a baton. He conducted the symphony of his hair.”
I think only the third story really troubles to confirm a sense of hope, but regardless it’s a collection I recommend as a set of inventive, refreshingly different stories that also take the time to kick around ideas. I don’t know if Heroux is a fan of Ray Bradbury, The Twilight Zone or entirely different influences, but if I ever get the chance to have a pint of beer with him I’d be interested to find out.
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Year in Review: 2023
Novels: The Society of Experience (Matt Cahill) tells a highly inventive story about identity and anxiety in a way that’s quite skillfully written: “We stretched out on the mattress and undressed each other tenderly, as if undressing wounds.”
Lump (Nathan Whitlock) is another novel by Whitlock that’s both compelling and features real-feeling dialogue and characters. Whitlock makes it look easy. There’s a brief interview with him below.
Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan) is a morality tale that’s refreshingly concise and vivid, set in Ireland in the 1980s.
Indian Horse (Richard Wagamese) is as compelling as it is important, telling the story of a residential school survivor. I’d have to call this my favourite and most memorable novel of the year.
Sebastiano’s Vine (Carmelo Militano) is kind of novel I love: contemplative and concise.
The Painted Veil (W Somerset Maugham) is an excellent examination of human frailty and our tendency to cling to illusions instead of seeing, as Orwell said, what’s right in front of one’s nose. Maugham likes to state the feelings his characters have in quite a straightforward way, and while this can be banal in the hands of some writers, his details are startlingly good throughout, as are other observations: “Was it not pitiful that men, tarrying so short a space in a world where there was so much pain, should thus torture themselves?”
Having been reminded I enjoy Maugham, I also read Up at the Villa which is skillfully done, but more of a melodrama and Theatre, a drama behind the scenes of a theatre company.
The Walk (Robert Walser) is a short novel. I’ve read Walser before and enjoyed his meditative work inspired by long wanderings. In a refreshing moment from a bygone age he reflects on so many people adopting the habit of rushing by the world in cars: “To people sitting in a blustering automobile I always present an austere face. Then they believe I am a sharp-eyed, malevolent spy, a plainclothes policeman, delegated by high officials to spy on the traffic, to note down the number of vehicles, and later to report them to the proper authorities. I always then look darkly at the wheels, at the car as a whole, but never at its occupants, whom I despise, and this in no way personally, but purely on principle, for I shall never understand how it can be called a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of despair.”
Stories: Instructions for the Drowning (Steven Heighton) is a superb final collection of stories by Heighton, published by Biblioasis. They were all worthy stories, but my favourite was the last one concerning Houdini.
The Happy Prince and Other Stories (Oscar Wilde) was an excellent collection with more of a fairly tale quality than I expected.
Confidence (Russell Smith) is a skillfully written, quietly meaningful collection I admired, while Dance Moves of the Near Future (Tim Conley) is a collection I appreciated for its inventiveness but also the way stories end whenever he damn well pleases.
The Prank, the best of young Chekhov (New York Review Books) is an effective collection with meaning generally dressed in humour because of the amount of censorship at the time.
Poetry: Alternator (Chris Banks), All of Us (Collected poems of Raymond Carver, Thirty-Three Poems, Some of Which Are About Death (Ben North), The King of Terrors (Jim Johnstone), The Essential Jay Macpherson, The Essential Earle Birney.
A Devil Every Day (John Nyman), Durable Goods (James Pollock) and While Supplies Last (Anita Lahey) all have a One Question Interview below.
Nonfiction: Ray Bradbury, The Last Interview and Other Conversations: I’ve reviewed this book below, and found it a valuable one for some of the great quotes. Here’s Bradbury on reading Grapes of Wrath: “He taught me how to write objectively. He doesn’t tell you what a character thinks or feels. You never get any thoughts of characters. What a character looks at or notices is how is how you get the entire feeling of atmosphere and emotion. You rarely get a character’s thoughts. The reader guesses at them by what a character sees or does.”
Best Canadian Essays 2024: all impressive selections, and a wide range of subjects is covered. Please do check out this series published by Biblioasis. This latest selection is by Marcello Di Cintio.
The Miracle of Dunkirk (Walter Lord) is a book I found almost as compelling as his famous book on the Titanic, A Night to Remember.
On Writing and Failure (Stephen Marche) is reviewed below, but simply put it’s a concise, articulate and somewhat reassuring examination of the struggles connected to the writing life.
Quiet Night Think, poems and essays (Gillian Sze) has real wisdom to be found between its covers even as it’s a fine example of living an examined, deeply thoughtful life.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman) is a book of essays by a most uncommon and articulate reader, as well as a delight to read.
One Story, One Song by Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese has wisdom in every chapter: “I remember that, like everything around me, I am part of a larger story.” Or in another moment, “There is no word for wilderness in any Native language. There’s no concept of the wild as something that needs controlling … My people say that humility is the root of everything. To be in harmony with the world, you need to recognize where the power lies and to respect that.”
Genre: The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler): mystery isn’t normally my thing, but I do enjoy Chandler’s spare and skilled way of telling a story.
Store of the Worlds (stories of Robert Sheckley): these stories blend imagination, insightfulness and cleverness all at once. I’ll be seeking out other collections by Sheckley.
The Word for World is Forest (Ursula Le Guin): I’ve never regretted picking up a book by Le Guin, and here we’re given a poignant story about humanity somehow oblivious to the devastation they’re causing on another planet.
Graphic novels: Superman Space Age and One-Star Squadron, (both by Mark Russell) feature impressive art and excellent writing with surprisingly profound moments involving struggle and loss. I don’t always pick up superhero graphic novels expecting them to be profound, but that’s the word for the writing to be found here. The one I’d recommend more highly is the Superman title.
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Tags: Book reviews, book-review, books, literature, writing
Nathan Whitlock is the author of the novels A Week of This and Congratulations On Everything. Nathan’s writing has appeared in places such as the New York Review of Books, the Walrus, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, the Globe and Mail and Best Canadian Essays. He is the coordinator for the Humber College Creative Book Publishing program, which he also teaches in, and makes the weekly author-interview podcast What Happened Next. His recent novel is called Lump.
I grew up on stuff like the original Twilight Zone and enjoy writing that’s both meaningful and puts a twist of some kind on reality, but I also love your novels for being engaging even as they’re about everyday life. Your dialogue feels quite real. Did you purposely develop your ear for dialogue (as writers should, really) and where are all the giant ice monsters?
Answering the second part of your question first: for decades, I have carried around this idea—which I used to think came from Stephen Fry or someone similar*—that American comedy is based on the idea of “wouldn’t it be funny if…”, whereas British comedy is based on “isn’t it funny that…” And I, as someone with British parents, and who grew up watching hours and hours of British television and movies (via PBS and my own inclinations), always leaned toward the latter: finding the funny (and the tragic and the moving and the joyful, etc.) in the way things are, rather than imposing some kind of wacky or contrived plot structure. In other words, digging into a seemingly banal scenario to reveal strangeness and perversity, rather than creating a bizarre and/or extraordinary scenario, then letting the characters within it react.
I think some writers can do the latter brilliantly, and I love a lot of stories that follow that pattern, but some part of my brain insists it’s cheating to throw in a strange or unlikely element, and then stand back and say: “Look at how wild this is!” It’s like an arsonist standing back from a house he just doused with gasoline and saying: “Man, these houses catch fire a lot!” Writing a story about a sentient refrigerator can be fun, and a story like that might be fun to read, but if fun is the only goal, you’d be better off chugging a beer and jumping into a pool with your clothes on. No book can compete with that.
It’s entirely possible I simply lack the imagination for the other kind of story, but for whatever reason, it’s the way I operate as a writer. I don’t get inspired by wild ideas or elaborate scenarios and questions of what if? My stories usually start by watching someone spend an hour blowing every leaf off their yard with a leaf blower. Or stand in the middle of a grocery store aisle, staring at a box of cereal, clearly having forgotten why they’re there. Or pace impatiently around a playground, waiting for their kids to get their fill of fun for the day. That’s usually what makes my brain start to spin out a story, for better or worse.
(Having said all that, I did just put out a novel in which a woman has a brief dialogue with a character in a cartoon, and later with a panda. And there’s a whole chapter from the perspective of a dog, so obviously it’s just as important to violate all these puritan rules when necessary.)
As for the way I write dialogue, I very much appreciate the compliment, because I always worry that my dialogue is not as good as it should be. I have a kind of Platonic ideal for dialogue in my mind that I work hard to match, but mostly I feel like I only ever get close, at best. I have a lot of thoughts about dialogue in literary fiction—at least in the kind of sad-funny-cringey literary fiction that I write—that mostly boil down to: characters shouldn’t know they’re in a story. They don’t know they’re being watched. So don’t have them expound upon the underlying themes of the story they’re in. Don’t make them sound writerly, since even writers don’t sound like that when they’re not onstage at a festival or whatever. Don’t have them advance the plot or provide useful backstory. And don’t ever, ever have them be funny—don’t let them perform for the reader or wink at the reader. (Though they can perform for other characters in the story, which can be funny.)
All this is to say that maybe we were the giant ice monsters all along.
*I looked this up while writing this response, and could only find it referenced in an onstage interview with Salman Rushdie, who put it that other way: that Brits are the “funny if…” people and Americans are all about it being “funny that…” He cites Monty Python and Seinfeld as examples of both, which makes sense, but I still say it makes more sense the way I had always known it. And I think the best Canadian comedy is closer to the British kind, for a lot of bad reasons, probably. Our funniest stuff is about the absurdities of everyday life, whereas we always go wrong when we get wacky and self-consciously outrageous.
Obviously, all of this is reductive and easily argued against and ultimately a question of taste, but I clearly enjoy the opportunity to run my mouth about it. And I do appreciate the compliments in your question. So, thank you.
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Anita Lahey is the author of The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture and two poetry collections: Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton. An award-winning magazine journalist, The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Lahey serves as series editor of the annual anthology, Best Canadian Poetry. Her most recent book of poems is While Supplies Last.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get a sense of movement throughout this book, both geographically and through time. Tides, wildfires and the ice-age all get mentions in your deeply thoughtful work. Even a section on the pandemic, often talked about as paralyzing, takes the approach of pandemic traffic reports. Could you elaborate on this?
I have been sitting on this excellent question for a few months, as you know. I love it when a thoughtful, astute reader picks up on something in my work that I didn’t see myself. And I didn’t catch this one at all, either when I was writing or when I was piecing the poems together into a manuscript.
You mention several kinds of movement: geography, time (it’s true that we go all the way back to the ice age in this book), tides, wildfires, and the more mundane daily movement of traffic—and there’s the flipside of that, traffic not moving at all. There are also rivers here, currents, water flowing and pooling, and the history and stories associated with those waterways moving alongside them.
Between the mammoth poem, the Don River saga—and even the question at the end of the first poem, that, when the great reckoning comes, when the ocean finally spits back at us all the wrack and ruin we’ve poured into over the ages, “will any of us be here, waiting?”—I am clearly finding myself digging into these longer timelines, the big picture: what came before our own presence here, our own little narratives, and what may follow.
Behind this (or between the lines) is maybe, in part, the sense of a human being moving through time: that is, me, ageing. I turned 50 the year before this book was published. And as I age, I become more and more attuned to the tiny dot each of our lives takes up on the vast timeline of the history of humanity, the earth, the universe. My sense of my own importance diminishes with every passing year—at least, I have more glimmers of awareness of my own insignificance. A good kind of awareness, I think.
Does this manifest itself in the poems? I think maybe it does. In that mammoth poem, for example, by the end, I am musing way down into the future beyond the existence of humanity, beyond our own extinction, when the land is reclaiming itself. It’s a scary thing to imagine—our disappearance as a species—but when I wrote that part of the poem, it also felt restful, somehow right and just. Never mind that we kind of deserve it. It also seems simply part of the ongoing order of the universe: nothing is static or permanent, things change, species come and go. And despite our always evolving ideas about our own significance in this fantastic and profoundly mysterious story of life, that change likely, eventually, includes us.
Don’t get me wrong: I also rail against my own personal end, the fact of my own pending disappearance, which various recent events—from the state of the planet and global politics to some personal losses—have lately brought into pretty sharp focus. That’s of course the impetus behind writing at all, right? It’s the weapon we poets wield against our own mortality. Totally ineffectual, mind you, but briefly satisfying!
Going back to geography, years ago, I met someone at an event who would later become a friend, the writer Abou Farman (who now lives in the U.S.). During our first conversation, as we talked about the different places we’d lived in and visited, he exclaimed with a look of knowing and delight on his face, “Everything is about geography to you!” And I realized that yes, as I spoke about the places I knew and loved, I was describing neighbourhoods and characteristics, shorelines and streetscapes, views, how it felt to move through those communities, on the ground, by pedal or by foot.
The poems in this book were written over a period of about 12 years, during which time I—and then my little family, which happily for me came to exist along the way—moved, for various reasons, from Montreal to Fredericton to Toronto to Victoria, and finally, in 2019, to Ottawa, where I had lived for about a decade earlier in my adult life. I grew up in Burlington, Ontario—ironically, not moving at all from the age of 1 to 18—studied in Toronto and held my first grownup job there, and have had a longstanding and deepening tie with Cape Breton Island since childhood (it’s where my father is from, and where many close relations remain). In each of these places, I’ve bonded with my home & community on an intimate and visceral level: I’m a person who works mostly at home, I go for lots of walks and bike rides, I shop in the neighbourhood when possible. I’ve also gotten involved in some volunteer-ish way in the community, and been fortunate to make lasting friendships. On the one hand, each move was a gift, the chance to get to a know a whole new place and find my footing there. On the other hand, it meant leaving behind people and places I’d come to feel attached to, to love. All that moving around dislodged something in me for awhile, and I think that sense that pieces of my self, my heart and my history are scattered about the country might also live somehow between the lines in this book. It’s blatant in the poem “Neither Here Nor There,” but I know it also drove the writing on some level, that restless unease, a sense for a time of not really belonging anywhere, of having given too much up—too many homes, and too many people. When you feel lost, sometimes you can find yourself in a poem, in the act of writing, even if temporarily.
I’m keenly aware as I write this how lucky I am to have found comfortable homes in all these places, and been able to afford them. I’m also keenly aware of how my relationship to the lands and places I’ve come to feel attached to have been shaped in part by our colonial history—that my being here at all, as a person with Polish immigrant grandparents and long-ago Scottish/Irish (and possibly French) ancestors who settled on the East Coast, is, in part, a kind of intrusion. Though it’s not necessarily explicit, my growing understanding of this and of our troubled history also affected the ways these poems moved as they were being written.
There are so many other places I could go with this idea of movement. How wildfires move erratically and with such terrifying force—the one whose story I tell in this book, and those coming at us now, in the present, increasingly so. How the forces of climate change are rolling toward us very much like a wall of flames, and we seem paralyzed in the face of it. When you take all that roiling, all that turmoil, and all the anxiety that’s attached to it, and fasten it with words to the page, still it there—though not entirely, for the words move, the rhythm of the poem, hopefully, embodies the rhythm of the forces it’s trying to convey—what does that mean? What does it accomplish? I don’t know, but it’s the one thing I’m capable of doing in the face of all this.
And traffic. Well, the traffic poems were pure joy to create. Obviously, road congestion and underfunded public transit are issues in many cities that relate directly to climate change and our future on this planet. It’s an issue fairly heightened here in Ottawa due to our light-rail fiasco. But that’s not why I made these poems. I use “made” because that’s what I did, as opposed to “write” them: I pieced them together out of words from Doug Hempstead’s local traffic reports on CBC Radio. I made them because my son and I were having so much fun writing down quotes from Doug’s traffic reports, which are colourful, chatty, and often sprinkled with commentary that has nothing at all to do with the traffic, but in a way that’s delightful rather than annoying. During the pandemic, we got in the habit of turning the radio up when the traffic report came on. We had no practical use for it except that it often made us smile, or outright laugh. Eventually, I had so many quotes from Doug scattered on notepads around the house, I thought I should try to do something with them. It was an instinct, and really just a fun thing to do.
But it did something—and I think you’re right that what it did in part has to do with movement, with the stop-and-go of traffic and with the juxtaposition of the effort to get somewhere, the mental image of all those cars on all those roads, in the midst of a pandemic that, in other senses, called a halt to so much movement, as well as to just about everything we knew as normal. Movement is what we do best. When we are forced to pause, and when a poem gives us the opportunity to pause while contemplating movement—including thwarted movement—what happens? How do we proceed? Where do we go from there?
Or do we manage to convince ourselves it’s OK to go nowhere at all, which might be the response that’s called for?
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John Nyman is a poet, critic and book artist. He is the author of Players, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award among other works, but his most recent title is A Devil Every Day, new from Palimpsest Press.
Aside from the many startlingly good lines in your book, there’s a mix of styles: some poems are in different voices so that you’re in the book as the writer in a refreshingly indirect way, while others are more direct. I particularly liked the advice “celebrate stillness,” which I’d say is desperately needed in North America. Could you talk a bit about the different themes and how the book came together?
Many thanks for your kind words about A Devil Every Day—and particularly for noticing the mix of styles and voices in the book, since complicating the idea of voice has been one of my central poetic concerns since my first collection, Players. As a student of postmodern critical theory (I have a PhD in the field), I don’t really believe in a single, unified voice or identity. Instead, I would argue that what we say and do stems from a multiplicity of dialects, rhetorical styles, and personal and cultural experiences, which blend together in unique and contextually specific ways. Likewise, I don’t write poetry that tries to capture “my” voice or perspective, as if that were something consistent or straightforward. When I write, my goal is to braid together different strands of experience and expression—sometimes from my own life, but other times from the media or broader social and cultural milieus—to reveal unique combinations that can help us understand our shared world in different ways.
The two predominant subjects of A Devil Every Day are houseplants and the Devil—and even though these two themes seem very different, each one responds to my postmodernist outlook in its own way. I’m fascinated by plants because of how their lifestyles challenge our basic understandings of identity: it’s often not clear where a plant’s identity begins or ends (for example, several of the houseplants I care for at home were once all cuttings from the same individual), or whether a plant possesses what we know as consciousness or a mind—let alone rights and responsibilities. On the other side of the coin, the Devil is meant to personify evil in a pure and unadulterated sense, yet he has been characterized in so many different ways, and we can never seem to agree on what exactly evil is or where to find it in our society. As they say, “the Devil is in the details.”
Even though evil is so amorphous, our culture has a strong (and growing, I think) tendency to judge what kinds of speech and behaviour are right or good. In my opinion, this tendency is gravely complicated by the complexity of our identities and interactions with the modern world. As a settler Canadian—and particularly as a white, straight, cis-male settler Canadian—my speech, actions, and values are saturated with evil, since they draw from and reinforce many of the ideological systems that foster marginalization and inequality in our society. Nonetheless, deciding to do good or “do better” is no simple task, since it would mean transforming some of the fundamental aspects that make me who I am. In other words, if the Devil wakes up tomorrow and decides to be a better person, is he still the Devil? And if not, who is? I hope that A Devil Every Day gives readers opportunities to identify with and further explore this dilemma, which I believe is fundamental to life in the contemporary West.
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I recently revisited No Country for Old Men, one of the most gripping films I’ve ever seen, often lacking the music that would faintly remind the viewer that you’re watching a film. Spoilers, ahoy: two of the main characters the viewer has followed and presumably cheered for – at least, more than the chilling assassin Anton Chigurh – are killed off camera, as though to emphasize the way the world casually carries on without you, and for most of the film the only character who seems to be very much in control is Chirugh with a careful, thorough and even inventive approach to killing. The scene he grills a hapless gas station owner who only wanted to make conversation about the rain must be one of the best I’ve ever seen, demonstrating (without spelling it out) how little time Chigurh has for irrelevancies even as the other man utterly fails to understand what’s wrong, but senses his life is on the line. Until, of course, the second last scene of the film gives us Chirgurh in a sudden car accident, which I assume to mean even the most cautious of us can’t anticipate everything in a complex and fast-moving world. With that in mind, it’s possible that ironically enough the baffled gas station owner is wiser if he recognizes the only thing worth doing is relaxing and trying to enjoy the ride as you make your contribution.
Growing up, books were in my house the same way there were potted plants. Nobody really talked about books. It was in university I started to find them appealing as a physical object but also, of course, as vital parts of a larger conversation. And I wanted to make my contribution. That was in the 1990s, and I’ve since learned what experienced writers know, that you need to celebrate your successes, because indifference is always around the corner. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the quality of your writing, work is turned down by magazines for a variety of arbitrary reasons. Maybe they published something similar recently, and maybe they simply didn’t find room for it after the lineup of better connected, more famous or more fashionable writers. On Writing and Failure is a potent and articulate reminder of all this – or a handy but somewhat jarring initiation for new writers – as provided by Stephen Marche: “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” and “You have to relish the rejection. Rejection is the evidence of your hustle. Rejection is the sign that your are throwing yourself against the door.” Or more troubling is the idea “the marketplace doesn’t test talent. It tests timing.”
A good novel takes years to produce, and most become old news in about three to six months. My novel sold fifty copies at the launch, but now sits at a modest twenty-two ratings on Goodreads. And to be honest, that’s because I encouraged friends to give it a rating and gave it one myself. “I’m pretty sure Goodreads exists only to torment writers,” jokes a novelist and friend of mine. But I’m still proud of it. I know it reached people and continues to reach people. I maintain that a book is always new to someone, and buy a copy on a monthly basis to give away or leave in a Little Free Library. Marche writes, “It should not be surprising that it’s hard to sell your feelings. What’s surprising is that there are sometimes buyers.”
A writer enjoying intermittent success can at least know they may be remembered – even if most of us won’t – and for now, they don’t deal at all with the spotlight of anticipation. Marche quotes John Updike on the subject: “Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness.” Writing in Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James notes, “generally, it is our failures that civilise us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.” He also notes a work should be judged by “it’s interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige.”
To add another layer of complexity, there has probably never been a worse signal to noise ratio, with more writers publishing more books at a time there’s more emphasis on those already famous and marketable, and more distractions. Huxley describes a world in which people “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” and while I don’t want to go into it here, the fact we all carry computers in our pockets is certainly something I wouldn’t have anticipated as a child, and even dedicated readers find it eats into their time.
So what’s left for a largely unknown writer? What’s left is being a part of a community, giving a cheer regularly for the work you appreciate, believing in diplomatic criticism and relishing the moments you give language the kind of elegance we simply don’t manage most of the time. You can only submit your work and let the rest of it hang in the wind. Marche doesn’t get into the joy of capturing something effectively, maybe because he assumes writers already care about this, or that it’s already in the heart of those dedicated writers the world troubles to notice, and can be found in the work. Marche does offer this, however: “You shouldn’t envy any writer, not because it’s bad for your soul but because it’s stupid. You have no idea what people are going through. You have no idea how things will work out.”
Writing in his book of essays The Difficult, the late Stan Dragland put it like this: “The struggle is not about winning, though that is exactly how some critics behave. It’s about testifying, sharing, working to be an active, responsible member of a cultural community that values art for itself and also has a way of reading the world. It’s about paying dues, putting in that necessary effort.” Thanks for that, Stan. I’m sorry I never had a beer with you.
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The Walrus, The Fiddlehead
Very glad to have a poem in the current (May) issue of The Walrus that you can read here. I’m in good company considering there’s also an excellent poem by Vanessa Stauffer (both poems are about fathers) and if you don’t subscribe it’s a great Canadian magazine covering relevant issues every month. I’m honoured to have a poem in it.
There’s also, by pure coincidence, a first poem of mine in The Fiddlehead, where I’ve submitted on and off since the 1990s (which is the only record that breaks how long I’ve submitted to The Walrus) so I’m also pleased and honoured to have a poem in Canada’s oldest literary magazine. And again, it’s a poem about my father. Of course, it’s also well worth subscribing to The Fiddlehead and please check in to the site because I’ve also contributed a review under Stop! Look! Listen! that should appear before long. I’ve taken a look at On Browsing by Jason Guriel.
Now that I’ve managed these two publications I’m honestly not quite sure where to turn next, but apparently I should have been writing more poems about my father as people have found them poignant. To be clear, he’s a very honourable, quiet man I happened to find a complete mystery as a child. These poems capture something of the love I continue to feel for him and the endlessly fascinating way we can be a mystery to each other, even under the same roof.
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I think highly of work by Ray Bradbury. I’d say the novels stand up better than the stories, which come across to me as a little keen to get their point across, often something poignant and a trifle heavy-handed about how sad it will be when nobody cares about art or reading books. Still, as we’re headed in that direction anyway (particularly thanks to smartphones, I think) it seems a churlish complaint to make that he so desperately cares in his stories. I admire the way a lot of his work is infused with love for books and reading, as well as a firm belief libraries provide access, so that equality comes from freedom of information, freedom to read.
It’s worth exploring The Last Interview for some of the quotes here. Bradbury strikes me as quite a lucky writer in some ways, with a skilled and well-connected agent for most of his life (literary agents are like unicorns to me, I send out an occasional email just to see if one will reply) even as Bradbury really hustled, trying to make connections and practicing writing continually. It’s a reminder you can have talent and develop your skills by reading like a writer (and watching how others do it) but ongoing effort to get your work out there is also required. How many writers do all three?
Here’s Bradbury on reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck: “He taught me how to write objectively. He doesn’t tell you what a character thinks or feels. You never get any thoughts of characters. What a character looks at or notices is how is how you get the entire feeling of atmosphere and emotion. You rarely get a character’s thoughts. The reader guesses at them by what a character sees or does.”
Asked why he elected to examine so many themes in stories set in the future instead of today, his reply is a concise summary of reasons for writing “ideas” fiction: “If you write an ordinary story in ordinary times, people are not going to read it. If you write a fantasy, people will think you are not writing about them, and in doing so, you will get to their guts and to their hearts. You want to stay away from appealing to minds – you want to reach their hearts. And when they are reading the book and they finish it, they realize, My God, that is me! I thought he was writing about the future, but this story is just pretending to be about the future.”
There are only a few sour notes in the book. Bradbury’s mini-essay on his architectural influences (specific to various projects) just kind of comes across as boasting from an already-famous writer, though it may have been meant joyfully and it’s explained by the fact that he’s obviously driven. For Hollywood to get a bit run down and be compared to Hiroshima is quite appalling, and at another point he seems to feel change is needed because the Obama administration is not “for the people,” so you’re forced to wonder what he’d have thought of the assortment of changes the American people eventually got.
But it’s only fair to say, it’s an admirable book for his repeated statements about love: do what you love, write for love and not for money. “Everything I did was pure love. Pure love. And if you live that way, you’ve had a great life.” I guess I’m getting that part right, at least.
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Tags: dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1888
James Pollock has published poems widely in many journals and his awards include the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Magma Editors’ Prize. He’s the author of You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (2012) and the book of poems Sailing to Babylon (2012) but his most recent book of poems (on everyday technology) is called Durable Goods (2022).
These are carefully crafted and imaginative poems about everyday items. Recently I came across a couple of Auden quotes, including the idea no one can create a work of art “by a simple act of will… but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.” And “there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.” With all this in mind, how long did it take to write a collection like this, and could you elaborate on the value of turning your attention to everyday objects?
Thanks for your question, Alex, and your kind words.
I’ll tell you how I got the idea to write Durable Goods. I was sitting in a meeting at my college with my English colleagues. We were discussing some randomly-selected essays from our first-year College Writing classes, to decide whether or not our students were learning what we wanted them to learn.
An essay by one of my own students was projected on the screen at the front of the classroom. The student’s name, and my name, had both been removed, but I recognized it. A couple of my colleagues began criticizing the essay for being written in first person, arguing that we should be teaching students to write academic arguments in the disembodied, disinterested voice of reason, not the subjective voice of an interested person. To my mind, the disinterested voice had certainly been conventional for academic writing throughout most of the twentieth century, but my view was that for some decades it had been gradually superseded by a more embodied, culturally-specific, first-person point of view, at least in the humanities, and I saw that as a good thing. In fact, I spent a lot of time in my classes encouraging students not only to write about things they cared about, but to write in first person, and to bring their own identities and experiences to bear.
I left the meeting feeling thoroughly annoyed and baffled, and as I passed a drinking fountain in the hallway, and gazed at it for a while, filled with emotional heat, it suddenly struck me that I could write a poem by imagining my way into the subjective existence of a drinking fountain, and all at once I felt tremendously excited. It felt very much like something Keats writes about in one of his letters, where he describes feeling despondent, and then, seeing a bird outside his window, “take[s] part in its existence” by a joyful effort of the imagination, “and peck[s] about the gravel.”
I realized that I could write a whole book of poems about such things: not birds or flowers, but tools and appliances and machines. So the idea for the entire book came to me all at once, standing in a hallway, staring at a drinking fountain.
After that, to answer your question, it took me about three years to write and revise the book, although I wrote most of the poems over the course of two summers when I wasn’t teaching.
As for the value of turning my attention to everyday objects, I have two answers for that.
First, I’d say it’s a way of moving past autobiography in English-language poetry. I’ve written some autobiographical poems myself, and of course there are a lot of wonderful poems that have come out of this Wordsworthian tradition that Keats calls “the egotistical sublime”; but I’m interested in finding ways to do something else in poetry. Keats identifies an alternative tradition of the “chameleon poet”—that is, the kind of poet who, like Shakespeare, disappears into the subject of the poem—and that tradition strikes me as the most exciting way forward in our own time. Of course, there are various ways of doing this: dramatic monologues, for example, or certain narrative forms like the verse novel. For lyric poetry, one way to do this is with the thing-poem, which is descended from, and related to, the riddle. This is the approach that excited me when I was writing Durable Goods.
Another way to answer your question has to do with the value of engaging imaginatively with technology. When we use the word “technology” today, we tend to mean recent computer technology—blockchain, smart phones, quantum computing, artificial intelligence—and we forget about all the older technologies we use all day long, so that they have become almost invisible to us as technological: umbrellas, mirrors, teaspoons. It’s all just hardware, appliances, “products,” and before long, junk. In other words, most of us live immersed in a thoroughly disenchanted world of objects that we use and then throw away. Even though these things often help us, and sometimes hurt us, and require our care, we tend not to think of ourselves as having relationships with them.
The poems in Durable Goods, in adapting the thing-poem tradition to tools and appliances, bring an imaginative animism to these things, so they become enchanted subjects in their own right, not just disposable objects. When William Blake writes, concerning a thistle, that “With my inward Eye, ’tis an old Man grey, / With my outward, a Thistle across my way,” that’s a Romantic thing-poem, a visionary animism of Nature. There’s a whole tradition of thing-poems in modern poetry, too, including poems by Eduard Mörike, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence, Francis Ponge, Eric Ormsby, and others. In Durable Goods, I’m innovating on that tradition by writing, not about plants or animals, or even works of art, but tools and appliances and machines.
As for your first quotation from Auden—his assertion that no one can create a work of art “by a simple act of will . . . but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him”—I agree. Still, I try never to forget that Rilke learned the opposite, or at least a complementary, lesson when he worked for Rodin in Paris. In Rodin’s words, “Il faut travailler, toujours travailler,” or in English, “One must work, always work.” So, practice is crucial, too. It certainly had a profoundly beneficial effect on Rilke’s poetry, which improved rapidly from that point on, as he started to write the two volumes of New Poems, where most of his thing-poems are to be found. Whereas before—when apparently he was always waiting for inspiration—his poetry was relatively vague and sentimental. Later, when he received the inspiration for the Duino Elegies, walking along the wall at Duino Castle—I believe the story is that he had some distressing financial business to take care of, and then suddenly he heard the opening lines of the first elegy—he was ready for it; he had the technique he needed to turn the inspiration into a masterpiece, because he’d been practicing for years.
Still, today I would revise the lesson Rodin taught Rilke, at least a little. Yes, writing Durable Goods was a great deal of work, involving endless drafts, endless revisions, trying to make it all feel effortless. But really, it wasn’t work so much as play. It gave me great pleasure to write these poems, imagining my way into the experience of a ceiling fan, and then a sewing needle, and then a framing hammer. Each poem was like a new game of backgammon or chess. There were certain rules I set for myself, like iambic pentameter lines, rhymed quatrains, and so forth. Sometimes I’d win, sometimes I’d lose—that is, sometimes the poem would fail—but if I lost, I could always just clear the board, or part of it, and start over again.
Finally, that second quotation from Auden strikes me as clearly wrong: “poetry must praise.” Tell that to Juvenal or Catullus or Alexander Pope! Not to mention Paul Celan. Anyway, I reject commandments about “all poetry,” especially if they try to restrict the freedom of the poet—in this case apparently to forbid all poetic satire and invective. As for my own attitude toward the things I write about in Durable Goods, I think it’s fair to say the aspersions I cast in that book, however playful, are sown almost as thickly as the praise.
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Alex Boyd: BoydBlog 
I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? By Nolan Natasha
Personal relationships feature strongly in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? Our attempts to connect are poignantly portrayed in the opening poem, “Walkie-talkie,” but a reader assuming these are simplistic poems just because they’re reasonably accessible would be mistaken. In “Rental Car,” it feels to me like our tentative hold on life gets a nod as, “Winter Tires hold us, just barely, / to this world, this monochrome day.”
A talented poet, Nolan Natasha has an eye for the kind of worthy detail that helps form a remarkable poem, as in “Gestures,” when a moment bumps the poet out of the usual perspective: “I catch my reflection in the lenses and see / for a moment, the man you see.”
Maturely, everyone inhabiting these poems is allowed complexity and does not come across as strictly or sharply defined. Queer isn’t to be easily defined, it isn’t one thing “written in heavy books.”
I found “Niagara Falls,” to be among the best poems in the book: an assortment of arresting snapshots in impressive detail unfold before a final few lines — I won’t spoil them here — take on a blend of mood and landscape to create a profound poem that, again, I think touches on mortality.
Nolan Natasha has written a superb collection here. It’s a collection that’s poignant and profound as well as honest and articulate. Quite simply, these are the reasons I turn to poetry.
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