We now have an agreement with the National Library of Canada for them to archive our back issues. We'll be providing readers with a link to that site.
Elias has been working on putting the magazine into two formats: "hardback" and "paperback". The "hardback" is essentially for screen viewing, the "paperback" format for printing out issues and for use by those with computers and software (like me) that can't handle Netscape 2.0.
I will be all alone
and no one there
the awesome emptiness
So the greatest poem has no witness
and we can only speak now
Louis Dudek
Is it the long Botticellian neck, or the hair
throughout the world:
O blessed Lady, with the soft speech, dark deep eyes,
Live and love also, have children.
And then, it is only your beauty,
The steps to your bed
I know by heart
but walk no more
because no I know
love sleeps alone.
And the air that was lying quiet
by the night's fireplace growls
and sinks its billion fangs
into my billion parts;
shakes me into pieces.
A saxophone pours
its midnight tears
onto my heart and spreads
its art into every cell.
I become that stranger
walking out the door.
R.W. 17
clouds exhaust without vehicle I dream
each is a dolphin happy chasing after us
dry half; bodies warm as I am snug inside
tangent to Magellan dotted lines axes
hardly moving slow earth turning over
like a tractor rotor gainer handstands
sweet hard candy lens knocked shuddering
hands drill cigarettes all lengths to screw ashtrays
flaps pound we shake we travel through what we make
There,
before the existence
of your eyes,
"God,"
Coca-Cola,
and the telephone,
the universe had sense:
it was a lamp, an apple,
a brake factory;
it was a song poured into a cup.
Nevertheless, man,
parasite under the empire of the sun,
not being able to decipher his origins,
calls himself the son of "God,"
in order to convince himself
he has inherited the universe.
suffused in Pine Sol--
it slid its solutions
in a bucket across the floor;
preoccupied, autumn announced,
TIME TO MOVE OUT!
with the bristles of steel wool
as I sat on the pier
and waited for fifteen
dollars' worth of fried clams
above a glut of lobsters in their cold, salty oxygen.
Drug Therapy
The killers haul their gun-metal phalluses from hurt to hurt, promiscuous as snow and ready for systemic silence. History is full of their pointless erections, blood-induced like most of the world's horrors. The pharmocopoeia of obsessive sex slowly winds the world down to point zero, where there is quick knowledge of death and then nothing.
Death is in the bloodstream.
So this is the truly contemporary world we have here in this anthology, and, to me, it certainly looks like the contemporary world. It is fast-paced and edgy, hopelessly urban and street wise, scattershot, exhilarating, and often degraded and degrading. When Louis Dudek reviewed the "other" seminal anthologies of the previous generation--Canadian Poetry Now and Anything is Possible--for The Canadian Forum in 1985, he called his essay "Poetry at the End of Things." I can't help but wonder what he would think of the work in The Last Word, which so clearly goes beyond what Dudek perceived, at the time, to be "the end of things."
In fact, compared to The Last Word and its sister anthologies (Word Up and Breathing Fire), Canadian Poetry Now, Anything Is Possible and The New Canadian Poets 1970-85 were, in many respects, quite timid. I tend to think of them now as Canada's last white heterosexual poetry anthologies. In comparison, the nineties anthologies are all ethnically and racially diverse and sexually various. Make no mistake about it: these are interesting times.
If for no other reason than that they cast a very different kind of shadow than the anthologies that preceded them, I have to disagree with Philip Marchand's recent assessment in the Toronto Star (March 23, 1996) that these anthologies reveal their poets to be "marking time". It seems to me that the entire social situation of poetry in Canada is currently being renegotiated, and it is the young poets of the nineties, whether they realize it or not, who are doing the renegotiating.
In his piece, Marchand provides us with some useful tools for investigating the new poetry. He discusses the work of the poets of the nineties in terms of anecdotal poetry, spoken word, and language poetry. These are interesting preliminary categories to be thinking about. I personally tend to look at this work in terms of how it negotiates its way between the poles of reference and utterance. When, for instance, Marchand complains that Breathing Fire contains too much anecdotal poetry, it seems to me that what he is possibly objecting to is a poetry that is too tightly bound to referentiality.
Of late, in response to the relative media dominance of spoken word poetry, there seems to have arisen a perceived conflict between Spoken Word and Written Word. This kind of a polarization strikes me as being particularly unfortunate. That some poets currently place a premium upon performance values is true; that others focus upon the poem as a written text is also equally true. But I would hate to have to live in a universe where I was forced to make a choice between the two. I think an argument can be made that some of the most interesting younger poets around today are those who combine powerful performance values with a skilled manipulation of text (I'm thinking here of poets like Michael Holmes himself, and Adeena Karasick, both lamentably and mysteriously missing from all three of the anthologies that attempt to define their generation). I might also add that, despite Michael Holmes' protestations in his introduction to the contrary, there are often more similarities than differences between the "spoken word" poets included in Word Up and the "written word" poets included in The Last Word.
Each of the three new anthologies follows a different set of procedures of course. In The Last Word, Holmes presents us with 51 poets with a maximum of three poems each. Some make very brief appearances, and no one holds the stage for very long. The effect is, to say the least, somewhat psychedelic. I wish there were more poems from the poets I like and fewer from the poets I don't, but there is a very democratic aesthetic at work here. Holmes presents his poets as 51 equals, in marked contrast to Lee's earlier The New Canadian Poets, where twenty poets were presented as the "stars" of their generation, with twenty-five others serving in the capacity as back-up singers.
If the poets in The Last Word tend to race by, there, are, nevertheless, poems that leave strong lasting impressions. Lynn Crosbie's passionate "Paul Teale, Mon Amour" tends to shake up a sensitive reader (and perhaps even a not-so-sensitive one); Sky Gilbert's "Confession number one" is astute and charming; Sonja Mills' "My First S+M Experience" is a real conversation starter; Steven Heighton's "Eating the Worm" impresses and moves; Louise Fox's "She Evaporates with Drops of Water Flung from her Hair" finesses its way into relevance; Darren Wershler-Henry's "Amoi(i)re" beautifully extends and elaborates upon the work of our beloved bpNichol. Each of these poems has its own particular significance that enriches Canadian poetry. My own personal favorite in The Last Word is Death Waits' "Towards a Contentless Society":
content that cannot show its face within the storm
when the split second between stations
becomes the only time allowed for thought
and trying to write the saddest poem
humanity could possibly write
(but what would it contain?) a nothing,
a nothingness: evolution's definition of humanity
my heart is beating faster
than a thousand cracking whips
I bleed from every orifice
and not a single drop of blood
is sacred
For me, that last stanza tragically captures the essence of this historical moment.
The Last Word, then, is flashy, hip, and, for the most part, effective. There are bound to be numerous quibbles about its containing too many poets from Toronto and its not being definitive. Anthologies always contain too many poets from somewhere, and they are never definitive.
Between them (and with almost no overlap) The Last Word, Breathing Fire, and Word Up introduce 90+ new poets to the Canadian scene. Long may they run.
Dear KenThanks for putting up "Somewhere Across the Border" on the Web. It is a great resource for those of us in the States frustrated by lack of access to the wild language experiments happening in Canada. All the best to you from--
Kevin Killian |
Hi:Nice list of contributors, but your web page is (frankly) a mess. I assume you are seriously under construction and things will get better.My sincerest best wishes with your project.
Ken Stange
|
Thank you for your help,