Subject: Shane Neilson's interview with David Solway

June 20, 2003

Dear Editor, 

Who is this David Solway person? As I began to read the recent interview with him, it seemed to me that Solway might be a delicious change of taste from the tinned tuna sameness which seems to dominate the poetic menu in Canada. I even smiled as I read this bit:

You might say that the motto I adopted was: fork out or fuck off, which I applied equally to myself as to anyone else. The problem is that I don’t have a tolerance organ in my psychical make-up for literary fast-food, for mediocrity, pretentiousness, sloppiness and self-aggrandizement. I practically choke on the indigestibility of it all.

I thought, "Well, the man does have a mouth. And he doesn't seem to mind using it." However, as I do have a skeptical organ in my body, I scrolled back up the page to click on the links to the poems excerpted from his upcoming book. Disappointment quickly ensued. I found those poems to suffer from the very things Solway claims to not tolerate.

'Addercop', for instance, is utter crap and "given overmuch" to "most", "much", "whereupon" etc., and similar "infirmities of the poet's craft". Sadly, the poem is not "intricate and strange" but sprawling and banal -- I would call it masturbation, but it hasn't even the potential for that solitary satisfaction.

Moving on to 'Mullein', I found one line worth reading: "Devil’s Quill, for by moving in wind it may forge invisibly the signature of God in paraphs and precessions of the tip;" but it was buried near the bottom of the poem as a perfectly good bicycle wheel might be buried in a trash heap; unseen, pretty much useless in such a context. But still, a decent line.

And 'Pepper'? It's a piece of prose. Solway seems to have been hitting the return key at random while he wrote it. Not a dash of poetry in it. It doesn't burn during the reading of it, nor is there a sly afterburn. The same can be said for 'Sestina: The Garden' and 'On the Sonnet'.

Are these poems truly indicative of Solway's voice? I hope not. But if they are, at least he escaped himself long enough to write 'Redeye Ghazal: Saskatchewan' which, as the (somewhat sycophantic) interviewer notes, is a good poem. Much of the prairies' power is compressed into those couplets; the seemingly constant wind, the rivers flowing -- their very movement giving the lie to the eye's perception of flatness -- their sharp water cutting the earth.

I hadn't heard of David Solway until I stumbled upon your website this morning. I suppose I'll have to hunt down his books to see whether poems such as 'Addercop', 'Mullein' and 'Pepper' are what he usually forks out. If so, he might as well fuck off.

John MacKenzie
Charlottetown, PEI