Mean
by Ken Babstock
House of Anansi Press, 1999
Reviewed by Geoffrey Cook
The term “tragedy” derives from the ancient Greek
for “goat song”; and the goat (among other beasts) is associated
with Dionysius, arguably the central figure of tragic myth and drama.
Ken Babstock’s Mean immediately sets us on the tragic high-road,
the first poem, “Camping at Glendalough”, opening with
A goat-track, for hours, a gorse-edged trough
that fanned to a dusted bristle of heather.
The camper in this poem, having pitched a tent only to
“bad-mouth the long trek back”, nonetheless imagines
we’ll stay, push on, higher, west where
the haze of cirrus fades to a passport
black, star-stamped and shut, not just
expat but exhuman; gone hairy, sure footed,
at home with our funk, reading the cairns
of warm dung like prayers before lunch.
I wanted to say something then, just mouth
the option but an old law hung like a beard
in my head. Still unsure: theoretical physics
or high-flown Yeats verse, the thrust
of it was how conditions may
shift from bad toward worse.
The last three lines resound as a couplet because of
that internal rhyme, “verse”/”worse. That effect is heightened
because we’ve been rocked in and out of iambics (note the central 7th
line is regular iambic pentametre) by the force of “something”, of
“it”, - vision? -, but we’re kept just off-kilter enough by the
substitutions of feet (trochaic) to recall those sheer goat paths. The
metaphor in the 2nd to 3rd lines is great, wrenching two discourses
together: the image of the passport evokes the sophisticate and
political, immediately following which we’re handed a grotesque image
of studying shit. But what is that “old law”? What relationship
exists between “theoretical physics” and “high-flown Yeats verse”?
What is that “option”? Staying? Praying to shit? Becoming goatish,
Dionysian? I’m not sure, but the conviction of voice, the range of
diction and the intricacies of rhythm in this poem are triumphant.
“Mean” is divided into three parts, the titles of
which are also highly suggestive: “Means”, “Head Injury Card”
and “Measures”. The tragic tone and content of “Mean” is
central. I admit it is a fact of dubious merit, but I’ve actually
counted the deaths in the book: somewhere around 40. The preoccupation
with mortality is certainly not gratuitous nor merely symptomatic of a
young poet (for whom love and death are typical themes). For Babstock
has had, it seems, his own brush with death. While I think other poems
in the book are stronger, the pivotal sequence, “Head Injury Card”,
is a core text in “Mean”. (I would use the clichŽ “still centre”
or “touchstone” about the sequence, but these metaphors are too
ironically inappropriate considering the subject of head injury).
Indeed, the epigraph from Tomas Transtromer (translated by Robert Bly)
is a key expression of Babstock’s aesthetic and ethical goal and
achievement:
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I am in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
The immediate relevance of this credo is the entirely
original, haunting, charming, Siren-song lyrical mediations or records
of the six poems in “Head Injury Card”. Yet the credo - “to be
where I am... where creation works on itself“ - applies to Mean
as a whole. Being who you are, sounding your self, finding one’s
voice, identifying with one’s place, are truisms of the poet’s quest
for authenticity. And yet just how hard and how important this quest is,
is revealed by the huge energy and wide-eyedness of Babstock’s poetry:
language muscling toward vision. Singularity of language is, I think,
the most significant criterion of an important poet. In “Head Injury
Card”, Babstock pulls out the stops:
* Unusual drowsiness
As if some swell beyond, below the sea’s belt
had bone-chilled us, bale-wrapped and banded
our tongues. Sentenced to stillness, a columnar,
wet-hemlock church. A sharp creak sparrows out
from the shed... slack-drum thud from the shrubs...
It starts in. Pray for its passing
That first sentence - especially the second line - is
wonderful, weird stuff: Anglo-Saxon in its alliteration and rhythms,
even in its subject - “the swell below the sea’s belt” - and
diction (the hyphenated, noun + past participles) - “As if some swell
beyond, below the sea’s belt / had bone-chilled us, bale-wrapped and
banded / our tongues.”
“Head Injury Card” is the idiosyncratic,
experimental edge of Mean. Most of the poetry is free verse,
though Babstock occasionally employs more traditional forms: sonnet,
terza rime, quatrains (rhymed and unrhymed), tercets, couplets. Yet
while these are often consummate pieces, their genius is not formal or
structural, but linguistic, again. In many cases the line breaks and
layout of the lines on the page seem arbitrary, but unimportant given
the engaging language and rhythms. Form is a secondary concern; the
linguistic energy overwhelms the structure. I do not mean that Babstock
fails the form; rather, the particular form is primarily a vehicle, or a
form of allusion, merely (the unrhymed tercets are clearly an allusion
to Dante as opposed to a practise of the stanza).
As engaging as “The
Gate” is, for example, Babstock sounds a bit caged-in by the sonnet
structure here (it even seems to force awkward conjunctions and
development of metaphors of a garden gate and a bottle). Instructively,
the 24-line “Flea Market: A Love Story” is an ‘exploded’ sonnet
- which, I suspect, is a result of the poet’s unwillingness to rein in
the language and fix (in the sense of make firm) the metaphors. I
speculate that the poem was intended to be a sonnet (that love theme is
there, the sense of epiphany), but the story got the better of the
piece. The point is not that Babstock has mucked up a sonnet; rather
that he’s taken what’s useful for the poem at hand. And that economy
must always dictate formal decisions in poetry: otherwise a poet is
cheating the audience and him/herself by lying or being clichŽd.
“Crab” is rightly quoted on the flyleaf of Mean
as an example of the quality of verse in the book. The second stanza
epitomizes Babstock’s virtues and vision:
Stacked up in tide pools,
in tangled leg locks, they were
brittle old men, grotesques thrown ashore by the sea.
For hours I gawked at plasticky joints,
spotted, knobbed claws, and
wispy ferns at the mouth, how the sea’s lens made
the shells swell, shimmer ‘til
perspective was gone and their name
had washed up on my tongue - Dungeness, Dungeness.
The boy I was edged closer to them,
brine-spattered, waterlogged, less.
Note the energy of the awkward, staccato rhythm, the
alliteration, and the apt imagery of “For hours I gawked at plasticky
joints / spotted, knobbed claws...”. “Plasticky”, in its
awkwardness, is a great term for the tangled, clicking mass of upended
crabs’ legs. Notice too, the mouthful of internal rhymes: ‘“gawked”,
“spot”, “knobbed”, “claws”. The intense, compacted
alliteration and internal rhyme of “the shells swell, shimmer ‘til”,
with its four stresses in a line of six syllables (and that caesura),
almost tripping up the lips and tongue, is a brilliant stroke to
introduce the climax and shudder of the last four lines - an ABAB
quatrain - which leaves us, the readers, in the boy’s position. For
those last three adjectives seem to refer to the boy instead of the
crabs, as the grammar seems to indicate. We are not made master by the
Adamic moment of naming here; we are “lessened” by the overwhelming
otherness of the image, humbled by all that is not captured in names and
terms.
These humbling encounters with the natural world of
beast, bird and bush are important motifs in Mean. There are poems
on animals (dog, wolf and crow) and plant and mineral forms of life
(lichen and lava). Like those crabs, other aspects of nature leave the
poet - and therefore us - with more and less: more world, less
arrogance; more identity, less illusion. Like D. H. Lawrence, Babstock
seems to enter the very being of these non-human lives, but through
language instead of posture:
High meadow mind, I am
scree-slope, dreaming.
(“Wolf Tells”)
Stone-chip beak a bone-thorn
in the sun’s rib. Squinting, Crow
wags out of its ditch:
Bachelor. Ex-con. Slut.
(“Crow, for the Time Being”)
Oh, granite trying
to be snow, you sleepless, sleep-
proof, trod on and sniffed
at reverie -
Stretch.
(“To Lichen”)
Monstrous night, great wing of no
weight. These stars slotted in chinks
between dark and dark, sequestered,
numb, and undone in the racket of ever...
Tent flap. Plains breeze. Pre-sleep’s
a cattle guard my mind’s caught
its hoof in...
(“Montana Nocturne”)
Extraordinary, lyrical lines. (The character of the Crow recalls Ted Hughes, another poet preoccupied by the natural
world and myth; yet “Nass Valley Lava Field” with its opening line,
“The fox did not enter me -”, seems to allude to Hughes’s “Thought
Fox” only to differentiate the poets.)
In “Sawteeth”, “...a gerbil / was kept, fed, to
piss and quiver / under a stunned boy’s / gaze until it ran itself out
on the wheel”. What is “[run] out on the wheel”? the gerbil or the
gaze? Babstock’s syntax is again suggestively ambiguous: in either
case, the poet does not avoid raising discomforting questions about his
own vision.
This gaze recalls the gawk of “Crab”. As opposed
to intellectual, veiled “gazing”, “gawking” is honest, engaged
staring. “To gawk” is as active with moral sense as passive with
surprise and humility. A young poet with talent “gawks” at the
world, and it is this type of looking which helps us characterize the
poet and his world, as well as the ambivalence, even agon, of achieving
a poetic vision. In the portrait of the poet as a young man, “Notes
for His Big Novel”, the “main character’s fate”
is to saw off his days
in one of two ways: last match, unstruck,
dead-frozen, and whey-faced or racing
to outrun the tidal bore of himself
and always, always only
slightly outpaced.
“To be where [you are]”, to recall Transtromer’s
lines, is, as I mentioned not easy; but it is to be “where creation
works on itself”, and in “Notes” - as in “Head Injury Card” -
Babstock does not flinch from the implications of that truism of knowing
who he is - contradictory, in crisis - and how he is worked on; he does
not flinch from working on himself. At the end of “Mainland Boy in
Eastport”, a poem about the difficulties of reconciling urban and
rural views of the world, the mainland boy jigs a cod which has “the
awful, ageless grin / of a bottom-dweller in a dinosaur book”. Then,
At dinner,
squeaking his chair across lino,
a mainland boy fidgets while grace
is mumbled through, he’s sneering
at the choral amen, at these supplicants,
their decorum, having seen what he’d
raised from the bottom.
The sneer implies judgment and superiority; yet that
phrase “mainland boy” is pejorative (when used by an islander).
Babstock doesn’t skirt the issue of his divided heritage and his own
ambivalence. That is, as fully realized, proud, fierce, determined as
the poetic voice in “Mean is, it is equally humble; it is a position
won from an unpretentious engagement with the world. Thus these images -
almost Heaneyesque - of a gawking boy or adolescent in many poems, and
thus, too, the testaments of apprenticeship in poems like “The Gate”
and “Finishing”.
The unique content and perspective of Mean is a
result of a socio-cultural context which I find familiar, and which is a
welcome relative novelty in Canadian poetry (David O’Meara shares some
similar territory here, as does Purdy, to invoke past masters): the
perspective of an educated, working class poet whose sense of place or
home includes both country and city. (The poetry also deals honestly
with the inevitable violence of male adolescence). The at times near
schizophrenia of this experience, as in “Mainland Boy”, is, I
suspect, more common than is known or represented in Canadian
literature. But to use pathological metaphors exaggerates the tension;
one could also easily make the case that Babstock manages a more
transcendent view, or allows potential transcendence of the dichotomy, a
perspective which implies a larger vision of one at home everywhere and
nowhere, since ultimately a poet’s home is language and the structures
he or she creates there.
All of this, though, is really an effect of
concentrating on the immediate world - whatever it is - and the
linguistic struggle to not just represent but recreate that world: to
make it ‘mean’. Thus the significance of the title Mean: as an
adjective it evokes the self-consciousness of the poet - an attention to
one’s own vision and destiny, which others may find cold-hearted and
selfish -, as well as the notion of balance, average, efficacy. The
adjective also signifies poor, dispossessed, humble (ironically).
Finally “mean” is the verb, to intend. Ken Babstock means well for
poetry.
Geoffrey Cook
was once one of The Danforth Review's poetry editors. |