Northern Prospect: An Anthology of Northeastern Ontario Poetry
edited by Roger Nash
Your Scrivener Press, 1999
Reviewed by Dan Reve
Sprawling, politically-divided, geographically diverse countries always
get the term "regional" stuck in their throat, choking them on the notion
of their own culture. In his introduction, Roger Nash defends Northern
Prospects as follows:
Northeastern Ontario
is a large region... bursting at the seams with poetic activity... Yet
the region has been sadly under-represented by Ontario publishers,
who generally prefer the cost-effectively cosier route of publishing
poets from large urban areas in the south. This is a great loss to Canadian
poetry, since alternate voices go unheard, voices that often have something
importantly different to say from those more shaped by homogenizing trends in large centres... [O]ur economy... threaten a rich diversity
among poetic voices, that can safeguard vitality in a poetic tradition.
True, good poets can come from marginalized places, but marginalized
places don't have to breed them. The whole point of good poetry is how
it defies the biographical - including the geographical, or anything literal.
Northern Lights includes a few pages each by 14 poets (politely
half male, half female) whose only common denominator is geography (and
the English language).
There is, as Nash argues, a great diversity of voice in the anthology:
Lorraine Janzen's mixture of simple, direct concrete images of the actual
with visions and sudden scenes of cultural ritual in her "Discovery Poems",
discovering her Native American Indian heritage; Robert Dickson's listings
of items to be found in Sant Carles De La Rapita; David Barlett's folk
song "Railway" - of a passing age in Northeastern Ontario; Jennifer Broomhead's
ironically banal notes on serendipity, time and love in "The Bus Stop
Poems"; Tom Gerry's miniature epic lines on the Niagara River; Trevor Laalo's
passionate poverty; and Marianne Schafer's gay vocabulary of the Bay of
Islands. It is, generally, an informed, informal tour in a particular
area from perspectives few of us know.
In his introduction, Nash also identifies his criterion for good poetry,
which I will summarize: a spontaneous, sophisticated response to life
expressed in language which is metaphorically original and semantically
indirect yet efficient, and this language is structured in a formally
purposeful manner. We can all agree with these clichés of contemporary
poetic methodology (the insights and experiments of modernist poets watered
down through Creative Writing Programmes and tired high school teachers).
What really matters in poetry, however, is articulate vision; and we shouldn't
be afraid to demand this of our poets. If they do not have this quality,
they are not our poets and do not safeguard any tradition.
The popularized modernist method - the free verse tradition - intimated
in Nash's introduction is also evident in the dominant techniques of the
poets in the anthology. When recited, poetry's rhythm helps establish
syntactic units, dramatic pacing, pauses, phrasings and phrases of colloquial
speech. But traditional syntactic structures and punctuation do this as
well, often better.
Besides, on the page, free verse devoid of punctuation, capitalization,
and often wholly arbitrary in line breaks (somewhat better in stanza breaks
- those these only establish sentence, image or narrative units, not intricate
echoes and patterns and ironies and transcendences of rhyming stanzas),
free verse of the sort dominating the anthology, is cryptic. At worst,
the page clearly betrays the weaknesses (implied above) of the poems.
Clearly, the influence of popularized poetics is problematic: yes,
a nation of poets can be recognized; but what are the implications of
the requisite lowering of aesthetic standards, and in the long one, moral
and intellectual ones? There's something of the naive political agenda
about the collection: you can't help wondering about the wholly arbitrary
nature of this product, the scent of political correctness, whether a
marketing
ploy (if not a whole aesthetic and education) has replaced discrimination
in projects like these.
The overall impression of Northern Prospects is a
catalogue
of the images of a region: images both literal (there are many lists of
things in the book) and created. And that diversity of voice: 3
moderately-lengthened
poems, certainly 6 will let you hear a voice - it's timbres and pitches;
it's originality and potential. Readers are encouraged to sample the anthology
for themselves, since reading is so much a private affair. W.H. Auden
haikued: "A poet's hope: to be / like some valley cheese,/ local but prized
elsewhere."
A reader can take hope in Julie Cameron: hers is the most distinctive
talent in the collection. I have space to quote only one of her shorter
pieces:
Paris, when it's naked
(p65)
half a block away
a moth confesses
to a single naked bulb
like a mythmaking angel
staggering to the oracle again
i tell it i don't know you
as sleeves touch and we cross over
through a puddle
and a foreign light
it's not cold but i'm getting there
and you
dazzled by every curiosity shop
and smoke-filled bar
on our way back to
some distant room
where we might have met before
and i am mesmerized by
the light and rain coupling
on the pavement
a beautiful woman passes
and i could swear to her
that i never knew you
your arm suddenly surrounds me
a reckless taxi passes
the vacant witness
to an unhurried kiss
sheltered by the singed wing
burning on the altar.
Dan
Reve was once a lumberjack, but he ain't no more. He's still okay.
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