Words and Music

I’ve been roaming through this old anthology, published in the 1920s and entitled, with great simplicity, The Canadian Poetry Book. Without even looking at the preface or the endnotes you can tell it’s a school text. The names of Doris Morgan and her sisters from Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan are written on the cover and flyleaf. One of them, clearly bored stiff, wrote her name several times and copied out all the information on the title page. Inside, you can tell exactly which poems the girls studied by the notes written on them in turquoise ink.

This poetry is from the 19th and early 20th centuries— fairly old in terms of Canadian literature. The poets represented here have largely gone out of fashion, and some, I suspect, have been pretty well forgotten. Canadians who went to school in the 1940s and ’50s, maybe even into the ’70s, will know Bliss Carman, William Henry Drummond, E. Pauline Johnson, and Archibald Lampman, but does anyone study them now? And how many today know the names Ethelwyn Wetherald or John Hunter-Duvar?

Anthologies can be a mixed bag, of course. Not every poem in this book is a gem (there’s an especially forgettable piece on the death of Sir John A. Macdonald). But there are some real treasures here, among them Johnson’s haunting  “The Legend of Qu’Appelle Valley,”  and Lampman’s “Heat” which conveys, with its alliteration and slow-swinging rhythm, the sleepiness of a summer afternoon. Until now I’d read very little of these poets— aside from Johnson’s “The Song my Paddle Sings,” which almost everyone reads— but having found their work here, I want to read more.

So many autumn poems are melancholy. Granted, some autumn days are conducive to melancholy: dull, damp and grey. Dry leaves turn to wet brown muck in the streets and you retreat inside with thoughts of blankets and hot drinks.

Fall is equated, understandably, with old age and fading beauty. It’s linked with decay, death and loss. Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ “Summer and Fall” follows that pattern with lines like these: “Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” It seems to liken autumn to the loss of childhood, the loss of a former self, as it ends: “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.” And W.H. Auden has this pair of lines in “Canzone”: “Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:/ Bald melancholia minces through the world.”

Gloomy stuff. But then there’s this one, from an old children’s anthology:

I like the fall,

The mist and all…

I like the gray

November day,

And bare, dead boughs

That coldly sway

Against my pane.

I like the rain. (”The Mist and All” by Dixie Willson)

Which reminds me of my son a couple of weeks ago when I was complaining about the persistent rain: “What’s wrong with the weather?” Read the rest of this entry »

I just re-read  My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell for at least the fifth time. It’s an account of the time his family spent on the Greek island of Corfu when he was a boy. My husband and I both enjoy this book, but have discovered that we can’t read it at bedtime, at least not when one of us is trying to sleep, because the one reading will keep the other awake with laughter.

I often find, with favorite books, that I notice different things each time I read them. What struck me this time around was how much careful observation there is in Durrell’s stories. Here is someone who was insatiably curious about the world around him, and was willing to spend a great deal of time just looking at things— geckos on his bedroom ceiling, trapdoor spiders, or scorpions in the garden wall. 

His curiosity was rewarded with some fascinating sights. There was the epic battle in his bedroom between a small gecko and a large praying mantis, the slow-motion mating rituals of turtles, and the sight of a giant toad stuffing an earthworm in its mouth.

I’ve had experiences like that, too, but not nearly as many as the young Durrell. The thing is, you have to get outside— that’s the easy part— and then you have to sit still.

I recently saw an exhibit of work by Joe Fafard at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (the day before it ended, naturally). It was truly delightful, and I wondered what it is that makes his work so attractive. It might be a romantic thing city-dwellers have for farm animals, but then again, there’s nothing romanticized about his cows and horses. Even when they are stylized, they are never made to look unnaturally cute or pretty— unlike the ducks that seemed to be everywhere on kitchenware and ceramics in the ’80s. I heard someone say that anyone who’s ever been acquainted with real live ducks would not find them all that cute.

Fafard’s animals are characters, that’s what they are. Whether they are smaller or larger than life-size, flattened cutouts or three-dimensional, they are not generic; they are definite characters.

The same is true of his ceramic figures of people. They are much smaller than most of his animal sculptures and, except for oversized hands, quite lifelike. My husband looked at a figure called “King,” of a man in a baseball cap and work boots lounging in a chair, and said, “That one must have been a real character.” 

Here is a video of Fafard talking about this exhibit (which was at the McMichael Gallery last summer) and about his work in general. And here is a link to his web site, with loads of pictures.

This spring, for some reason, I’ve been noticing birds more than ever before. Their sounds, their colors, their omnipresence. And that reminded me of Barbara Reid’s lovely illustrations for the children’s book, Have You Seen Birds? It’s worth a look even if you don’t have a child to read it with. Reid’s Plasticine illustrations are expressive, detailed and colorful. It’s the kind of book that can make you aware of things around you that tend to go unnoticed.

In the same vein, I also recommend Saskatchewan Birds by Alan Smith. I discovered this beautifully illustrated book, and many of the birds described in it, while attending the Sage Hill Writing Experience last May. As a city-dweller, I tended to notice the obvious birds— sparrows, robins, the ubiquitous Canada geese— while remaining oblivious to the thrushes, warblers and nuthatches. This book showed me that

1. Sparrows are more varied— and unexpectedly beautiful— than I realized 
2. In movies, the cry of a red-tailed hawk is often paired with the image of an eagle, because eagles do not have impressive voices
3. There really is such a thing as a coot

A couple of months ago, to mark World Poetry Day, I went to hear Don Domanski give a reading and interview. He had strong opinions about why so few people read poetry these days (more about that in another post), and also had some things to say about writing poetry. It’s important, he said, to get outside oneself, to put yourself in the position of another – whether that’s another person, an animal, or a tree. 

This reminded me of the words of David Milne, the Canadian painter who lived from 1882 to 1953. An exhibit of his work at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992 had quotations from his letters and other writings on the wall next to the paintings. “Art is love,” he said. Not love of anything or anyone in particular; “[i]t is just love, love without an object, a spilling of the oil of love.” He also said: “The thing is that while I write or paint with one hand I have to have someone— nature mostly— hold the other.”

I think this is some of what Domanski is getting at in reference to poetry, although he used the words “compassion” and “mindfulness.” But for both Milne and Domanski the point is that art-making has to involve a movement outward from oneself. Self-absorption is deadly; artists ultimately have to get outside their own heads if they’re going to have anything interesting to say. Strong feelings in themselves don’t make for good art.

The assumption implicit here is that poetry, and art in general, is about something other than itself. That’s certainly my own approach to poetry, but there are movements in poetry that treat language in abstract ways. Yet I think that even this kind of poetry requires getting outside one’s own head. The poet has to begin with a love for language and a willingness to listen. 

You can read a poem by Don Domanski here, and a CBC Radio interview here.

See some of David Milne’s work here.

Spring is about surprise. Spring happens every year, and yet it’s possible to be amazed over and over at what the season brings with it: the smell of damp earth; shoots emerging from the ground; birds returning. I’ve been reading some poems that express the exuberance of spring wonderfully.

e.e. cummings was very good at exuberance, and wrote several spring poems. A bookstore in my neighborhood had one posted in the window: “in Just-/ spring     when the world is mud-/ luscious the little/ lame balloonman// whistles     far     and wee…” The line near the middle, “when the world is puddle-wonderful,” reminds me of my son, who views puddles (as I did, at his age) as things to be enjoyed, not avoided. (Full text of the poem here.)

In “Québec May” by Earle Birney you can sense both the energy of growing things and people’s revived spirits: “Now the snow is vanished clean/ Bo’jour, Pierre, ça va?/ skyward point the cedar billows/ birches pinken    poplars green/ magenta runs the sumach tine/ pouring down the hills like wine/ Yellow catkins on the willows/ yellow calico on line/ ‘Allo, Marie, ça va? ”

Of course, people have been writing poems about spring for centuries. One of the few bits of poetry I remember from a class in Middle English literature is the opening of this lyric: “Lenten is come with love to toune,/ With blosmen and with briddes roune,/ That all this blisse bringeth.” Unfortunately, all this bliss contrasts with the speaker’s unhappy love life, but there’s still a lot about the beauty of birds and flowers here.

And there’s the most famous of Middle English lyrics: “Sumer is icumen in,/ Lhude sing, cuccu!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, cuccu!” The rhythm skips merrily along, like the lambs and calves in the second stanza. (Hear a music video of this here.)

And finally, there is A.E. Housman’s “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…”, in which the speaker thinks about how many years he may have left to live, and concludes: “And since to look at things in bloom/ Fifty springs are little room,/ About the woodlands I will go/ To see the cherry hung with snow.” 

Spring has sprung. Carpe diem.

I enjoy modern art, with its profusion of styles and techniques. Some abstract art is a bit of a stretch, like monochrome painting, but other works are fascinating plays of color, texture, line and movement.

Then again, some art is simply irritating. Well, to be more accurate, what’s irritating are the descriptions attached to works of art in gallery exhibits. It makes sense to have some commentary on an exhibit, since a lot of contemporary art is baffling to a lot of people, and it’s useful to get a hint of what to look for in a work. At the same time, I often find that it’s more helpful to view a work without reading the accompanying commentary. If, for instance, I’m looking at an object that appears to be a blotchy mirror and then read that I am supposed to glean some elaborate sociological meaning from it, it’s more than likely that I’ll stare at the object for a minute or two and then say, “Nope. I don’t see it.”

Dan Siedell, in an interview with Image magazine, says that looking at art “is not about receiving a meaning that the artist intended. The artist isn’t intent on ‘communicating’ with me some idea that he or she is wrapping up in paint that I then need to unwrap.” A work of art, he says, is not so much an essay as a poem. I find this a helpful way of thinking about art. And maybe what I’m really irritated with is the sense that at times I’m being told what I ought to see — that some artists or gallery curators do see art as an essay.

But that’s still not quite it. Sometimes art-as-essay does work. For instance, last year the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina showed works by Kent Monkman, including a silent film that uses role reversal to question the idea of history, and whose history is authoritative. It works because it addresses a fairly straightforward question, and while not subtle, it is clever satire executed with skill and flair.

On the other hand, there’s that blotchy mirror. This is an extreme example from an exhibit called Let Me Be Your Mirror, also shown at the MacKenzie Gallery last year. According to the description, in this exhibit “the viewer’s position before mirrors, both real and represented, is placed in question as part of a larger inquiry into social structures that govern desire and its production.” Looking at the works in this exhibit may well raise questions about images, how we see ourselves and what is real, you would not get to the level of interpretation in the description without reading the piece, and furthermore, knowing something of the theory behind it. On the whole, the exhibit did not seem able to bear the weight of the complex meanings attributed to it.

Or, in English, matters of taste are not to be disputed. Or, to stretch the concept a little, there’s no arguing with tradition. I’m thinking of how we often a strong pull toward things we’ve grown up with, regardless of how our beliefs, tastes or critical faculties have changed over time. This is expressed beautifully and hilariously in the song Zen Gospel Singing by Mark Graham (recorded by Bryan Bowers). In it the singer tells how, despite having left the church become a Buddhist, he misses the four-part hymn singing. He doesn’t believe in that sin-and-salvation stuff any more, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to get his Buddhist friends to sing more than one note at a time.

I had to laugh when I heard this song, because it reminded me of the Christmas songs we used to sing at family gatherings years ago. Some of them are truly lovely; others can be either lovely or drippily sentimental, depending on the day; still others are just not very good (sorry, Mom). Bells are mentioned frequently, as in “Süsser die Glocken nie klingen” (”Sweeter the bells never ring”), “Hört Ihr nicht die Weihnachtsglocken” (”Don’t you hear the Christmas bells”), or “Kling, Glöckchen, kling” (”Ring, little bells, ring”). Christmas trees come up fairly often, too, as in one of my favorites, “Welchen Jubel, welche Freude” (”What rejoicing, what delight”). I sang all these, and loved them, long before I understood the words.

But for a certain subset of Russian Mennonites from the prairies (my extended family included), the crown jewel of Christmas music was “Der Friedensfürst” (”The Prince of Peace”). It’s different from the others: not a hymn or carol, but a choral piece probably written around the turn of the 20th century. It’s composed of several short sections, with each pair of lines in the text having a different musical setting. It sounds like it was written in the popular-song style of the day. Once, at a carol-singing evening at the church we attended in Toronto, someone brought out copies of Der Friedensfürst” and we sang it. Those of us who knew the piece were thrilled; those who were new to it didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

To this day I am not sure if it’s a good piece of music, objectively speaking. But that’s not the point. The point is that we used to sing it every Christmas, and now we don’t. And if, at some Christmas gathering, someone were to pull out a copy of the music, and if there were at least two other people in the room who knew it, I’d sing it. With feeling.

While poetry books may not sell a lot of copies, people do still connect with poetry. U.S. poet Robert Pinsky, during his term as poet laureate, set up the Favorite Poem Project. 18,000 people sent in submissions. Fifty of them appear in videos on the project’s web site, reading their favorite poems and talking about how those poems connect with their lives– all kinds of people, reading a wide variety of poems. One young man from Boston reads “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and says, “It just made so much sense. It was like telling my story.” A woman reads “The Sentence” by Anna Akhmatova and tells how it precisely describes what happened to her brother in the Vietnam war. These are moving stories.