Nightwood Editions launched a trio
of new poetry books in Vancouver tonight, with readings to a packed house at
the Western Front. Publisher Silas White
introduced Jay MillAr –
himself a poetry publisher, helming Book
Thug in Toronto – as one of the country’s underappreciated talents. MillAr
set up half a dozen poems from Timely
Irreverence by noting jokingly he’d seen a Green Day concert a few days ago and had
now found a proper punk-inspired stance for reading poetry.
 |
| You can still see a little of the Green Day-inspired stance here. |
MillAr's writing
foregrounds a wry self-awareness: most of the poems thematize themselves as poems, as avowedly contingent verbal artifacts (as in the title poem: "I'm tinkering with these lines . . ."). Another preoccupation in his work seems to be with collisions
of representation and violence, as in “More Trouble with the Obvious," where in a kind of dark comedy of innocence he describes how “kids”
turn found objects into imaginary guns, which still – as mundane alchemies, blurring
creativity into threat – have the
potential to “blow you away.”
Elizabeth Bachinsky’s poems from
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
have a lighter touch, but draw on a similarly intensive, if playful
self-consciousness, setting formal detachment and poetic “craft” (“Eliot was right, it’s useless to describe a
feeling”) against confessions of personal investment, of getting her feelings
hurt:
To
dislike this poem, to dislike me.
[.
. .]
Astonishing.
Poets like this word.
I like this word. I’ll use it again.
Astonishing!
How
could you not like me? Not like this thing?
She reminds me at times of Colleen Thibaudeau, with her fearless attachment to expressive particulars and to the
pleasures of major-keyed melodic diction. As with her other books, Bachinsky’s
range of forms (from villanelle to sonnet) is impressive; her reading of the
mono-rhymed “Nails” was a highlight (check it out, get the book).
Brad Cran read a set of four poems dedicated
to Gillian Jerome. These, too, are personal pieces, but very different in tone
from Bachinsky’s. Some of the pieces in Ink
on Paper have developed into what Cran has characterized as
essay-poems: long-lined, longer texts that combine a narrative plainness (“It
was days before Halloween . . .”) with almost journalistic descriptions of
personal history and contemporary politics, like open letters, cut through with
occasional moments of melopoeic density: “Fear beat in our chests like second
hearts.” These are poems designed to communicate, without pretense or
highfalutin obscurity: civic poems. Moving and provocative, they work so well
when read aloud.
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