The last lines of “Cornage” –
the sixteen-part sequence of carefully-turned triple quatrains with which Carmine Starnino
closes his 2000 collection Credo –
frame the cultural work of a poem as an act of salvage, rag-picking language
for splashes of unexpected colour (he has just rediscovered the resonances of
the word “vermeil”):
Even this poem is one more example
of
the usefulness in scavenging through
the
day’s refuse, saving anything of value.
Starnino’s characteristic
line, often an artfully balanced pentameter or (as if to register a little
Gallic influence) hexameter, suggests at this point in the sequence a posture
of measured resignation. The task he sets for himself isn’t so much to “purify
the dialect of the tribe” (as T. S. Eliot once parsed and repurposed Mallarmé),
although he might still aspire to breed lilacs out of a nearly dead land, a
poetic labour that involves recovery more than rescue – to reanimate what he
perceives, even in himself, as contemporary staleness with a mix of archival and
ethnopoetic rummaging. The poet doesn’t so much conserve as curate, mindfully
intervening in whatever lexical felicities cross his attention by unpacking
etymologies and re-stitching phonemic meshes. (In part five, he lists the “[w]ords
I’d like to get into a poem: eagle-stone, ezel, / cornage, buckram, scrynne,
waes hail, sillyebubbe,” and proceeds to write poems that use most of them.)
The idea is to “smuggle in / this fox-fire,” an audible and tangible vitality
he feels missing from poetry. But the vatic intensity he craves is often either
contained or held at bay in these poems by cautious and even anxious craft, a
technical command I have to confess is also what I admire most in Starnino’s
writing. He can be affronting – “gnarled turds” is quite a phrase – but it’s
not shock that works best in these poems so much as their gently nuanced fabric
of echoes and hums; notice above, for instance, how “usefulness” morphs and
reduces into “refuse” or “scavenging” into “saving,” or how liquids and vowels
from both words fuse in “value.” These words don’t so much flare up as entwine
and accrete. I can call that meshwork anxious because I’m taking a cue from
Starnino’s “Credo,” which remarks almost as an article of faith “the fear with
which / a poem caskets away everything it wants to rescue.” Cultural and poetic
rescue, as I said, seems closer here to recovery, a salvage rather than a
saving.
What is it, then, that these poems do? What’s their
function, their “usefulness,” in a contemporary cultural context, a Canadian
context (if that’s not too much to demand of them)? Starnino already takes up
the procedural challenge at the outset of “Cornage,” where he casts his ear
back to a patriarchal medieval world to explain his reasons – as a poetics, in
fact – for his choice of title:
Cornage
was the duty of every tenant
To
alert his distant master of approaching invaders.
I
have thereby stationed this poem on a tout-hill, where,
In
time of danger, it will blow a horn as warning.
He offers the recovered word
as a moment of civic engagement, as cultural “duty”; more than that, the poem
comes to act as a warning, as a ward – as portent, as monster (check the
etymology, the Latin monstrum). But
what exactly is the danger the poem confronts? A linguistic entropy? A verbal
decrepitude? A lack of monumentality or durability, of poetic heft? I hear the
problem Starnino wants to address, and I hear his trepidation. But I’m not sure
how ultimately dire, even to a poet, this situation might be. And I am not sure
that building a poetic casket out of that fear is the best way to go here.
I’m looking back on these poems because I have been reading
“An
Interview with Carmine Starnino” from the most recent issue of CV2. Writing poetry, he says,
is a
critical as well as creative act, and value judgements are part of any good
poet’s skill-set. Just as a literary culture is the sum of all our actions, a
good poem is the sum of ruthless decisions toward every word in a draft.
In the unflinching
self-awareness of the poems in Credo,
most of them written a good fifteen years ago, I hear prefigured this interlace
of critical and poetic sensibilities. I admire an editorial ruthlessness in
composition, evident in the deliberateness of Starnino’s formalism. But I have
to say that I don’t accept his over-simplification of aesthetic value judgment,
as if there were merely right and wrong, soft and hard choices to be made. (And
frankly, I don’t think the best of his poems accept this over-simplification
either; they’re much better than that.) Starnino sees a risk, even danger, in
critical candour, and he defends his cohort of poet-critics – he mentions
Michael Lista and Jason
Guriel, among others – as deserving “our respectful attention,” which they
do. But I’m not sure that candour – as opposed to acuity, perhaps – is what’s
especially missing in recent poetry and recent reviews, Canadian or otherwise:
the rigour of poetic attention has always been a sticking point for committed
readers of poetry. The issue for me has to be not whether a poet pays attention,
but defining the nature and practice of that attention, of that respect. Saving “anything of value” needs to be made
precise, carefully, and the diffuseness of that “anything” replaced with a
materially substantive sense of what such value might be, and especially of
what cultural and linguistic apparatus is producing that sense of value, of
values. To this end, the poet’s task, it seems to me, doesn’t need to devolve
into a parochial cosmopolitianism – ferreting out “the best” of what is thought
and said in Canada and pushing it onto a fictional world stage – nor into a
diffusely Canadian cultural nationalism, so much as to situate and to address,
rigorously, the audible and tangible mediations between self and world that a
poem – a good poem – wants to gather.
No comments:
Post a Comment