John Foy : “Some Kids’ll Play Hockey on Any Ice”

 

from Report from the Brockwell Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

I met Stephen Brockwell when I was an undergraduate rube from the U.S. at McGill University in the early 1980s. Stephen was among a few young CEGEP poets from John Abbott College (including, if my memory is right, Neil Henden, Ben Soo, and Greg Lamontagne) brought along by their mentor, the notable poet Peter Van Toorn, to read for the English Department. When I first saw Stephen, I was impressed by one thing. He didn’t look like a poet. At that early age, one usually tried to look the look. But this did not apply to Stephen. No beret, no black turtleneck, no long hair. (I did have long hair.) His arm was in a sling and shoulder cast. He’d broken some bones, evidently, playing football for John Abbott College. His hair was cut short. He was clean-shaven. He had none of the affectations of the young, mewling, derivative, would-be poet. I don’t recall exactly what he read that evening, but I do remember that some of it was in an Anglo-Canadian dialect, and all of it was fresh, surprising, and unapologetically in-your-face. The poems felt like a direct engagement with life.

A year passed. Next I knew, I was sitting in a McGill creative writing class with Stephen. There he was again, without the sling and cast. Hair still short, no beret. Our instructor was Prof. Ron Reichertz (I hope I am spelling his name correctly). We all read our pomes, etc., etc. At one point, Stephen read a poem about a house in Montreal that was burning to the ground in the middle of a winter night. No dreamy Kubla Khan. The fire trucks came and got hooked up to the roadside hydrants and began pumping water maniacally to try to put out the flames. During these efforts, the hydrants were overflowing, spilling water across the street in the freezing night. By morning, when all the trucks were gone and the timbers of the house were smoldering, the entire street had been turned into a sheet of ice. Stephen’s poem took this into account, the destruction and the joyful contingency, as boys came out to skate on the street with pucks and sticks: “Some kids’ll play hockey on any ice.”

After 41 years, that line is still with me. Not a lot of poetry stays in the mind like that, especially a line written by an as yet unknown poet one barely knew. It captures what has always been the best in Stephen’s work, which is to say simplicity of expression deceptive in its colloquial ease. There are depths below the hard, clear surface. I could invoke ice, and cold, and therefore Canada. Maybe there is nothing wrong in that. I love ice, and cold, and Canada – Montreal in February! But this has more to do with the nature of poetry itself, regardless of country or latitude. His unadorned line points to the realm of Ethics and the land of Play, where the skater on any ice is the poet. Is this “Canadian Poetry?” It’s poetry, and the poet is Canadian. I believe that is the correct balance of considerations.

We became friends, and I remember walking through the snow with him down Hutchinson in the student ghetto as he talked to me about the virtues of Ben Jonson and the plain style. Neither of us had time for literary poseurs, who were as numerous and untalented then as they are now. We preferred to go to the Word Bookstore on Milton and listen to mad Artie Gold talk about sonnets and who the best poets were (I recall that Artie always included himself on that list; he is gone now, but his ashes are still kept at the Word Bookstore.). Stephen introduced me to the beautiful, outlandish, precision-obsessed poetry of Peter Van Toorn. Stephen was a protégé of Peter’s, and their mutual respect was apparent. I grew to admire the work of both poets.

Thanks to Facebook (it’s good for some things), I was able to reconnect with Stephen after many years. We were both down the road. We both had forged a life in the fresh air above the sunken bathysphere of academia. We both had made a lifelong commitment to writing poetry. We were both publishing books (he faster than I, alas), and we were both hosting poetry readings in our spheres of influence, in New York and Ottawa, to create communities. It turned out Stephen Brockwell and I still had a lot in common.

Once reconnected, we traded wares: a good tankard, a tight halyard, a sharp sword. I was happy to come into possession of some of the books he’d published since I knew him at McGill. These included: The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Poetry Series, 1988), The Cometology (ECW Press, 1999), Fruitfly Geographic (ECW Press, 2004), The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007), Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books (Mansfield Press, 2013), and All of Us Reticent, Here, Together (Mansfield Press, 2016).

Stephen still had the poise of an athlete, the mind of a scientist, and the tongue of a lunatic poet, seemingly derailed but actually on track. He was a ringmaster in the circus of phenomena, calling bright details into the circle of his coherence and giving them a better life.

To give you a taste of his work, I’d like to cite some favorite poems along with a list of poem titles from various books to indicate the changes he went through.

His early book The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Poetry Series, 1988) included mostly earnest nature poems, well-wrought and keen-eyed, indicating his relaxed and loving proximity to the natural world. Some tittles:

“Old Hay in a Barn”

“Black Angus”

“The Cats at the Back Door”

“Bobolink”

One of my favorites was “The Tiller,” driven by an iambic beat that dodges playfully around tetrameter and pentameter:

Here, under the maples, where I have choice
of sun or shade, the light comes through
in threads between the leaves, knitting patches
of shadow in the quilted grass.
When I step out to start the tiller up,
there’s only light meeting my eyes
and it takes nothing to see through it all:
I have a tiller for the earth,
a tool, a gardener’s sewing machine;
if I don’t weed between the rows,
there’s nothing in the light or earth that will.

Then we jump ahead a few books, and 19 years, to The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007). This is a book of meta-poems told mainly in the voices of other people. Some titles from this very different book:

“Mark Bradley’s Plasma TV”

“Untrained Machine Voice Recognition: Joanne”

“Mark Bradley’s Truck”

“Corporal Jensen’s Afghan Rug”

“Joanne’s Vibrator”

Here are the first few lines from a long, strange poem called “Dr. Plaza’s Idea”:

How did the Earth make
the spiders? How did
it make the children
who sleep in soft beds?
Think of the havoc
the spiders wreak on
the dreams of sleeping
children. Imagine,
without spiders,
the evolution of flies….

Then we have this poem, in its entirety:

Randomized Oxford Exploration 7

Under
the aegis
of envy
hectic faiths
pack tin mirrors
with sunlight strips.

And here’s one of the best poems in the book, for my money. It turns back to nature, but now it’s a dark, deceptively glib narrative in someone else’s voice about killing. Heartbreaking is the accurate description of the muskrat before it gets shot in the eye:

Bill McGillivray’s Pellet Gun

A forest shapes
itself when you’re away.
The path that was there
fifteen years ago
stops and starts at the
edge of the field now.
No one else would know
there was a path there.
I remember it
because I walked it
in my dad’s rubber boots
hunting muskrat
at the swamp’s edge
where you could hunker down
in the needle bed
under the boughs
and snipe them
with a pellet gun.
And I did. Out of the
swamp, shinning wet,
fur shedding water
as it sniffed the air,
it held its front paws
up like a dog playing.
I saw a splash of
blood out of its eye
but it sank back
into the swamp so fast
I’ll never know, and
I wasn’t about
to wade into the
swamp to fish it out.
No I didn’t have
nightmares over it.
Do bobcats have
nightmares over rabbits?
If you ask me to
say there was a thrill
to killing, I’d have to say
yes. Yes. Sure.

Six years later, Stephen publishes Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books (Mansfield Press, 2013). We are now a long way from “The Tiller.”

Some poem titles, to give you a flavor of this wild turn of a book:

“Glenda Explains Her Love of Smoking”

“Greg Come Clean About His Urges”

Both of those are part of a sequence called The Big Book of Confessions and Apologies by Self-Aware Addicted Persons.

One of my favorites in the book is “Folio 924-7B, July 20, 2033.” This is part of a sequence called The Archives of the Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance. It is a twisted portrait, perhaps, of the poet, spoken in an arch, ironic voice issuing from the abandoned and now haunted house of a sonnet (14 lines):

Dear Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance,
I no longer perform work of value.
I spend my days scavenging dumpsters
or stewing mice waiting for my end.
I use few resources—a little water
to wash, to brew tea and to cook.
A little gas for heat on the coldest days.
But could not even this give hope
to one young mother and her child?
I am truly an unselfish man.
There is no reason why you should
reject my application for God.
Surely the Ministry cannot be so cruel
as to force a broken old man to go on living.

Next we jump ahead three years to his most recent book, All of Us Reticent, Here, Together (Mansfield Press, 2016). Stephen moves out of the meta-mode and returns to a voice that is earnest and straightforward as he looks back on his family life and recalls his mother and father. Some titles include:

“Biography of Parents”

“Constructing an Addition on the Old House”

“Biography of My Father’s Last Breath”

“Biography of My Mother’s Ashes”

Here are two poems that have stayed with me:

Farewell With a Guitar

He drank at noon from a bottle
he would empty by sunset.

Let him strum a chord here,
in the living room, to close the evening.

Let the gravel in his throat,
more percussive than lyrical,

drone, out of tune and out of time,
his misremembering of an old folk song.

And here is “Coma” – again a voice issuing from the haunted shack of a sonnet (14 lines). It is wryly comic in its enumerations of where, locally, peace might be found, but the subtext is compassionate and sad:

When you wake from your coma, let there be
if not peace in the world, peace in the ward;
if not among all of us and our masters,
then peace among the nursing staff on the floor
at that moment, peace between orderlies
and nurses, between nurses and physicians,
peace, even, among emergency room
patients, paramedics and police, peace
between hospital administrators, who
smile broadly, porcelain caps sparkling.
Let there be babies nearby—I don’t care
if they cry—I would rather the babies
wail you out of your coma than angels
bugle your gleaming corpse to Paradise.

I hope these excerpts show the striking range of Stephen’s imagination. I’m tempted to use the phrase “Canadian Poet,” but that has always seemed to me a loaded term – a gun loaded with a blank. Stephen is a poet in Canada, a Canadian, who commands and deserves attention anywhere. I am richer for having known him and read his work.

Here are some photos of Stephen, Peter Van Toorn, me, and my wife (Majô Lanari-Foy) when we visited Montreal in August 2018. On that visit, Stephen and I made a pilgrimage to see Peter Van Toorn. He was much older, but as we talked he still smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and shots of whiskey went around. This was a few years before he died. The bar photos of Stephen, me, and my wife were taken at Reservoir, on the corner of rue Duluth and boulevard Saint-Laurent, in Montreal, August 19, 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Foy’s third book, No One Leaves the World Unhurt, won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published by Autumn House Press in 2021. It is available in standard book format and also as an audiobook (MP3 files). His second book, Night Vision, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize (St. Augustine’s Press, 2016). His poems have been included in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, The Raintown Review Anthology, and Rabbit Ears, an anthology of poems about TV. His work has appeared widely in journals and online. He lives in New York.