Permanent Carnival Time, Colin Smith
ARP Books, 2021
The Kootenay School of Writing was established following the closure of the David Thompson University Centre; it has existed since then as a loosely defined series of temporary affiliations. Smith’s work is often considered part of this evolving body of poetry, which seized on Language writing’s challenge to the lyric voice and often engages with the gap between the totality of the market and the speaking subject’s pretense to agency. It’s a convincing fusion of poetics and politics, but I’ve sometimes had difficulty grasping exactly what kind of there is there. The poems themselves range from familiar Language approaches and topics to free-ish verse that, however studded with Mad Libs, still signifies relatively straightforwardly. Critical writing on the poetry’s singular radicalism, meanwhile, sometimes seems to me to come up short. These readings often reach into the realm of the subjective: it’s not only disjunctive, but really, really disjunctive; it not only chooses words carefully, but registers the implications of those choices; it’s not just radical, but actually, in-real-life radical.
Permanent Carnival Time both encapsulates the quiddity of the KSW and stares directly into this nebulous indefinability. There’s an old-school working-class politics here, even if it’s subject to linguistic disruption. “Necessities for the Whole Hog,” for example, nudges analogy and sloganeering just past meaning when it says that “Governments and citizens have the same / thing in common as landlords and tenants / and bosses and workers / -- nothing” (8). It undermines sweeping political pronouncements, seizing instead on postmodernist concerns with nuance and incomparability. At the same time, the poems read like the work of a veteran mining his preferred vein, sheltered from subsequent trends that would mark the writing of a younger poet while maintaining a kind of disoriented irreverence. A few pages later, the lines
Imagine
what a little
Guaranteed Annual Income could do.
Herbal
tea
(plenitude).
(14)
throw snarky, consumerist critique together with a practical, even populist economic activism. Both sentiments seem somewhat removed from the types of activism usually explored in the literary arts, but they’re by no means problematizing the poetic speaker beyond recognition.
This dual commitment to vocalization and screw-around-with-it attitude exposes the wound-up, off-kilter core of KSW poetics, if a single such thing could be said to exist. Jason Wiens, in an astute 2017 article in Canadian Literature, throws some light on this dynamic. Wiens reads two versions of “Indolent Corollaries,” from Smith’s Multiple Poses (1997), writing that each engages with ubiquitous consumerism by employing discontinuity, defamiliarization, and disruption, and that while Smith’s iteration of KSW poetics may seem more “confessional,” it “remains a documentation of an ephemeral structure of feeling in our long neoliberal moment, rather than a confessional narrative” (81). Wiens’s is a careful reading, but this aspect of it might make one wonder what, exactly, separates a poem that is “a documentation of an ephemeral structure of feeling in our long neoliberal moment” from a magpie lyric poem expressing a set of feelings about our long neoliberal moment.
Perhaps the difference lies in how much of a KSW adherent one is. At any rate, the poems in Permanent Carnival Time make it somewhat more difficult to disentangle the two. Unlike some of Smith’s past work, his new book showcases an unfashionable, unfashionably grounded sense of self that smooths out the above engagement with what it even means to hold forth using the trope of the quotidian unfamiliarities of old age. “Corner Talk” twists up the vagaries of taste and consumer choice using cloying, complaining voices: “‘If their crap bread is almost the same price as / their artisanal stuff, we should get the latter’ / ‘Why don’t we stop buying bread?’” (46). The politicians, novels, and films that crop up throughout make for a mundane swath of contemporary culture. At a time when the conflation of work, leisure, and competitive consumption is just everyday life, and the idea of blending high and low culture is itself a middlebrow cliché, all these layers exist in Smith’s uncertain half-lyric in a way that recalls a time when they might have been more distinct.
There are expected Language touchstones, like swaths of medical terminology (in “Essaying Pain”) and the poems’ references to named artistic milieux (“Winnipeg’s public art is far less suckhole / than that of many other places. When Marbles on Portage / by Erica Swendrowski went out on Tuesday 31 July 2012…” [14]). But the voice at times surprises in spite of its aesthetic alignment, offering a reflective and self-deprecating picture of itself at a distance from that voice’s formation, like when “Necessities for the Whole Hog” reflects,
After the long throb of all
my years -- 62 -- my cultural and
political alliances are
still somehow attached to Asian workers
-- my long-ago and
home-like Vancouver spell -- even though
I grew up in a Southern
Ontario as white as any idiot’s idea of
Christianity, and stand now
-- well bent over with pain -- on
the Prairies. (28)
This kind of awkwardness and adulterated sincerity appears regularly, even in “Essaying Pain”:
“Feeling eternal, all this
/ pain is an illusion.” I would challenge
Reverend Maynard to drop in
at my place -- I’d serve us tea and
biscuits -- and haggle over
this concept, but I can hear darn
well from other Tool songs
that he knows acutely what pain is. (35)
It’s these clever twists in content that do the work as much as any formal features, let alone any commitment to an identifiable poetics. Perhaps the KSW gave us a ragged, sometimes compelling series of moments in which these strains intertwined into something principled and distinct. But Permanent Carnival Time shows whatever remains of that tradition dissolving further into the always-assimilating hybrid poetics of the present.
