Pearl Pirie : The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky, by Amy Dennis

The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky, Amy Dennis
Mansfield Press, 2022

 

 

 

How to comprehend another mind so that is fascinated with gore so that their choices make sense? Dennis’ answer is research as in companies do with 360 evaluation of what peers, self fans and mentors said. Consider at length yourself. The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky is researched in depth and long considered in order to get inside the head of a painter. Gorky is less famous than some of the period. He did simultaneously abstract, realistic and surrealist art.

Dennis has a PhD in ekphrastic poetry. This is an ekphrasis of Arshile Gorky’s paintings, most painted in the 1940s while he ran with fellow artists Breton and Marquis de Sade.

He was a problematic human, I gather. He had a habit of beating girlfriends. He was a cultural by-product of Armenian genocide of death marches into the desert including his parents, a period when about a million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman empire. This is 30 years before the paintings were made. His paintings were made during the rise of Nazism.

He lived as a precarious existence before his suicide as a full time artist and as a man hunted, moving under pseudonyms and fictional backstories, or as Dennis put it, “you never aligned with the recognizable—still hiding/what you loved from the Turks” (p.64)

The modality of the collection is to try to understand another person from the inside, a peace-making act. In the last several poems Dennis explores how and when his painting make her make sense of herself, such as in times of breakup, car crash and miscarriage. From those griefs she can deduce his head space. From his head space she can see a manifestation of her own. From their combined visions, we get a scope of ways of being human.

Ekphrastic poetry isn’t my usual preferred reading because many texts rely on knowing the art, or about painting or about art history. As a result, in these poems, there is a certain amount of skim as I’m not the ideal reader, not having mental tags for cadmium or de Chirico. But the text is a springboard for learning. And there so many enviable lines— “a mystery like his/aches when it is almost/recognized” (p.59) or “the complexities/of your fauna confronting loss” (p. 64.) or “in the dark hallways of your arms” (p.88). Gorgeous.

Some books have end notes that are must reads. The end notes in The Sleep Orchard are fascinating. The poet, to find Gorky’s driving force, researched from Hayden Herrera’s biography of Gorky, from letters, from a film and from gallery catalogues.

How to understand a man with so much pain inside, who danced with ugliness, who was a dimmer, bruised smashed version of Cezanne or Matisse searching to “hit/the limits of who he is.” (p.30)

The portrait of his wife Mougouch is interesting. Dennis reveals her as sympathetic character and partner, not a trapped victim. This comes not from imagination but Mougouch's eyes wide open letters. “[A]s calamities go it had its exhilarating side.” (p.62) A mix of stoic to abuse and hedonist to embrace all that is, she knew who she was getting involved with, in daily and in the potential, a prophet artist. (p. 53)

“Living with you
was the closest I’ve come
to prayer”

The wife and the artist are analogues to a person and a disorder. Indivisibly tied yet separate with a needs for settlement and boundary between them.

There are some gorgeous lines in The Sleep Orchard as Dennis finds the beauty in his voluptuous decay of surrealist still lifes. For example, “her mouth spilled finches shaped with soot.” Or look at the assonance here: “Eyebright, too white, my love/for trilliums”(p.58) as she parses the fertility of his contemplation of what is ephemeral and passing. These are from a poem entitled “Ambiguous space, seemingly random angles” where “Nettles that grow over buried bodies reach a foot higher/than they would elsewhere.” The latter is a quote she pushed forward, rather than coined, but writing is curation as much as creation and contemplation.

 

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie lives in Quebec and in hope of placing poems where the readers who need them find them. www.pearlpirie.com

rob mclennan : Immune To The Sacred, by Stephen Brockwell

Immune To The Sacred, Stephen Brockwell
Mansfield Press, 2022

 

 

 

The latest from Ottawa poet and editor Stephen Brockwell is the full-length Immune To The Sacred (Mansfield Press, 2022), his seventh full-length poetry collection overall, following The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Poetry Series, 1988), Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), Fruitfly Geographic (ECW Press, 2004), The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007), Complete Surprising Fragments of Impossible Books (Mansfield Press, 2013) and All of Us, Reticent, Here, Together (Mansfield Press, 2016), as well as numerous chapbooks. Composed as contained bursts of passionate deduction, Brockwell’s lyric theses offer a scientific approach, one that seeks out the promise of pure facts, yet hold a high regard for the possibility of wonder. “Look,” he writes, to open the poem “MIRACLES OF THE SACRED REPLACEMENTS,” “my terrier puppy bears wings. / Each morning, my tabby sings arias for kibble.” His is a lyric simultaneously aware of both the lyric complexities and possibilities of corporate-speak, and how, as his late mentor, the poet Peter Van Toorn once wrote (Brockwell offers a dedication to Van Toorn at the end of the book’s acknowledgments), “you can smell the poem in a thing for miles.” Despite this, Brockwell’s lyric holds a discomfort, one fully self-aware, as though he ponders this unique placement and perspective, with a foot each in two worlds of perceived separate thinking, each of which consider the other utterly foreign. Instead, through Brockwell, the two sides appear intricately connected: if one is to think through language, after all, there will always be an opening into and through poetry. As he writes to open the poem “CEILING”:

For corporate folk with experience
it was like a call on a bond that had maxed,
or, for yokels you aren’t familiar with such parlance,
a doghouse ceiling for the dog that won’t hunt,

or, maybe, the inside top of a can of beans
that a living thing briefly tried to leave.

His attempts at folksy parlance don’t necessarily present themselves with the ease of tone required, but there’s a way Brockwell offers a directness that turns expectation slightly askew, almost a way of turning a line into or away from the light, allowing poems to sparkle, seemingly suddenly, and out of the blue. “If you think the clouds are water,” he offers, to open the poem “INCOMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF CLOUDS,” “it’s been too long since you / sprawled on the summer grass // and called to them, as you watched / seagulls fly under their beards— / or sun-cloud skirts if you prefer.” Through Immune To The Sacred, as with much of his prior work, his is an unironic earnestness, something his work shares with the late Kingston, Ontario poet Steven Heighton, or Houston, Texas-based poet Hayan Charara, offering genuine empathy amid his ongoing study of human effects and natural beauty, even as he plays with and against such expectation. “No ice cream on this planet,” the poem “NO SOLICITING” ends, “is as delicious as privacy.”

Whereas his prior few collections leaned further into explorations of voice and character, Immune To The Sacred leans into a kind of observational wonder paired with humanity’s increasing amplitude toward self-destruction, offering poems composed around investigation and response, anxiety and grief, while ever seeking to find a light through the dark that might otherwise be missed. As he writes to end the poem “VINTNER IN SPRINGTIME,” offering a description of clay cups and the farming of grapes, and the intimate purity of working with one’s hands: “Soiled human hands / make beautiful things.” His is a carved and considered beauty, one often sparked through the ability to remain open to new ways of thinking, seeing and observing.

Through Immune To The Sacred, Brockwell’s poems have shifted from one seeking to articulate the artifice, as well as the shaped perceptions, of cultural and intellectual constructions, into a lyric engaged with attempting to get, finally, at and into the root of a lived engagement with the world as it is. To open the poem “WHY YOU CAN’T HAVE BEAUTIFUL THINGS,” he offers: “Here is a beautiful thing: a cuttlefish tattoos itself the mottle / sepia of the reef. // Here is a beautiful thing: the tardigrade clambers up a / ladder of algae.” As he spoke of the project, then still in-progress, in a recent interview at Touch the Donkey:

Maybe one more thing. I find it dispiriting (I am overusing that word these days) that we—many of the members of our species—are immune to certain sacred, essential things (the bodies and spirits of others, this delicate planet) and simultaneously too easily infected by ideas and beliefs our culture makes sacred: evangelical faith and the faith in human instrumental reason. That’s the orbit the book has gravitated into.

The deceptive straightforwardness of his lyric belies an awareness itself of its own construction, as Brockwell offers his thoughts on border crossings, trees and social media, the work of Cobourg poet Stuart Ross and even declassified nuclear tests. Set as a thread through the collection, this new work includes eight poems in his “STILL FROM DECLASSIFIED NUCLEAR TEST FILM” series, connecting this collection to concerns around human-prompted ecological disaster he offered through his chapbook Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films (above/ground press, 2014), the poems from which subsequently appeared into the collection prior to this current volume, All of Us, Reticent, Here, Together. “And of the trees, / what survives?” he asks, to close out “STILL FROM DECLASSIFIED NUCLEAR TEST FILM: / LET’S FACE IT,” “Matchsticks can’t make / survival / as beautiful as a sunset. // There are no creams / for alpha particles.” He writes on nuclear tests and migrant children, commenting on social justice and the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that rolled into downtown Ottawa earlier this year, mere blocks away from his front door, attempting to hold on to the beauty of small moments despite the brutality of self-deluded human self-destruction. “Tell me,” he writes, to close the poem “LASER SCANNING PSALM,” “before I drink myself to death, if the sky is falling.” And yet, throughout Brockwell’s clear view of the world as it currently stands, it would be difficult to not see this collection as an optimistic one, offering the contemporary state of the world through a Schrödinger’s perspective: simultaneously alive and dead, until the possibility of the open door.

SCHRÖDINGER PSALM

O bosons, fermions, and quantum fields
that brought into being this habitable world
by chance—help me understand the loaded die
of high finance our landlords cooked up
by design to cheat your inexorable chaos.
Those who turn improbability into profit thrive.
Help me thrive. Deal me an ace after this jack-
shit so I can pay my taxes and my daughter’s tuition.
Lock our cats out of Schrödinger’s box in a single state
of purring ecstasy so their fur may comfort me
when my daily coin toss lands spinning on its edge.
Give these felines, incapable of evil,
independent trials of mercy at your craps table
of chaotic cellular division. Let me suffer for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He is is currently pushing to complete (or at least further) a novel this summer (as his household allows). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

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.