Michael Turner : Tribute

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

 

 

I was saddened to hear of Barry’s passing. He was good fun and a great poet. Barry had invited me to visit with his students in Prince George on a couple of occasions, which I enjoyed because they were conversant in a number of literary conversations, while patiently waiting to align with their own. Prince George was also where I met Barry’s brother-in-[college administrative]-arms John Harris, whose Small Rain (1988) I love as much as I love Barry’s “making landscape/ of self” Pulp Log.

 It was Pulp Log (Caitlin), John Pass’s The Hour’s Acropolis (Harbour) and my first book, Company Town (Arsenal Pulp) that were nominated for the 1992 Dorothy Livesay B.C. Book Prize for Poetry. That was where I met Barry, who, when we were introduced, seemed friendly but understandably distracted, and John, who, if I were Anthony Powell, I would describe as a happily impatient man. This is an awful story, one that if it were to happen today would more than likely have the three of us united, despite the fact that it fell so heavily on John. 

When the award for the poetry prize was announced, it was John’s name that was called, and he bounded onto the stage more relieved than impatient. I don’t remember all that he said, but I do remember him saying this: “And finally, I would like to thank my wife, to whom living with is pure poetry.” And with that, I had to leave because my band was playing that night in Victoria.

A couple days later I was back in Vancouver, checking my answering machine, when I came upon a message from Brian at Arsenal Pulp, requesting that I call him. Brian asked if I’d heard anything about the poetry prize, I said no, and he told me it was given to the wrong person -- that it should have gone to Barry.

The reason for the cock up is complicated, an administrative problem, a case of best intentions going awry. I remember Brian doing a good job of describing how the error happened, just as I remember years later Barry telling me that, although he went home with his cheque, the B.C. Book Prizes decided John should keep the one handed to him and, with a grin that told me I was at this point in my professional life both in need of a poke and able to take one, that “The real loser of the night was you, Turner. Because unlike John and me, you lost twice!”

 

 

 

 

Michael Turner's most recent book Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems is forthcoming from Anvil Press this summer, 2024.

 

Michael Turner : Tomorrow Is a Holiday, by Hamish Ballantyne

Tomorrow Is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne
New Star Books, 2024

 

 

 

I’ve been looking forward to Vancouver writer Hamish Ballantyne’s’s Tomorrow Is a Holiday since Rolf Mauer announced he would be publishing it and Rob Manery would be working with Rolf and Hamish as the book’s editor. Nice that Rob should be attached, given that he introduced Hamish to so many of us when he published his poems in SOME’s fifth issue. After reading Hamish’s SOME poems, I learned of his chapbook, Imitation Crab (Knife Fork Book, 2020), and a more recent chapbook called Blue Knight (auric press, 2022), not to mention poems in journals like The Chicago Review and Blazing Stadium.

Tomorrow Is a Holiday begins with its title, with its beautiful, if not sudden, retro-temporal suspension (learning that tomorrow is a holiday and its immediate effect on the texture of today), then its bio. We are quick to look at bios -- to see if the writer looks like us, has published in places we recognize as maintaining a standard worth aspiring to, to learn what they do for a living. In Hamish’s case, he “works seasonally as a mushroom picker and works in the Downtown Eastside the rest of the year” (the latter presumably as a community care worker). Does this work have bearing on the “content” of his poems? Yes, but not in the way we think of when we think of what used to be called “work writing.” The same might be said of the book’s “style”. Is it “language-oriented writing” because it “lacks” narrative insoles? Because it prefers syntactic knots to rhetorical zip lines? Do these distinctions mean anything anymore? They do to some.

The book is comprised of four sections, the last of which -- “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK” -- consists of the poet’s irreverent or otherwise translations of three longer poems by 16^th century Carmelite mystic San Juan de la Cruz (1542-91). The first section -- “Hansom” -- is also “about” a figure, a contemporary one, the kind endemic to any focused, if not improvised, gathering -- be it a mushroom-pickers’ forest collection centre or, as is increasingly common, an inner-city park, like Vancouver’s well-publicized Oppenheimer, Crab and Strathcona Park homeless encampments of the last decade.

Here’s the third page of “Hansom”:

learn from facebook that guy Hansom
threatened to stab
me with a triangle of porcelain
when shouting with my friend he woke
from a nightmare he is dead
a bbq for him

The structural similarities between “rural” and “urban” dynamics, exemplified as much through behaviour (swatting at mosquitoes) as through language (the mosquitoes themselves), not to mention the poet’s participation in these societies (simultaneously, binaries be damned), is to my mind the book’s great social achievement. Indeed, we find these similarities underscored in the title of the book’s third section -- “A&Ws” -- in reference to a fast-food franchise whose outlets look the same whether they are off the highway north of Campbell River or in the heart of downtown Vancouver.  

Here are first six lines of the poem’s third page:

a letter from jimmy buffet to
benjamin treating the form
of appearance of movement arrested
in the billboards advertising
billboard space: a whale encounters
an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine

The image of a tightly wound, brainiac, “One-Way Street”-era Walter Benjamin receiving a letter from a ludic, don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff, parrot-toting Jimmy Buffet is cutely funny and there to show range. The poet demonstrates he can be both of these men, but is he a better man for it? Indeed, there are a lot of men involved in the production of this book and the turning of its lyric gyres (a she/her appears rambunctiously in the book’s second section, “Luthier,” but her energy is frowned upon and she disappears just as quickly), which has me wondering, Does Tomorrow Is a Holiday make a case as a course add for a Masculine Studies module?  

Here is “8” from “Luthier”:

and I DON’T even KNOW her I’m just pet-sitting
the rabbits of someone who did

she came up with sweatsuits she
boosted and none of us wanted
the sweatsuits she jubilantly cast out
the window they hung flapping from
the hotel sign for weeks

Early in my reading of Tomorrow Is a Holiday I was watchful for traces of more-northern B.C. landscape poets Ken Belford (1946-2020) and Barry McKinnon (1944-2023), but Hamish Ballantyne brings something different to the innovative Nature/Culture trails these two writers blazed. For Hamish is a more complicated man, of a generation that grew up when testosterone was spoken of as if it were a disease, resulting in a more self-regulated man, compared to Belford and McKinnon, who were born at a time of ferocious male privilege, when testosterone was closer to a working drug. I am, generally speaking, nervous about this new man, his reactionary potential, though I remain curious about where his poetry will take us.

 

 

 

 

Michael Turner was raised in the garrison town of Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish land. His books include Hard Core Logo, Kingsway, The Pornographer’s Poem, 8x10, 9x11 and (this summer, with Anvil Press) Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems. This July he, Joi T. Arcan, Whess Harmon and August Klinburg will lead the Banff Centre’s Visual Arts Thematic Residency Get LIT! Language, Image, Text.

 

Michael Turner : Five poems from Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

Winterer

after Buffy Sainte-Marie

Hind of sorrow, curiosities exhumed

You can have my smiles, winterer

Tin feet patrolling the profane

Conscience and gall cursing the shitlists

Priests will scowl, millwrights will trim their nails

You can have my minutes, winterer

You can have my ear, the hawk’s claw

You can have my indifference, winterer

Moons will rise, cacti will hold their waters

You can have my months, winterer

You can have my foot, after spring ends

You can have my mind, winterer

Woe, Yet Another Example: How to Hear Hello

after Leonard Cohen

You hate me in the evenings, their protests light and frosty

My skin stripped and held under rocks, tin grey and angry

No, few will hate as they have -- you questioned their freshness!
Out of pastures and deserts we frowned, you and I
Closer then -- they lacked discipline!

My ear hard and full of joy

Woe, yet another example: how to hear hello

You listed me as missing, then waited at the station

To run you to the centre of their ragged three-legged race

I am unsure if hate comes at me, my hate goes against you

There’s more than one version of staying the same, unlike the roadside puddle

I want to hear more about hate and wings and what those wings might bind

My ear hard and full of joy

Woe, yet another example: how to hear hello

You hate me in the evenings, their protest light and frosty

My skin stripped and held under rocks, tin grey and angry

No, few will hate as they have -- you questioned their freshness!
Out of pastures and deserts we frowned, you and I
Closer then -- they lacked discipline

My ear hard and full of joy

Woe, yet another example: how to hear hello

I Am Under Your Body

after Sylvia Tyson

Until you go to sleep tonight

I am under your body

And while under your body

You are rewarded

You are unburdened

You are open to ecstasy

You go to the centre

Partly to increase your joy

No, to increase it further!

You are rewarded

You are unburdened

You quit work for the first time

Until you go to sleep tonight

I am under your body

And while under your body

You are rewarded

You are unburdened

You are open to ecstasy

You no longer think

Above your hat brim

Just above your hat brim

No, you had to stay

You had to stick around

You had to squat on your euphoria!

Until you go to sleep tonight

I am under your body

And while under your body

You are rewarded

You are unburdened

You are open to ecstasy

A Square Job

after Joni Mitchell

Tomorrow a professor will lecture on weapons systems

Teaching aids include a carboy of sand flies

Courageously gathered from a stagnant sea

Resuscitated through its reflection of a launched rocket

The semesters turn left or right

The sculpted golf carts -- forward and reverse

They’re freed by Space’s service road

They can drive into the future -- in both gears!

Turn left or right or left...

Outside a square job

For years this professor was passed over for promotion

Swam every night in the campus pool

Thoughts of If you were younger powering every stroke

Threats of Not on my watch in the eyes of faculty

Thirty-two semesters later

Sessional appointments < professional disappointments

We hear ourselves think

Go faster! Time’s a-wastin’!

Then I kick into gear -- jump bullets for that square job!

Salt Molehill

after Neil Young

So, to die under Salt Molehill

Against the mimes and the ball-and-chains

I can be twelve under Salt Molehill

Because I feel

I’ll only return there

I’ll only return there

Quiet and church-like

With a few enemies in attendance

I purchase a fillet of dried cod

Will I bring my children here one day?

A gendered place

Frowns coming at me like bats

I am deaf to what is spoken

Blind to what is obvious

Leaning over the mezzanine

Those below looking up, grinning

I know none of them

It’s enough to quit smoking

I write: I’ll return to work

To keep me company

Sad to think of myself

Lost in the fantasies of others

Michael Turner is a jalopy of complicated provenance stuck in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His most recent book, 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2018), was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. You can visit him at mtwebsit.blogspot.com. Leave a message, he always writes back.