This text was written just after Christmas while browsing The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry [Montreal: Signal, 2005] and listening to Bob Dylan’s basement tapes
Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006.
There’s some good Canadian poetry:
“Borrowed money so’s not to be anywhere near Christmas,”(1)
“… as citizens hammer the accidents of their lives into suburbs,” writes Karen Solie, (2) whose Sturgeon also has quite a lot of force. (3)
A lot of the writing is about themselves, of course, was always thus with poets, though in the end you find your own despair in the mirror.
“You steal for warmth, a dirt blanket, and the happy knowledge there is nothing uglier that what you are.”(4)
“It was like a training regimen to ensure I’d place last in the race to accomplish, acrue, attain,
or think straight for a day and a half. I didn’t dust.” (5)
Poor poets, how much more successful might they be if they were just one more degree more confident, towards arrogant even. Too determined they are to beat the critic at her/his game.
Of Dylan’s “rare and unreleased,” it is not surprising these tunes didn’t make it to albums, though lines here and there made it through to finished tunes, like “I’m not looking for anything in anyone’s eyes.”
One hopes the poet Anita Lahey might pick up a guitar and makes something of her distinctive voice.(6)
If Dylan’s unreleased tunes are rare, so too are the poems in The New Canon. They’re Canadian after all.
Feelings caught on tape or in writing, pressed on vinyl or printed on paper, caught and released.
—
(1) Ken Babstock, Palimdromic, p. 273
(2) Wouldn’t you know this was the first line that grabbed me and I couldn’t find it in the book again when I went back. It came up on Google though, in this review.
(3)”And when he [the caught sturgeon in question] began to heave and thrash over yards of rock to the water’s edge and, unbelievably, in,
we couldn’t hold him though we were teenaged
and bigger than everything. Could not contain
the old current he had for a mind,”
(4) John Degen, Neighbours are Dangerous, p. 202
(5) Babstock, ibid, p. 272
(6) pp. 282-288
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