Exploring the Poetry Boom

Poetry is red hot! From Rupi Kaur to Sabrina Benaim, the world is captivated with the raw honesty and emotion channeled and expressed by these fabulous poets. As fans continue to engage through social media, and poets continue to engage through readings and heavily viewed YouTube videos, the genre has experienced a colossal boom in sales. Check out Publishers Weekly's in-depth take on the Poetry Surge here. 

Toronto Poetry Map

What a lovely idea! I am a huge fan of George Elliot Clarke who helped put together is awesome Poetry Map together with Toronto Public Library. They are also asking for suggestions.

My Kind of Poetry

Where The North American Poets Meet. . .

Spring has definitely arrived and so I've been immersing myself in poetry and the (fictional) lives of poets this weekend.

New Canadian Library has just published a really terrific anthology: Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960, edited by Brian Trehearne. It covers a literary period that I really love when writers were experimenting with modernism - a characteristic that influenced Trehearne's inclusion of poets for this collection. As he writes in his afterword: "in their common reaction against Romanticism and its legatees, and in their commitments to modern poetry's possibilities of profound newness - for newness could be profound in and of itself in this period - they make up one great movement in Canada's cultural history".

Some of the selections will jolt you right back to high school (E.J. Pratt's multi-voiced "The Titanic" and Earle Birney's "David"), and any English university student will have come across many of these poets in Canlit courses: A.M. Klein, the wonderful Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Avison, John Glassco, Irving Layton, Raymound Souster and James Reaney just to mention a few. There are nice selections from two of my favourites - F.R. Scott and P.K. Page whose poem "The Stenographers" seems particularly appropriate to read on a Sunday night. I've also been introduced to some poets previously unknown to me - Louise Morey Bowman's "The Tea Kettle" turns that comforting image on its head, and Patrick Anderson who writes of skiers on Mount Royal during WWII in "Winter in Montreal":

and I said: Can you tell me? Is this Canadian
to ski - I mean, to dare so silently
with nothing in front and blue behind like a railway?
I waited for his answer but it was
wafted away in the sanitarium snow
where the skiers flushed like the hectic tubercular
schussed down the fever of their feathery pillow.

There are poems from across the country and (again, why I like this period so much) many of them are set in cities. They deal with all aspects and descriptions of Canadian life (and the weather) but also are set against global events during this period - the Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, the Cold War. A wonderful book to keep by the bedside table and regularly dip into.

I was reminded of F.R. Scott's satirical poem "The Canadian Authors Meet" (yes, also included) when reading Lore Segal's delicious Lucinella. This novella is part of Melville House's exquisite Art of the Contemporary Novella Series which publishes or brings back into print little gems such as this from around the world. Originally published in 1970, this very funny story follows a bunch of poets, a literary critic, the editor of a poetry magazine, Zeus and Hera, and our main heroine at three different stages of her life (sometimes all present at once), during their jaunts at a writer's retreat, an academic symposium and several boozy parties. Their egos, insecurities, idiosyncrasies and libidos are all on display and fair game not only for endless gossip but as fodder for their work. Yet, despite the facade of friendship in this cosy circle, it turns out that not only do most of them not like each other, they don't even - GASP - read each other. And while it's clear they should never marry each other, they yet need each other and stay connected - right to the end. I couldn't stop laughing all the way through this marvellous unpoetic ode to the messiness of everyday life and love.

Hull's Most Famous Librarian Gets Feted

I've always had a soft spot for Philip Larkin's poetry; for a dose of surly grumpiness on the disappointments of daily modern life, you really can't beat him. I pick up his Collected Poems whenever I need a chuckle or to be reminded that things are never that gloomy. Just read his poem "Toads" and "Toads Revisited" anytime you have a bad day at work.

Larkin also spent numerous years as a librarian at the University of Hull in the city where I was born, although I've never actually set foot in my birthplace because my parents left before I was old enough to walk and I've never been back. A couple of years ago, Hull was voted as England's number one crap city to live in which didn't exactly make me nostalgic for a visit.

However, this would be a good year to make that pilgrimage. Hull is marking the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death with a series of celebrations including a tourist trail as outlined in this piece from The Independent. A website, Larkin25 will also list information about other upcoming events.

And if you are a fan, I highly recommend getting a copy of the audio CD Pretending to Be Me. This is a recording of a one-man play written and performed by the British actor Tom Courtenay and it is just hilarious! Courtenay plays an older Larkin reflecting on his life and work and in the course of the play, he reads a number of Larkin's best-known poems from "This Be The Verse" to "The Whitsun Weddings". A real treat for Larkin admirers but if you love Alan Bennett and his unique type of British humour, you will also definitely get a kick out of this. It's on my iPOD - ever ready to rescue me from the blues.

Lest we forget. . .

My fellow Deweys know about my passion and fascination for all things relating to the First World War, and they are always alerting me to new books covering that devastating period. And I promise to get to them, I will! Tomorrow I'll blog about the WWI book I'm just finishing up now, but I wanted to acknowledge a couple of very interesting books that I'll be browsing through this week as well.

Oxford University Press published a much needed anthology of Canadian war poetry earlier this year. Canadian Poetry from World War I, edited by Joel Baetz contains more poems from John McCrae than just his famous "In Flanders Fields", and war poems by well-known Canadian poets E.J. Pratt, Frank Prewett, Duncan Campbell Scott and Robert Service to name a few. The collection also includes contributions by many women poets that I'm unfamiliar with, but look forward to reading.

From McArthur & Company comes Juliet Nicholson's The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War which is a great bookend to her previous book, The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911. Both promise a detailed and interesting sociological look at the many levels of British society before and after the war, including the many ways in which the lives of women were drastically altered.

And somewhat related, I'll also be buying a copy of L.M. Montgomery's The Blythes Are Quoted - a collection of short stories (some never before published) about Anne and Gilbert and their family, both before and just after the First World War. Readers of Rilla of Ingleside will remember that two of Anne's sons go off to fight in France, with only one returning.

Also for younger readers is Jack Batten's new book The War to End All Wars: The Story of World War I which provides a good overview of the conflict, and highlights the individual stories of Canadians who fought - both men who were famous such as Billy Bishop, and boys such as 18 year old Ray Goodyear, who was one of the many, many Newfoundlanders who lost their lives in France. I enjoyed Batten's earlier book, Silent In An Evil Time which told the story of Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was executed by the Germans during the war - it's also an excellent overview of the history of the nursing profession up to that time.

NYRB Challenge: A Ménage à trois of letters. . .

My next pick in my ongoing 50 book NYRB Classics Challenge was inspired by a recent conversation with a friend. We were discussing - ironically by electronic means - the demise of personal correspondence, concluding shamefully that it had been several years since either of us had actually written a long letter by hand. E-mail or instant messaging can be a wonderful, instantaneous, cheap mode of communication, but I have to wonder - are we missing out on something possibly more precious and fun, that is not only more permanent, but also intellectually challenging, forcing one as it does, to thoughtfully take the time to choose words and subject matter? Is letter writing truly a lost art form and one I'd like to re-engage with?

I wanted to find out so I spent two hours flexing my lazy hand muscles and I wrote my friend a letter. And then I went to my shelves and started reading NYRB Book #6 - Letters: Summer 1926, the correspondence between the poets Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. The collection is edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky and translated from the Russian, German and French by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt and Jamey Gambrell. Susan Sontag provides the preface.

The collection covers four months in which the three poets wrote to and about each other. Rilke was battling leukemia in a sanatorium in Switzerland; he would die later that year. Pasternak was living in Moscow (where he couldn't receive letters with Swiss stamps - Rilke had to reroute them through France or Germany) and carrying on both an artistic and romantic correspondence with Tsvetayeva who was living in poverty in Paris. Reading this collection of very powerful and beautifully written letters, I was struck by several glaring contrasts to our modern styles of communication, no doubt influenced by the historical period and the personal temperaments of the poets. Considering that Rilke had never met either the adult Pasternak or Tsvetayeva, the emotional and familial outpouring of words is impressive from all three of them. Any author today would blush to get the type of adulation that gushes from this fanmail. This is especially true of Tsvetayeva's letters which were my favourite of the group. As noted in the introduction, she treated her letters as art, as if she were creating a new genre - "epistolary lyric poetry." Here she is on the subject of writing them:

A letter is like an otherworldly communication, less perfect than a dream but subject to the same rules. . . Neither the one nor the other can be produced on command; you neither write a letter nor dream a dream when you want to but when it wants to: the letter- to be written; the dream - to be dreamed.

Secondly, it was fascinating to note the extreme importance placed on the written word. These letters were not only read and re-read, but multiple copies were made, extracts written down in notebooks and forwarded on in other letters to friends and families. And indeed it is because of this meticulous preservation that this correspondence has been able to be reconstructed, as in some cases the original letter was lost. These letters were treasured and savoured. Pasternak kept a copy of a short letter from Rilke in an envelope marked "Most Precious" which he carried in his jacket pocket for the rest of his life. Would we ever do this with an e-mail, even one printed out? Would it have the same sentimental and emotional impact as a blue-tinged, crinkly piece of paper, the ink faded somewhat, but still showing signs of its writer's distinctive handwriting? Would we ever assign that much importance to any device that needed electrical charging?
And the correspondence even continued posthumously. Both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva wrote letters to Rilke after hearing of his death, as if this was the only medium they felt could best express their grief.

This collection contains an excellent and extensive introduction that provides all the biographical and artistic context one needs to successfully navigate through the correspondence and it will make you want to engage with the poetry as well. Rilke's poetry can be found easily and in many editions, for example here. Samples of Tsvetayeva and Pasternak's poetry, can be found in NYRB's edition of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. In particular, this collection contains Tsvetayeva's long poem "The Poem of the End" about a couple ending their affair as they walk across a city. It's haunting, beautiful and stylistically interesting, and when she sent it to Pasternak, it made an enormous impact on him (he mentions it numerous times in his letters, both to her and other correspondents). The collection also includes poems by acclaimed poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Alexander Blok.

The day after I finished the book, a handwritten letter arrived from my friend (Canada Post is considerably slower now than 1926 postal systems that crossed many borders). I shall treasure it. I think we both enjoyed the exercise enormously and I hope we'll continue to make the time to write.

"Bright Star, would I were stedfast as thou art. . . "

Okay everyone, get ready to sigh and swoon and lament an age when poets not only wrote odes to their beloved, but some of the most beautiful love letters as well. Twitter just doesn't cut it, does it? On the weekend, I saw Jane Campion's new film Bright Star, based on the tragically short romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and if this movie doesn't have you taking down your dusty anthologies of British poetry from university days, and reading some Keats, (and yes, all his greatest hits are in the movie), I don't know what will. Like these lines from his poem "To Fanny":

Yourself - your soul - in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom or I die. . .

Heady stuff, eh? Do try and get an edition that includes some of the love letters as well, which are some of the most passionate ever written. Our movie-tie edition will include the complete poems and a good selection of letters, and also has an introduction by Campion. It will be available in November (in plenty of time to get into some stockings). The movie is very well done, certainly very beautiful to look at, and yes, quite romantic. One of my friends has been told in no uncertain terms by her husband, that she is not allowed to see the movie without him by her side. Critics have been effusive in their praise of Abbie Cornish who plays Fanny but Ben Whishaw as Keats, more than holds his own (you may remember him as Sebastian in the recent movie adaption of Brideshead Revisited). And most importantly, he has a lovely poetry-reading voice.

Keats isn't the only dead poet making the literary rounds at the moment. I've just started Adam Foulds' new novel The Quickening Maze which is on the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize (we found out late that we have Canadian rights to this, but the hardcover edition should be in stores and libraries now, and Vintage Canada has bought paperback rights and is bringing it out quickly in early November). Set about fifteen years after Keats' death, The Quickening Maze tells the story of nature poet John Clare, during the years he spent at High Beach Asylum. Located in the Essex countryside, it's not a prison; Clare is allowed to work each day in the gardens and for good behaviour, he can take walks in the nearby forests. Alfred Tennyson is also a character in the novel; he moves to a nearby house to be close to his brother who is also getting treatment at the asylum. I'm only about sixty pages in but I'm luxuriating in the pacing and lovely descriptions of nature; Foulds is himself an award-winning poet. And it's reminding me of yet another recent novel about a British poet - Robert Edric's In Zodiac Light - which traces the last days of First World War poet and musician Ivor Gurney, who was also confined to a mental institution.

Bright stars indeed, but quick to burn out.