Status Updates From 15 Canadian Poets

The notes on the poets are sort of nice, but really flattering and blurby in the way a lot of 60s 70s stuff seems to have been written, and a lot of bad vague art criticism is. Still, some of the stuff was helpful. The photos of the poets was maybe a more illuminating addition than some of the write-ups. Pretty well put together book.

Ondaatje, who I liked. Some of the poetry has weak moments, cliche moments, clunky endings. But it seems this is him pretty young. He seems to do so much with such latitude in his career. Cool.

"On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white, / the size of a leech. / I gave it to her / brandishing a new Italian penknife. / Look, I said turning, / and blood spat onto her shirt."

Victor Coleman. I am so blessed to have found Coleman in this book. I am him innumerably in method, preference, approach, play, improv, decaying voice, idiosyncrasy, &c.'s. Good.

"I am not complaining
I am not complaining The waning / of the harvest moon is NOT A POEM / (it is a waning "

George Bowering, very intimate. I like it.

"the home of the dinosaur, / caught in a corner of the / prairie, small-town people / in a dying town, conscious / they must cling to the / dinosaur for their living, / cling to his neck, forgetting / where the dinosaur came / to rest."

John Newlove, sort of lovely:

"His eyes, they said, / were soft and easy / years ago. Now, / he wears them cleverly / like some secret / coupled badge, / twin and original, / dark / ice eyes that watch and asses / slowly what they have / fixed / on; his head does not move."

John Newlove, sort of lovely:

"His eyes, they said, / were soft and easy / years ago. Now, / he wears them cleverly / like some secret / coupled badge, / twin and original, / dark / ice eyes that watch and asses / slowly what they have / fixed / on; his head does not move."

Gwendolyn Macewen.

Really seems to treat language as sacred. I think the material may be too dated for me, but in another lifetime I might have loved this.

"And its claws, I tell you its claws are gloved in fire"

Defs not down with Atwood defending Galloway, never liked her writing. Quote in a poem about a barn (i like barns): "There is a barn but I am not in the barn; / there is an orchard too, gone bad, / its apples like soft cork / but I am not there either."

Eli Mandel, who doesn't really do it for me:

"one cannot be another, I cry / let me not be crazed by poetry"

Yeah, Mandel doesn't have to worry about his poetry driving me crazy, unfortunately, which is a double shame because I always want to give prairie-born poets benefit of the doubt

Onwards

Margaret Avison—
"A woman whose eyes shine like evening's star / Takes in the freshblown linen / While sky a lonely wash of pink is still / Reflected in brown mud / Where lettuces will grow, another spring."

So cold and deliberate and tough (but rewarding). The writeup in the back compares her to Wallace Stevens, and I can believe that.

Alden Nowlan, who I have a soft spot for—
"'I don't know,' says the witness. 'He was naked' / There is talk of dogs"..."and by now he's probably done / whatever it was he wanted to do"

Not all good poems in here, but I know he has them in his broader work.

DG Jones:

Like butterflies but lately come / From long cocoons of summer / These little girls start back to school / To swarm the sidewalks, playing-fields, / And litter air with colour.

Leonard Cohen. He is who he is. Some gems in his section, but nothing life-changing for me. Maybe he's too prolific to try and tuck into an anthology.

"All her flesh is like a mouth... / She kisses the hand beside her mouth. / It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters, / there are so many more kisses."

Raymond Souster, maybe my fav so far:

"Get the poem outdoors under any pretext, / reach through the open window if you have to, / kidnap it right off the poet's desk, / then walk the poem in the garden..."

I like when people appear in his poems better, but this 'hold hands with kidnapped poetry on a stroll thru a garden' sentiment is pretty good too.

Irving Layton:

"...or to put it the way / a junior prof / at Mount Allison might, / Helen with her thick / absconding limbs / about the waist / of Paris / did no better."

Al Purdy,

"... with the best and worst of a love that's not to be spoken / and a guy right behind you says then/ 'Got a smoke?'/ You give him one and stand in the boxcar doorway / or looking out the window of a Montreal apartment / or running the machines in a Vancouver factory / — you stand there growing older"

Finished Earle Birney

"Green as a great bruise / where the smooth flesh of the drifts / has been savaged the auto lies / crumpled and akimbo / like a beetle battered by catspaw"