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“It is probably no coincidence that the majority of writers best known as fantasists are introverted, reclusive, misanthropic, or that a strong vein of misogynism has built itself into the conventions of the genre over the years...the women are unbelievably beautiful goddesses, treacherous jades or silly slave-girls. Much fantasy is...bachelor-fiction...written and read by that section of the community” (53).

Nichol, martyrology IV, which I've already read on it's own. Nice statements from some of the poets.

Roy Kiyooka: The Fontainebleau Dream Machine.

I wasn't sure about this. I had a hard time. But then I tried again when I was sleepy; most poems have a key 🔑and sleepy was third one's key! I love it so much. Some really bizarre verbs and constant weird telescoping in and out of ideas and images; lovesss it.

"the 7th Frame show / the Hand of the unseen Poet turning into a palimpsest"

George Bowering: Allophanes.
Maybe the best long poem so far.

From the "XXVI Dispersoid" section:

"Bye, Mama / we are engaged. / Language rings us."

An epic about a snowball and language. This poem loves me the way I love this poem.

Frank Davey: King of Swords.

I like this. Shame that the poem (or how the poem channels Arthur) is pretty misogynistic.

"viii Once, I went after my roommate / with a beerbottle, was restrained. / That morning he, nor I – / no one fuckt her, / & the story dies / like an empire rusting in its scabbard."

Robin Blaser: The Moth Poem

"the wet / touches / spring a trap in personal / history, / interior, riotous / smokers / of poetry bathe among the ruins, / slip off the rocks"

Not my thing really.

Don McKay: Long Sault.

Sillier than I knew he could be. Not my fav tho.

"And here's old Highway 2 who followed you / everywhere. / Always the comic, now he surfaces / to hump an islet / and subside. / I have to go. Rest easy / and so long."

Daphne Marlatt: Steveston.

"This is the story of a town, these are the people, whose history locates inside of dream..."

"Only, always to dream of erotic ghosts of the flowering earth, to return to a decomposed ground choked by refuse, profit, & the concrete of private property, to find yourself disinherited from your claim to the earth."

Stuart MacKinnon, The Intervals.

"there is that point in winter / when the weather controls us / and the earth seems dead / when rich Canadian physicians / go south to catch the first spring / and escape the dreadful pause / that old people die in / when suicides are plentiful / and prisoners stab each other / or strangle in sheets / like winding umbilical cords"

Robert Kroetsch, Seed Catalogue.

"The gopher was the model. / Stand up straight: / telephone poles / grain elevators 🌾/ church steeples. / Vanish, suddenly: the / gopher was the model."

"Now in this dream condition, as dream-time fuses into the kind of narrative we call myth, we change the nature of the novel. And we start, with a new and terrible energy, to write the poems of the imagined real place."

This is so readable and thorough and earnest so far. also reallllly British. But not in that bad Dickensian way. Well, it's Dickensian, but not that way. Hard to explain. Very engaging in a lot of ways, and the theoretical framework is beneficial to the discussion but the content doesn't conform to it / use it as a crutch. Why can't all theory be so enjoyable?

Done the Iliad. I liked Hector. A lot. Also the word unyoke. Onto the Odyssey, with less guts and glory and more weirdness (or so I've been promised)

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."

DAVID UU (UU pronounced W), who I didn't immediately believe in the fragments of, but then he succumbed to the dream, and I fell into the 'simulated wornhole' too (the spelling errors their own delights in this pure resistance to sense):

"...back now ocean west another inner / shes it cumming to where yu sure / once we get to the house papa knows / what to do with the bones"

*
I am really happy I found this book

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.