Habituation
November 20th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Originally appeared in the Triggerfish Critical Review.
HABITUATION
Years in and the unspeakable happens:
sitting in your chair the neighbourhood rises
like exhaust around you, the hardly noticed
products of time’s manufacture: slow rattle of cars,
muffled screams of jet liners taking off, open
and close of the gate, sound of water as it
free falls from the eaves each time
with precision and consistency
to knock on deck boards like a door, the window
blurred with light’s bending. Might as well
greet mornings this way, gradual habituation sets in
like an uncle you hardly know put up
in the spare room, eventually forming a fixture.
What is it you’re missing? Home? No,
too easy after all this time. It’s the
unexpected that haunts you, the absence of it:
how the street could easily be
your street, the town easily be your town.
You know the people strolling by, who
they are or used to be. The struggle
to belong was over before you knew it and,
shifting uncomfortably in the seat, you
reel at the thought. Home. Pan the yard
through wide French doors, survey the earth,
adjacent houses, the towering tree you
no longer notice that loomed once, a warning.
Vision settles near the patio’s edge;
like last year the bleeding heart’s in bloom,
that warm pink brighter now than ever.
Stephen Rowe, 2009
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Canadian Content in CanLit
October 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The issue of “Canadianness” in Canadian writing has come up yet again. John Barber in today’s Globe and Mail has discussed whether or not there is enough of Canada in this country’s literary output. More and more it seems that fiction, in particular, is being set in places other than the motherland, creating a new kind of trend for novelists, but there are people who support this pattern and those who do not. In some ways this can be viewed as Canadian authors gaining confidence in their own abilities and where our national literature is headed, but it’s certainly possible that we are losing an important part of our literary and national identity. Fewer and fewer books are set in Canada and fewer are concerned with characters or events associated with the country, making it a tempting assumption to say that this is a terribly threatening development in our literature.
I’m not entirely sure I agree, since Canada’s vast size and the differences between spaces within our borders have always made subjects of our literature somewhat isolated to a particular regional demographic (for example, stories that are thought to be distinctly “Newfoundland” in nature may not have a great amount in common with those of Montreal, or Winnipeg). To my mind, this may represent why Canadian writers feel less pressure to set their novels in Canada or use Canada-specific content; this historical division by region meant that, essentially, all literature in this country could be viewed as foreign to those in other provinces. The current trend, then, may be less a straying from the roots of a Canadian literary heritage and more an extension of the one that has been present for decades. With the nation’s large migrant population, there’s no wonder a focus on other cultures and origins would be tempting for authors to explore. On the other hand, we have to consider what is more important to great literature: quality writing, or content that is specific to a certain social group. In reality, it is probably some combination of the two.
Here’s an excerpt from the article, but I’d recommend you read the whole thing.
Almost a decade after Yann Martel described Canada as “the greatest hotel on earth” in accepting the Booker Prize for The Life of Pi – a famous Canadian novel that begins in India and ends in Mexico – Canadian content has only become rarer in Canadian literature. While many U.S. and British writers turn inward – a trend exemplified by Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending – Canadian literature is more than ever characterized by free-floating cosmopolitanism.
“That’s definitely one of the striking things about contemporary Canadian literature,” said Paul Martin of Edmonton’s MacEwan University, former director of Canadian studies at the University of Vermont. “But it’s not something we should be apologizing for. I think it’s something we should be pretty excited about.”
Internationalism is a sign of confidence, many observers agree, and a faithful reflection of the ethnic diversity of modern Canada. “Going back to the middle of the 1990s, Canadian fiction became confident enough it no longer had to be set in southwestern Ontario or the Prairies,” said University of Toronto English professor Nick Mount. “I think it felt it could set wherever it wanted to be set.”
Michael Lista’s Got A Point
October 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
When Never More There first came out, I was hopeful that I would luck out and win some award. I would never have deluded myself into thinking a Governor General’s Award was possible, but an award of some kind, maybe something local, was in the back of my mind. It’s hard to admit now and it sounds rather foolish to even think such a thing, but such are the aspirations of young poets. As time went on I quickly came to realize that an award or even the recognition of a nomination was not coming, but more importantly I came to the realization that it didn’t really matter whether or not such an honour would come: the poetry and the discussion surrounding it was far more important.
The supposed importance of literary prizes has grown in recent years and has contributed to a shift in importance in the literary community and this is the focus of a recent article by Michael Lista. In it he discusses the recent Vancouver poetry conference and a “common direction” he sees among the great variety of poets in Canada: the general opinion that there is too much emphasis on literary awards and fewer on quality reviews reaching the reading public. I, like many others, will tune in to see which poets have been nominated for a variety of awards and doing so serves as a way of familiarizing myself with the latest books of note. Less and less are we reading reviews of exciting new books in the papers, regardless of our attempts to do so, because the volume of reviews have declined. There are, of course, still publications that run reviews, but cutbacks across the country are having a noticeable effect on the discussion of poetry in this country.
Lista seems quite positive about the direction things may take in the future, especially since Canadian poets seem to have similar opinions regarding reviews and prizes. I think, more than prize recognition, reviews of new and old work need to increase in prominence in order that the conversation about Canadian poetry continue and retain vigor. Perhaps there is room for young poets to join in this discourse and add a new perspective.
The dearth of reviews is happening for a couple of reasons: newspapers are scaling back their books coverage, but more than that, the ever-growing body of young poets (who themselves expect reviews of their books) are afraid of writing them, for fear that filing the wrong review will come back to sting them. And so as the number of poets publishing books increases every year, and the number of reviews dwindles, a single meretricious thing has come to dominate the poetic conversation in this country: the literary prize. I say meretricious because for jurors, seeing good books received by silence is a maddening thing, and makes otherwise honest, reasonable, perspicacious readers — who as this conference demonstrated, are very much interested in poets and poetry outside of their aesthetic ken — act in partisan ways.
