What I don't write about

my  4 kids, my 3 grandkids, my parents when i was a kid, my childhood other that time at a cottage, my siblings

Book Review I - A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Draft)

Need to clean up a bit still, provide references etc. But the content of what I want to say is mostly there. 


Stuart Ross’ A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent

Stuart Ross has been writing poetry for a long time. His bio says “Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like ‘Writer Going To Hell,’ selling over 7,000 chapbooks.” He is now the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and essays. In preparation for writing this review of his latest book “A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent” (Wolsak and Wynn 2016) I wrote him and asked if he had anything he wanted to say about this book.  He said that the only point he might make would be he tried to write a book that is more accessible and personal than much of his previous work.  

I’ve been thinking about that.  The work is definitely personal, we’ll talk about that a bit later.  But “accessible” is highly subjective.  I really love this work.  But it is soaked in quirkiness. Does that make it accessible or not? For some the idea of accessible means it has less value for others it means it has more interest.  I’ve had this discussion with people about Emily Dickinson’s work, how her imaginative take on the world is difficult for some to enter, for many others it is energizing. Stuart Ross has Dickinsonian quirkiness in these poems as he also is a poet who creates poems that project the real world through the lens of his imagination  And Dickinson and Ross train this lens on the big questions of death and immortality. 

So accessible perhaps, quirky definitely. Consider the poem Doxology, which contains the line that provides the title of the book. as a good example of what I am calling quirky. First of all the title means a short hymn of praise to God.  In this poem a fireman swallows a string dropped from a sparrow’s mouth.  An odd subject but the writing comes across as mostly narrative until when he last part of the poem shifts diction, level of quirkiness and elevates to match the title. 

sparrow had said unto him

he remembered the sparrow 

saying they abide and they 

endure carry a piece of their

nest within you don’t fuck

things up like you usually

do like how your wrecked

your family and the fireman

held out his palm and the sun

shone upon it and many

baby birds did there appear. 

Besides the quirky Stuart Ross loves the quotidian and also loves to raise up the poem using it.  For example, buying a suit from a lower end chain of stores called Moores from a guy named Al is the subject of the poem Moore’s. Moores is a well known Canadian chain and most people in Canada know it.  But that doesn’t mean you have to know it to get the poem.  Ross situates the reader immediately and you get to know the store and the merchandise with the entry to the poem 

Al at Moores menswear store in Ajax,

Ontario, is a pretty good guy. Not just

because he found me a nice Italian suit

for $199 ($270 with tax and alterations) 

but because he found me one below my budget

instead of trying upsell me

like the guy in the Cobourg mall. 

But Ross is also situating the reader in a smaller suburban city setting, not the big urban. Dealing with a suburban mall not some high end location. And also warming the reader immediately to Al.  At the same time we are getting a measure of the speaker who is comfortable and looking for a deal, not to be the subject of upselling like that other mall. A lot of background has been provided in a very short space and with a conversational voice that helps warm us to the speaker as he warms us to Al. Ross has us with him. 

Ross goes on to complicate and elevate this daily material.  He mentions “Al looks good in a black suit and not like an undertaker”.  This is the first hint we might be going to be dealing with death.  He then goes on later to compare Al when he chalks the speaker’s sleeve cuff to his own late grandfather. 

marked my sleeve cuff with a sliver

of white chalk just like my grandfather

Sam Blatt, used to do, a tape measure

draped over his shoulder like a tallit. 

Ross conflates for the reader the grandfather  wearing a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, with Al.  And as the poem develops further into this exploration of Ross’ and his grandfather’s history he brings Al in at the end of the poem in an unexpected way.

This suit is for my wedding. I won’t 

need a suit for my funeral. Al will 

wrap me in a plain

white shroud —Tachrichim—

and he’ll suppress the impulse

to find me a matching tie. 

So in the end Al has become someone preparing the body of the speaker for death, despite an earlier assertion that Al was not an undertaker.  This imaginative moment also ends on a note of humour.  What is masterful here is this exploration of death and the dressing for death that just naturally gets inserted. So what starts with what appears to be an everyday description of a retail transaction turns into something much more, a meditation on the images of rituals surrounding the speaker’s death. The poem has taken us a very interesting and surprising ride while luring us in with the everyday. And it is accomplished through the use of humour, engaging language and mashing up of characters and images within a 39 line poem. 

Quirky sure.  Surreal, a touch but not as much as in some other poems. And that is another wonderful thing about this book.  Ross shifts gears often.  Sometimes a surreal poem, sometimes a torqued narrative like Moores, or sometimes an absurdist poem like this short one, August 2008. 

I arrived with a jar of pickles. 

The town was small. 

We sat on your porch. 

We saw a man pursuing the horizon. 

The water in our glasses was crystal. 

You read me a poem by Stephen Crane. 

I read you a poem by Stephen Crane. 

and I said: “Is it good, friend?”

Now this is the strange part:

You leaned toward me

and the sky turned red.  What then?

You don’t have to know that the some lines are taken from Stephen Crane poems. “We saw a man pursuing the horizon” is a reference form Crane’s poem I Saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon, “Is it good, friend” from a somewhat gruesome scene in Crane’s In The Desert , “Now this is the strange part:” from A Man Saw A Ball Of Gold. and “What then?” from LCVI . And Ross doesn’t mention this in the notes to the book, the mention of Crane’s poetry twice in the short poem can be considered sufficient to drive a reader to Google and down a rabbit hole of research into Stephen Crane and his poetry (where I spent last evening).  But it doesn’t matter, the poem works as absurdist work on it’s own, the intertextuality just adds to the effect if you are aware of it. 

It is interesting  to know though that the feel of this poem does echo the tone of the Crane work referenced., short strange free verse poems. Here is one of the referenced Crane poems. 

"I saw a man pursuing the horizon" 

I saw a man pursuing the horizon; 
Round and round they sped. 
I was disturbed at this;   
I accosted the man. 
“It is futile,” I said, 
“You can never —” 

“You lie,” he cried,   
And ran on. 

Ross is using poetry written by a fascinating young man, who died at 28,  described as the foremost American writer of  his time in the 1890’s. Though he is not known as well for his poetry as his prose like The Red Badge Of Courage, his poetry ended up being later recognized as ground breaking for the time and said to establish the foundation for the Imagists that followed years later.  An interesting choice for Ross to focus and this short poem has added depth when the sources are researched.  And like the  other work in this book this nominally accessible work also has surprises.

Stuart Ross brings in other poets and their work routinely throughout the book. And does this in many different ways.  In a title echoing Frank O’Hara with Oh Cy Twombly Please Get Up, direct mentions of the Canadian poet David McFadden and his influence on Ross, Oscar Williams (the famous poetry anthologist) who died in 1964 appearing to young Stuart Ross in 1974 in the very entertaining poem And Oscar Williams Walks In , several poems taking their first line from other poets’s poems.   The purposefulness of referencing others adds to effect of the collection, illustrating the interconnectedness of literature as well as Ross’ own generative processes and influences.  

As to the personal.  While going on some fairly wild flights of imagination Ross also has some very personal work.  It is elegiac and nostalgic.  Accomplished through exploring the death of parents, memories of his grandfather but also through pop culture references from the 1960’s and 1970’s.  You don’t have to know anything about the sixties like the TV show F-Troop to understand and appreciate the poems, but if you happened to grow up at the time you’ll feel the nostalgia come through even more.   And the deep emotions of some poems also are available to readers. Dickinson famously said “Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality”, Stuart gives us that same thing in the very first poem about his mother’s dying. Ross is never overly sentimental but genuine in truthful emotional content. 

I’m a year younger than Ross, grew up close to some of the neighbourhoods he talks about.  The book has a personal appeal for me on that level.  But for other readers the poems will also resonate with skillfully written poetry, literary depth and an adventurous movement through form and subject.  Quirky, personal with just the right amount of accessibility. A great book. 

Editing Over-workshopped Work

So I was looking again at an older poem of mine that I had included in my first draft of my thesis. Matthew liked it but told me it needed to be stranger. This is one of those poems that got worked and worked over the last six years. I had a workshop with Jane Hirshfield a couple of years ago where she said she thought people workshopped too much, that workshopping can "take the finish" off poems, take the shine off them and make them boring. I think that was the case with this one. I went back to a number of versions of the poem looking for the interesting spots I'd taken out and brought them back. I had tried a number of forms in the various versions, what you see in the new version is a mashup of these forms as I brought the older material back in. I decided I found that interesting as it seemed to fit the poem.   I also shifted to first person for more immediacy. Sara also consulted, suggesting the indents used in one section, which for me added a lot, making that material more of an aside and allowing it the different form with the first letter of each line capitalized and no punctuation. Sara also suggested the elements from the Catholic Mass be italicized, another good idea. Below is the new version of the poem followed by the original.

Questions Should Be Asked 

There are words that I keep forgetting

like possum or spoon. Sometimes I feel

them behind other words. There are dark 

shadows under my eyes.

What are those birds?

What is this wilderness?

(my eyes are closed

on the 100D Flemington Park bus)

When I was small I came to this city, the pigeons strutted the sidewalk and short, old Italian men pushed red carts by the museum, roasting chestnuts. My mother bought a small white bag for me, it was warm in my palm as my hand gripped it. There was a burnt aroma as I peeled the brown skin from the hot meat. All the dry leaves blew down the avenue and away into the fall sun that day.

(open my eyes)

A man depends on something

A memory of his father and mother

Or last lover

A small white bag in the open palm of his hand

And then he can go into the world

Where he will learn about winning and failure

One day he is playing with his best friend

In the playground 

And then next thing they know 

They are sitting on a park bench

Looking at the scar that runs through his old-man chest

(this is my stop)

The man busking at Bloor and Avenue Rd.

tells me the angels will dance in the sky the night he dies,

a white pigeon pumpjacks his head  towards the concrete,

I cannot be sure of anything,

maybe it is the way the shadows fall here at dusk,

every day I am filled and then emptied, I can only

hope it starts again. 

A man depends on something,

the memory of his mother or father

or a small white bag in the open palm of his hand.

(This is one of the five places where I sleep at night) 

What I have done, what I have

failed to do, in my thoughts

and in my words.

I woke up one day and knew part of me

had left while I slept.

Questions Should Be Asked

There are words that you keep forgetting

like possum or spoon.

(your eyes are closed

on the 100D Flemington Park bus)

You came to this city when you were small,

pigeons strutted the sidewalk by the museum, 

old Italian men, red push carts roasted chestnuts, 

small white bag, warm in your hands.  Burnt aroma 

when you peeled the brown skin from the hot meat.

(open your eyes)

The old man at Bloor and Avenue Rd

tells you the angels will dance in the sky the night he dies, 

a white pigeon pumpjacks his head  towards the concrete.

You can’t be sure of anything,

maybe it is the way the shadows fall here at dusk,

every day you are filled and then emptied.

A man depends on something,

the memory of his mother or father

or a small white bag in the open palm of his hand.

You woke up one day and knew part of you

had left while you slept.

Arisa Helps Me With My Poem Happiness

I have never been happy (no pun intended) with a poem I wrote maybe five years ago called Happiness. Arisa helped me in our tutorial session by making the poem more immediate and taking out what I think of as connective tissue much of the ideas which came from pseudo-mirroring a poem that I used as a prompt for this poem, Welcome, Fear by David Rivard. After taking Arisa's ideas for the material I found the form wasn't working. I tried couplets which didn't quite do it and went to the form below. It makes me happy with what I feel is subtle brokenness, close to what I felt in the original form but evolved. Here are the before and after poems side by side.

Happiness After reading David Rivard’s Welcome, Fear I am quite grateful that you said  I can choose to be happy or sad and I should choose happy when I push the down elevator button in the morning, that elevator with the mirrors on 4 sides that puts on ten pounds and twenty years. To happily stride out into a shit-filled city armed with my own happy shit-eating grin. And that is my path to enlightenment, no need for hope or love or even striving for anything other than making a single choice. Easy to say, maybe easy to do but what am I supposed to do when I want someone to wake up beside me? It’s not hard, not impossibly difficult, a relief even, at least in this moment, to recall a blonde curl against your face on Sunday mornings, the sun just a suggestion beneath the window blinds, as you went from sleep to wake, your lids fluttered and then opened, the cornflower blue of your eyes just visible in the dusky bed beside me. And my hands began, my mouth against yours, the first true pebble dropped into an unbelievable deep pond. Now there is no sun, no window blind, no blonde curl. And its not like I thought it was going to go on forever.  But it’s more like you have gone off menu and chosen happy while I’m still staring at two pages full of really fucked up choices. A story we once told each other, now has the ending gone but the middle is missing too. I know it’s you not me. Or I think I’m supposed to know that. But you know it’s really like I’m standing up the driveway, the porch light off, trying to find the keyhole and failing again and again.  Would be nice if someone would just flick a switch. Nice even if someone could.

Happiness In that elevator with mirrors on four sides that puts on ten pounds and twenty years, I’m grateful you said I can choose to be happy or sad, I stride out into a shit-filled city armed with my own happy shit-eating grin. But                               what am I supposed to do when I want someone to wake up beside me?                  A blonde curl against your face on Sunday mornings, the sun beneath the window blinds, your lids fluttered then opened and there was the cornflower blue of your eyes.                     My mouth against yours, the first pebble dropped into an unbelievably placid pond.                   It’s not that I thought it would go on forever. You go off menu and choose happy while I stare at two pages of fucked-up choices. The middle of our story is gone.                      I’m standing up the driveway, the porch light off,  trying to find the keyhole and failing. I want someone to flip the switch on.

Arisa White Prompt Narrative Structure With The Narrative Running Backwards

Also start with a bite.  And pleasure should be part of the poem or the major theme.  Here's what I got....

The Anthropocene

In the beginning was the serpent, the apple and then the bite.

And it was then God began again the work. 

The evening and the morning were the first day. 

God said, Let us unmake man and woman of our image, no longer after our likeness, no longer be there pleasure or the bearing of fruit.

The evening and the morning were the second day.

And then God said, This is good. 

And God said, Let the waters that brought forth abundantly

the moving creature that hath life be they now greatly overfished and lifeless.

The evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let no longer be there lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day 

from the night.

The evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto no place.

The evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, Let there no longer be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it not divide the waters from the waters.

The evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And in the end darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God did not move at all upon the face of the waters.

Thus ended the seventh and final day.