I have always had a fondness for Shakespeare, and a few key phrases of verse from him and other poets remain ingrained in my mind. They pop up at convenient moments when those few words perfectly capture the situation or emotion. In moments of frustration and depression, I have thought: “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/ seem to me all the uses of this world,” like Hamlet. Reading Whitman’s “Song of Myself," I have found the line “(I am large, I contain multitudes)” to be a way of understanding my own contradictions. On another level, the images and fun with language make William Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright/ in the forests of the night” and Lewis Carroll's “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said/ ‘To talk of many things: /of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – / of cabbages – and kings’” the perfect embodiment of W.H. Auden’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech.”
Yet, while I know that the best poetry remains alive in the mind, I don’t seek it out; and I’m not alone. Contemporary poetry is a rather marginalized genre; the broad audience of people who buy and read books tend not to consider a quirkily titled slim volume of verse the ideal accompaniment to a cup of tea and a moment alone on a lazy afternoon. Those who do read and appreciate poetry have overcome, or never experienced, the vague sense of intimidation that stays with me – my concern that I’m not quite qualified to properly understand what the writer is trying to convey, that I might miss some key reference point and fail to understand the strength of the work. (Surely, as a published work, it must be good – or at least appreciable.)
Where did this ability go? Historically speaking, poetry was created for and sustained by the masses. Meter and verse were employed to make stories easily memorable and, therefore, repeatable and performable in the days when few could read and write. With the shift to printed material, the forms that, when recited orally, emphasize certain words and establish certain moods and emotions become less obvious and effective. Prose writing allows authors to give greater detail to the emotions and scenes they convey, and thus the meter and rhyme of language fall away in all but the most lyrical writing. I’ve become accustomed to all that additional information, reading without needing to notice the pattern of the sound. Poetry requires a different mental position than prose: Becoming attuned to the emotional effects of the rhythms in speech, and immersing oneself in the linguistic play.
Despite its shift in stature, poetry still holds a place in the cultural library. While prose has become the preferred medium for novels and non-fiction writing like biography, history, and science, there remains a particular effect and power that can only be communicated through poetry. I hope to become more appreciative of the art myself, because I do love language, and poetry is first and foremost an expression of the music and power in every word and phrase.
Katherine Wootton is a writer, filmmaker, and bookseller.
****
Wandering through language
The Alphabet Game:
a bpNichol reader
edited by Darren Wershler Henry and
Lori Emerson
Coach House Books
321 pages, $21.95,
Aaron Tucker
Alphabet Game, The: A bpNichol Reader is exactly that: a game, a playful and clever cross-section of Can-Lit legend bpNichol’s work, a continuous exploration of the pun as a means to shift and re-invent language. His ongoing passion for language and need to bring written and oral works to new and unexpected places propel this collection, at once humorous and rich in underlying pathos and personal resonance.
The work begins with The Complete Works, which is a list of all the letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation on a keyboard followed by a note: “all possible permutions of all listed elements”. From the outset, the reader is drawn into Nichol’s base poetics: a special attention to the letter and how it can be constructed and combined to make sense. The challenge to traditional meaning-making courses throughout the whole work; the reader is asked to constantly reconsider the way she reads and receives text.
For instance, ABC: the aleph beth book takes each letter, enlarges it, then rearranges multiples of that letter into overlapping, gorgeous poems. This takes the reader’s expectations of the letter as a singular unit and re-imagines it as an abstracted pictorial arrangement, defusing the initial denotation of each letter and infusing it with fresh considerations.
What keeps the book compelling is the undercurrent of sadness, partly due to his untimely death, but mostly originating from the denser works included, like Nichol’s prose poetry Journal and Still. The sixth book of his life-long work, The Martyrology, is particularly moving. The lyrical work has the prairie landscape as a background to Nichol’s personal life, referencing his wife Ellie and his children:
“who to, Nicky?
only the future
invisible as my own
the first child died
the second awaits its birth”
As a collection, The Alphabet Game is thorough, covering Nichol’s entire body of work while providing excellent introductory points for those unfamiliar with his poetry. Included are his formative works, such as samples from The Martryology and concrete poems, as well as the author’s letters and afterwords that help to further illuminate the texts. The book is also useful for those who have some of the more popular works (such as Selected Organs) but can’t find more obscure works like Translating Translating Appollinaire and The Other Side of the Room.
The main issue with the collection is the lack of dates directly attached to individual pieces, an omission that makes it difficult to observe the chronological progression of Nichol’s work. However, the editors’ notes and notes on the poems give excellent insight into the construction of the work. In conjunction with this book, an excellent online bpNichol archive has been launched at www.bpnichol.ca.
The Alphabet Game and the web archive provide access to a deep, staggeringly diverse, and complex body of work that respects the multitude of readers’ tastes and interests while still remaining true to the idea of play and potential that language always holds.
Aaron Tucker is a writer and reviewer who lives in Toronto.
