“A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature to never
quiet down.” That’s Russian poet Osip
Mandelshtam in his essay on Dante.
How’s everything feeling today in your
Canada, on Canada Day?
I’m in the Bibliothèque Nationale,
hunched over the same copy of Matrix
Magazine for the second day in a row,
reading the poems of Suzannah
Showler.
Aisha Sasha John’s
sequence is punching a hole through the room
right now at this bar in Toronto.
John Wall Barger
is reading in Halifax, walking us through
the memory of a recent massacre overseas, at
the end of his litany saying "I would like
to sing your music backwards."
How’s everything feeling today in your
Canada, on Canada Day? Me? Not so good, not
so good. Regarding the current political
climate, I have my laundry list of quotable
grievances and fears.
But when I first cracked the spine of Sara Peters’s 1996,
I felt all of the cold rain in Antigonish,
and that was a very good day. The day that Elena E. Johnson’s
envoys from the Yukon backcountry came
across my desk during my short tenure
editing with The Fiddlehead was also
a very good day. And when that big bank put
out a chapbook including a few of Vancouver
resident Raoul
Fernandes’s poems on the web, I had to
track down his profile to try to say thanks.
Transparency isn’t necessarily what any of
the following poems are after. Poems are
only ‘transparent’ insofar as their readers
believe in the concept or construct. For me
the thrill of experiencing a citizen going
public with what I perceive—rightly or
wrongly—as an effort towards that concept
(or construct)—as reader or writer, as
speaker or listener—never quiets down.
And cheerleading like this isn’t change. And
poetry isn’t necessarily politics. I don’t
know these six poets well or what each of
their separate artistic intentions—fluid,
evolving—actually are, but their poems have
added a shade and a depth to my concept of
‘country’ at specific points during the past
year or two. Years where I’ve needed it.
“A good education is a school of the most
rapid associations: you grasp things on the
wing, you are sensitive to allusions—this is
Dante’s favorite form of praise.”
That is Osip Mandelshtam again; whose words
outlast his time.
