Encore Literary Magazine

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

The Interior of the Empress Theater, NDG 

Lunch hour. Nikas on Christmas Eve. Alexandra the waitress has one of those rare grins on her face, the one that says the world is too crazy even for her to comprehend, so, why fight it? Or else there is liquor in the kitchen and she has been helping herself between customers. Eddie the cook, after I inquire as to his well-being, says he has been battling a turkey since five in the morning. Since I am not aware that any untoward addictions or existential dilemmas beset the man, the turkey to which he refers must be the turkey the restaurant intends to serve up for its dinner clientele, the loners, the flotsam and jetsam of Sherbrooke west of Decarie, a neighbourhood which is seemingly subject to different orders of barometric pressures than, say, the neighbourhood of Westmount. (Or else, NDG has been the scene of one of those thought-experiments to do with the laws of physics and the nature of time, to wit: that the Empress Theatre modelled architecturally after Tutankhamen’s tomb, home at various times to vaudeville, porn, art cinema and regular flicks, is in the area, was always in the area and will always be in the area here, there and everywhere. That there are no such things as events that we generate; rather, we simply bump into our moments of farce. No need then for a moral code; it would be useless in any case. God has got His eviction notice; and we, little darlings that we are, are always getting born, always getting to the Cavendish Mall, always getting dead.)—

I have been battling, after a fashion, the prose of so much left of centre on-line screeds. I am trying to determine what, if anything, is being said with respect to the new fascisms, and whether or not they are a threat to the so-called democratic process, or have already done the dirty deed and fatally shafted the notion of equality under the law and so, is the new sheriff in town. It is a conversation worth having, although there are political minds who suggest that those who wish to conduct the conversation are paranoid nutters. Still, because so much of the conversation seems to be made of endless runs of compound words, frilly abstractions, boilerroom theoretics – as if the German language has swallowed the English language entire – I do not hold out much hope for clarity on the matter. As for the writings of the right of centre, we here pass them over as an alien sort of jungle fever—

I had a Karl Ove Knausgard to peruse, but something about the book’s cover put me off. An instance of some unintended consequence of marketing? Title on the cover of said book: A Man in Love. In white block letters against a dark background. Then the tortured Nordic countenance, that of a long-haired, bearded male who is either a male German feminist or a serial killer. Then the blurb words: compelling, rewarding, maddening . . . breathtaking. Sure, I know, I am not meant to take the words seriously, just as I know pretty Christmas lights have everything to do with sales and nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of a religious ritual. And then, at the bottom right-hand corner of the cover the sub-title: My Struggle: 2. And yes, so was Mein Kampf a struggle, literally, inasmuch as the German of the Norwegian title translates directly to the English of ‘my struggle’. Well, unfortunate word-play perhaps. The book in question may be absolutely brilliant, the prose unrivalled for intellect and literary quality, but even if so, the cover inclines me to opt out; I cannot bring myself to crack open the book‘s pages lest I contract an incurable disease or begin to subside in the muck of some European sty, the literary imagination picking at its fleas. And then, every so often, or much too often, the North American imagination desires to import those fleas so as to have something to pick at too. Otherwise, I have no idea what the book is about though I have heard rumours—

James-Sutherland-Smith (who authored In the Country of Birds, Carcanet, 2003, my copy of which has been spirited off my A-list shelf by some unknown agent) from where he resides in Eastern Europe sent me a long and intriguing poem of his to read for my reading pleasure, the covering e-mail stipulating that he is in open revolt against ‘identifiable narrative’, and in this instance, I believe I ‘get’ what he means; that he has no intention of reinforcing yuppie expectations of their bedtime prose by way of Atwood or Dan Brown or the like, let alone bevies of neo-classicizing rhymesters attempting to bond with life’s hallmark moments via verse and so, it is conceivable that no one but out of the loop connoisseurs like myself will ever take Mr Sutherland-Smith seriously, though there is nothing really experimental or willfully inaccessible in the poem he sent. It opens with the lines: 

It’s the most baroque of times / It’s the least classical of weathers. / Nobody’s been promoted; some have gone to remote housing estates / to open cardio-vascular fitness centres. / All of us are to lose a belovéd friend / in three subsequent volumes—

Speaking of which, is not Trump a performance poet par excellence? For all the harm he has done and could still do, he has done the electorate invaluable service, exposing the sham that is politics and the aforementioned, so-called democratic process. If, as Kenneth Clark the art historian posited in another era and was swatted about for alleged eurocentrism, civilization is the product of a confident people, it would seem that Trump is a standard-bearer of the same, just that he is so, so, so a parody of princely equipoise, no Lorenzo, no Duke of Urbino, no Joe Dimaggio; no Dapper Don—

 I have finished with a book which declares of the Romans that their concept of maiestas (weakly translated as majesty) was always the prime motivation for their wars. Replenishing the treasury, while important, was a secondary consideration. That the Romans could only feel secure in their position if they were seen as, hands down, top dog. Hence the brutality of their wars, especially the retribution they visited upon those who took issue with their top-doggedness. Well, as children of economic determinism, we are likely to expatiate on oil and regime change, on this and that order of business as entirely rational excuses for hostilities and so, discount every casus belli that would appear at first blush irrational and beside the point, war being an extension of political reasoning, top-doggedness by other means. Every age seems to get the minds it thinks it requires, and we have got our Wall Street minds and our high-tech minds, as these minds, to be sure, will save us from ourselves; but that if you have a mind for Moby Dick or Sappho’s apple or flying buttresses, very likely you are a drag on the economy and an impediment to the general thrust of civilization. Say, did troubador poetry create a civilization or was it merely the by-product of one, in the way that talking sponges are at the core of ours, as are tweets and Dr Phil? From another book through which I have been sifting in fits and starts: 

Yes, that explains too, the failure of Rome, not in art only, but in life, in government. To the heart which would refuse to look on just that with indifference—that and the rest—the future belonged. Yet we may well ask ourselves, if only to avoid a kind of vulgar self-complacency, what latent cruelty we still entertain—which in certain circumstances might induce us to do the like, or at least to find excuses, reasonable and comforting for an indifference, there certainly, not less criminal than action itself. And remembering the brutalities of the modern world we shall do well not to flatter ourselves before the Romans—

Rome, third edition, Edward Hutton. A book of sepia-tinted sentences. Even so, and though I do not know to what extent the atrocities of the 20th century coloured his view of things (the date for the book’s first edition given as 1907; the date for the 7th and last edition given as sometime in the 1950s), I will take Hutton‘s words, however mincing they may sound to wise guy ears, over and above any amount of sociological and economic hemming and hawing over what boots it for late stage capitalism. 

Received: a boxed, two-volume set of poem books privately published in Jerusalem, titled respectively as Notes from the City of God and A Little Bedside Bestiary. Very rogue. Pan-like wanderings through the biblical; through the myths of the Greeks, through the present-day literary facades. With colour plates. Marty Newman being the poet, Montreal-born, 60s refugee. Subsequently he was a denizen of Venice, California, and then he panicked. Plenty of rhyme. Lots of doomsday gusto—

[encorelit-blog]

Three Poems by Gerry McGrath

Gallery Space by Zachary Knoles

By Numbers

Rain dashed the window and flushed away the view, such as it was – clothesline, ditch, riverine road, the neighbour’s house and stable, a sorry ewe.

Field, ditch, snow-heavy canopy, ice-laced reach of water and buoyant cloud-rich sky were promised in traceries of line and a gnat-count of numbers. (Every man a Rembrandt! The box boasted.)

Half-drunk on oils, I painted past the season I was in, but came back long enough for supper, quick work with a spoon.

Dilettante

Buy just enough paint for one canvas, its surface not to exceed a certain size.

Dine out on one poem of sufficient wit to cause dessert to melt just a bit.

Stay with the story you’ve already told even though by now it’s growing old and taken to the polish you’ve applied at parties until the hostess nearly died.

Make sketches of what you intend to do, but don’t do them. Less is more, so less of your stuff means more of you.

When taking French, two dozen words will do to flavour speech and mint an aperçu.

Canadian Content

Our broadcast regulator warns our porn channels are insufficiently Canadian. We’re failing short of thirty-five percent, our hard target. The nation is not being served. So, forget the lack of speaking parts – we need more Canadian lumber in the yard. Too much truck with imported arts will bring us to our knees. We’ll not sow our seed at pleasure’s ports, we’ll slip and lose our grasp of the nation. Is not the beaver ours after all? Why should the Yanks and Swedes swap in their pelt for ours? Damn infamy, this assault upon our shores, quotas violated, flesh culture compromised. Jobs, of course – gainful employment is desired for our own homegrown blue crew. Why should they have to go abroad for work when eight-point-five hours a day of broadcast time are theirs to fill? Not that we’d notice in the end the provenance of pubis or of penis, or from what side of the 49th parallel our fellow was fellated. In the absence of flags, there’s no saying how we tell one birthday-suited citizen from another. This is where our guardians come in. Firmed up with fact and figures, they’ll see us safely grown as a country not entirely silted under by foreign loam.

Jerry McGrath is a painter and poet has written art criticism for Vanguard, C Magazine and Parachute. His short stories have been published in the Antigonish Review. Another post by Jerry McGrath.

Zachary Knoles is an artist and visual designer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied art at San Jose State University, where he earned a BFA in Animation/Illustration, and he currently works as a UI artist in the video game industry. You can see more of his work at his website, artofzacharyknoles.com.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

Winter by Jasper Johns

If you have been thinking there must be something more to life than culture wars, the chances are good you have a point to carry at your next fondue party. Moreover, you might find yourself receptive to the cheese in a recent Chris Hedges  screed at Truthdig. It has neo-liberalism in its sights and the liberals who sold out the franchise. For all that, Mr Hedges is a dour and humourless man of words, given to finger-wagging at mild-mannered academics and artists and the like who are, perhaps, more interested in tenure and grants and PC protocols than in matters of economic justice. I wonder if I might not find his revolution-to-come as stifling and trifling to the spirit as a catechism class on anti-depressants. As for Trump and all things Trumpery, this man is not necessarily the fascist who seems to be giving a fair number of talking-heads the heebie-jeebies of late, but he, with a little help from his cohorts out there on La-La Drive, just might have the dirty 30’s stashed in his vest pocket like so many loaded dice, a game of craps in the offing. Could be. Just that we here are a little leery of calling out that the sky is falling, though it does seem a little askew—

Morning. Nikas. Rain and gloom enough. And it is as if the middle parts of the fair nation-state collapsed, the west coast rubbing shoulders with Salaberry-de-Valleyfield. Eddie the cook’s foray into the construction world seems to have been rather a short foray, as he is re-established in the kitchen, cracking jokes aplenty, Irish Harpy all smiles, her morning coffee no hollow ritual now. I still have not succeeded in explaining to myself how it is that poets like Yeats and Pound managed to get themselves transfixed by fascism’s hypnotic glare, but now and then a glimmer of an answer teases me, usually when I am in the presence of TV fodder and the more gamey offerings of pop culture in conjunction with ‘shaming’ politics; and then one might throw up one’s arms and surrender wholesale to the Life of the Mind; and still, nothing is explained. Himself an entertainer, Trump aids and abets mass delinquency when it comes to any Thinking Man’s Guide-To-Any-Endeavour. He is not likely to go all Leonardo da Vinci on you, and the ten million dollar Renoir that he owns is simply that: ten million sassy dollars, not upstart art. Yeats was attracted to ‘men of action’ over and above those who sat around and stewed in their intellectual funks and so, for a short while, Mussolini won him over, that is, until fascism’s darker side became more evident and the Nazis started showing their truest colours. Would Pound have viewed Trump as a grotesque clown or as someone with virtues to extol, seeing as the latter man, this most American of Americans (save for the hickory Americans of which Pound was probably a late instance), is apparently free of all equivocation? I have no idea. But is it not the great temptation, even in men and women who could care less about scoring points, to speak one’s mind, and delusion and hypocrisy shrivel away into so much nothingness?

—Otherwise, from an unexpected source, received: the pope’s encyclical on the environment and climate change, as per the following:

Encyclical Letter

Laudato Si’

Of the Holy Father

Francis

on care for our common home—

Unexpected, because the source is such a strict materialist, even, how shall we say, inimical to the church. Yet, he believes this example of papal thinking to be unparalleled, even in the secular world. Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature &c. Well, shiver me timbers. Moreover, Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence has been singing the praises of my source’s poetry which you may find in Mr Kurp’s ‘older posts’ with respect to Robert Melançon, one of Quebec’s best kept secrets—

I have been investigating Marius Kociejowski’s Zoroaster’s Children, Biblioasis, 2015 for suspicious cargo, as it is a book of travel writings and other musings. If I find anything untoward I will let you know—

Bugatti Don dropped by the other evening, full of his inner  Mcgravitas vis-à-vis mass shootings, Polish novels and bad poetry. He behaved himself and vacated the premises early—

The ruminations of Bartolomé de las Casas in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is dreadful reading on account of the fact that it is so relentlessly grim. It seems a wonder that there was anything alive left moving after the Spanish had completed their initial innings on the New World continent. Not even a mouse—

The passing years will, no doubt, pacify this ghost in time. And, when the years have passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies and despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again—

from The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macauley, 1956, and it has nothing to do with Spaniards of the 16th Century and a bit to do with the ‘Happiest Decade’, comprised as it was of TV’s golden era, Beatniks and baseball, Presley, and Joe McCarthy, among other things; you know, those 50s; Soviet tanks, B-52s, Pepsi’s Cold War; the 50s when the liberal mind, even so, was not the equivalence of a toady living in abject terror of offending the wrong parties, persons who could be of any persuasion, depending on the time of day and the seating arrangements; when the conservative mentality understood the limits of American power. I myself suffer from a mild disposition—

Gone: Christopher Middleton, poet and translator, 1926 – 2015. My patience for poetics has long been minimal, but when someone put in my hands Mr Middleton’s musings on what poetry is or is not, I believed then and still believe that they are the finest I have ever come across. I have in mind his Jackdaw Diving, Carcanet Press (my copy of which seems to have been pinched from my shelf by an unknown book thief), and Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal, Shearsman Books. The link below will whisk you on its magic carpet to an obituary, courtesy of Marius Kociejowski, a true believer, who fought tooth and nail with one of the editors of said gazette just to get a minimal survey of the man’s accomplishments across to the reading public—

Link

Left to right: Marius Kociejowski and Christopher Middleton. Photo by Tony Fraser, 2005.

Norm Sibum has washed his baseball cap recently. His novel is The Traymore Rooms.

[encorelit-blog]

Two Poems by Stephen Klepetar

Li Bo and the Moon of Expectation

Tonight we’re in a field, with the moon rising, shedding its ice light where wildflowers sleep. Meadow grasses tickle our ankles

as we wander toward the tree line. Li Bo points to the sky. “That’s the Moon of Expectation,” he tells me. “See how her shadow eyes open,

how her mouth breathes a hopeful song, a prayer? It seems to me her face blurs with tears, proud as if her fine sons had left on a voyage, sailing their shining

ship around the horn of the world.” Crickets hail us in soft light. We expect nothing but the taste of wine. We drink deep, toasting the hope in her ghostly face.

Li Bo Tears Up His Contract

and lets the bits fall in a soft avalanche on his kitchen floor. He’s a holdout.

I make coffee, sit him down, push over the sugar bowl. He says “I’ll walk

the river, following mallards as they swim toward the dam. I’ll make

my home in mud.” I offer toast and cherry jam. “I’ll be a bird,” he says,

“and drill clean holes into the trunks of rotting trees.” He eats thoughtfully

at first, then with great pleasure at tartness and sweet. Carefully we run

the numbers, his demands against risk and time lost, the chance that some younger

voice might take his place on the team. “Remember Wally Pipp,”* I warn.

Later I find him on the floor, folding shredded papers into perfect little squares,

as if this act of tidying could  bring his body into line with old rage and newfound appetite.

Steve Klepetar's work has appeared widely and has received several nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

Weep for Irish Harpy. Morning. Nikas. The heartthrob of her retirement years – Eddie the cook – has gone into the construction trade. So much goes on in this world: nation-building, nation-bashing, austerity finance, identity politics, migrating cooks. No doubt the woman’s daily retinue – her retiree of a husband and her enigma of a son – are not that much cut up over Eddie the cook having flown the coop, but will the new cook know how to poach an egg? She is a tall, sinewy, stringbean of a woman, this Irish Harpy, good-hearted mostly under her knee-jerk politics that veer rightward throughout the course of most news cycles. Still, I am quite willing to wager that bantering with Eddie, refugee from whatever was Albania, was very often the high point of her day—Otherwise, received: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas. I bought it in a fit of sentimentality, seeing as so many books I have read over the years have made mention of the book, and I thought I may as well read the thing myself than get its import secondhand. So I read the introduction in a bar on Bishop Street, one of those so-called Irish joints, and sure enough, my head was sent spinning with the usual aromatic whiff of blood and burning flesh such as accompany so many inaugural sojourns into the New World. But you know – a long time ago in a galaxy far far away—From The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno: 

I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God into a great Judge or Policeman—that is to say, we are not concerned with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but one, but all men are I’s. / Do you remember the end of that Song of the Wild Cock which Leopardi wrote in prose?—the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who never succeeded in achieving belief? “A time will come,” he says, “when this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvelous things achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory remains today, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will fill the immensity of space—&c. 

Giacomo Leopardi

Unamuno goes on to invoke the then new scientific and rationalistic term for nothingness i.e. the thing that was entropia, and a pretty picture it was. And then by implication: how we can neither live with reason nor without it, and this was the ancient ‘irreconcilable conflict between reason and vital feeling’. In any case, just saying. Irish Harpy’s secret lamentations have put me in a mood. Now was Walt Whitman as grand a poet as all that or a joke? And I ask myself: ought I to grab onto all three big volumes of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War? (The American one.) P.M. Carpenter, Distinguished Political Commentator to the south of here, in his commentaries has been unceasingly thanking God or Whomever for Donald Trump, red meat boon to a pundit’s appetite for reveling in the great unraveling of a certain political party, and for making things, if nothing else, interesting. “Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large—I contain multitudes”—Or so the American bard had it, as if he had had a precognition of the media circus and the disintegrations of so much—

Norm Sibum writes the column Ephemeris.

[encorelit-blog]

Three Poems by Nate Maxson

Astrolabe/ Autoclave

Rivers named in pre-latinate languages disappear along with the words for them It’s possible to follow them (from the middle) And see them go vaporous into the salt and dust Having only an awareness of a vague center But the following of it No one ever does that completely Even though it’s what you’re supposed to do,

Be a big shot, use the right tools: mapping it all out Idolizing the stock image of Dante driving on an interstate which is gradually sloping down Yes, yes: all that is very nice But does the city really dream? To build a railway for the dead and never see it’s end Who dreams each spike and each nail? The word escapes me like a sudden anosmic taste of rye whiskey and steam

Obligatory Weather Report

It’s raining as the room goes dim And the rain turns to snow and the snow turns to dust A tinnitus whisper (what comes after) It sounds like it’s speaking in Italian I would stay away from the windows if I were you, Wait until this passes over A record skipping vaguely Like a stone In this Snowstorm One remembers from childhood Curling up and waiting

Portrait Of A Mountain

There are no mirrors On the Brocken, highest peak of the Harz mountains in Germany But they bring them in, rolling them up the mountain in wheelbarrows Covered in white cloths for Walpurgisnacht It’s the stage for Faustian weather patterns (Mussorgsky set Night On Bald Mountain here, for what it’s worth) And it has stone children around the world

Me, I live in the west and my predecessors ( I prefer that term to more familial titles) fled the very east whose fulcrum is the mountain in question They say that if you stand at the top, your shadow will project along the mist: endless, massive and tall The Brocken shadow, we must have seen someone standing up there glowering down at us though my first reference to such things comes from Elmer Fudd

It goes deep down into the earth: the proto-wall, the ur-wall (Brandenburg just an imitation split in half by another pretender), gate to the neutered aether (home of one of the earliest radio towers) And comes back out here, not in a mountain This flat spot in the desert, formation like an infant’s soft skull Years earlier, Bonny Parker and Clyde Barrow grit their teeth preparing to be burnt at the stake on a pile of tires These are things that an abstinence-only sex education won’t teach you Some baby spiders knit parachutes just out of the egg and float away

This is how we separate ourselves from disease, a bad idea in the long run In the far like mist and exhaust fumes being confused as astrological signs Considering hibernation, Before the invention of television snatched up the concept We called it remote viewing This is how we build the walls How we climb the walls I climb up on the roof and strike a pose but my shadow remains small

How the mountain vanishes

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. He is also the author of several collections of poetry, most recently “The Age Of Jive” from Red Dashboard Press. Maxson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

Received: The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron, a book I once owned and certainly read. But then I lent it out and never saw it again. Go ahead, play patron to the arts and culture, see where it gets you. Now as I intend to re-read the book, I wonder if ‘Orientalism’ will infect me? Will the spirit of the text violate a building code that has come into play since I last clapped my eyes on the thing?

 Received: The Assassination of Julius Caesar, A People’s History of Ancient Rome. Michael Parenti, The New Press, 2003. Here is a book with a chip on its shoulder. The thing is, except for that chip, the writing is quite lucid; and, in general, I find myself agreeing with the spirit of the author’s assertions, if not all his arguments. That the patricians, in particular the optimates (the one per centers of the day) were sonsofbitches, the plebs screwed at every turn. That Julius Caesar’s regard for the ‘people’ was at least halfways sincere above and beyond his regard for his own political advancement. That Cicero was a scumbag, this homo novus who stood to lose ground in Caesar’s new world, so he played both sides of the fence just in case. That Cato and his buddies were unregenerate hypocrites, talking up the republic and civic virtue and such and lining their pockets every chance they got. Mr Parenti accuses both ancient and modern historians of grossly misrepresenting the reality of the empire, and his charges go hard against Gibbon as well as Mommsen and even some present-dayers who ought to know better, not to mention the ancient annalists who thought the rabble unworthy of their attentions. He has it in for the poets, Shakespeare, too, the Bard having backed the wrong set of Romans, Friends, Countrymen, your ears, please in his tragedy Julius Caesar, the common people all too easily snowed by groovy rhetoric. Poets, writers of history, the bankers – the lot of them thought the plebs incapable of political judgment and so, dismissible. True enough, it is easy to say ‘I’m screwed’, just as it is easy to be spiritual. But screwed in what ways, why, and to what end? If the plebs always get the shaft, the plebs are not intrinsically better at governance than anyone else, though these days what is there to choose between? (‘You can tweet a revolution, but you cannot tweet a government’ – this a quote from a Mr Krastev and the opinion page of The NY Times.) 

Received: Rome, a Methuen & Co. book from another far distant epoch, written by Edward Hutton. Who was one of those turn of the century aesthetes traipsing around Europe, giving themselves to overripe prose with respect to the overripe ruins. The above Mr Parenti, no doubt, would slight the man for viewing Brutus as an honorable sort devoted to the preservation of the republic (when all he and his peers were up to was running interference for their privileges) and of seeing Julius Caesar as betraying his class. Mr Hutton, however fey his adverbs, did not seem all that predisposed to romanticizing the Roman past, its ruins excepted; he was not blind to the brutalities of a rigged system, though when he writes the best and worst of human behaviour that was Rome, perhaps a bit of teary-eyed mist can be seen to enshroud a sentiment. Otherwise, you can relax, as we here are not necessarily recommending the book unless one wishes some intimacy with how certain people thought at a certain time about certain things—

Received: The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macauley, a feminist and off and on believer in the Deity. This book was published two years before her death in 1958, and is considered the best of her 39 books. Yet another poet thought my life needed comic relief and so, voilà: the book and its send-up of Christianity, Catholics and Anglicans in particular. The chuckles one derives from reading it are of the stealth variety: you find yourself laughing before you realize you are laughing. But there is also much whimsy in the book in conjunction with a deep sense of the tragic, and then the laughter mutes, the peanut gallery rendered silent, the imponderables in control—

Received: Zoroaster’s Children, Biblioasis, 2015, Marius Kociejowski. Travel essays. A continuation of the well-received Pebble’s Chance, published by the same press. More on this anon. Received: Various volumes, academic, on aspects of ancient Rome life and imperial policy, and all I will say for them is that I am on my usual fool’s errand, hunting for prime analogies between two empires widely separated by oodles of time—

Now, London “Twinkletoes” Lunar was seen doing Swan Lake to a bellydancer’s belly dance in a Moroccan dive on Front St in a major Canadian metropolis. A happy spectacle it was, if somewhat alarming. She had invited; he accepted, Uncle Dan kindly picking up the dinner tab, this after he nuked any remaining sub-traces of romanticism that I might still have had in me concerning the literary world. (We writers are so naïve. Do we not know that publishing has nothing to do with anything but the management of disappointment?) He described the relentless pressures that are put upon the editors of the larger presses to produce best-sellers. A book, to hear the man tell it, must be seen to make for itself a hundred thousand smackeroos at least so as to justify the trouble of bothering with it. You can see how this eventually skewers things. Literary quality does not guarantee sales, but trash generally sells, so go west, young man, or young lady. And then there is God’s little acre of ‘good bad books’ which on occasion catch on; and then there is self-indulgence that is paraded about as high art and the reviewers get their ducks in a row; and then there are literary territories attended to by alien laws of physics about which we here have nothing intelligent to say but that, nonetheless, now and then succeed in holding the mind hostage—

Received, as it was received, and by way of Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence, an article somewhat about John Fahey the guitarist, American Primitive, but also about Geeshie Wiley, a female ‘deep blues’ singer of the 20s whose ‘Last Kind Words Blues’ certainly haunts. It is blues played in a minor key mode. And I learned that ‘kind’ in this instance does not mean ‘nice’ but ‘in kind’ or ‘back at you’, the implication being that some blues tends to preserve the more archaic meanings of words—

And we do wish to circle back to Leopardi and his Zibaldone one of these days, and return to the man’s dry asides on the human condition, but we have been waylaid by the now worn-in notion that economics trumps and determines power and not the other way around, as it was for the Italian poet and thinker. “Inverted totalitarianism,” said Mr Sheldon Wolin not so long ago, he a radical philosopher, if no Marxist. Mr Wolin: 

Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement, 

smartly-written novels rather than Crime and Punishment. &c. Well, there’s a thought. And I have always contended that post-modernism (I seem to the last man to still be picking on this particular chapter of human evolution) was not a snubbing of power so much as a capitulation to it, a hankering to have pride of place on power’s dance card; hence the great vacuum we all of us inhabit, that would be a vacuum was it not for the bloated and rotting corpse of the imagination smack dab on the premises. Not that we lack for good writing; there is good writing. Now and then an act of cinema reminds us that film-making is sometimes an art. I have lived these past twenty-some years with a painter who has taught me what it truly means to have artistic integrity, not some parody of the thing that one trots out when the occasion requires it. For all that, it is a world where first principles no longer apply and there is no such animal as consequence and Houses of Cards do not fall down, they double down; just that, without first principles, no matter how often one gets something right, one is always wrong. Quick, grab another selfie, do the market proud—

Norm Sibum writes Ephemeris and has read about Rome more than most.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

There was the so-called blood moon which occupied our eyes from McGravitas’s rooftop terrace. Quasi-pagans gathered beneath a starry sky of small aircraft and their blinking lights; a sky busy with questions. Were we creatures with a yen for religious feeling now and then? Were we just partiers, any excuse for a fete? Beer, pizza, smokes. Oh, the casual science behind the spectacle above us where the moon was being devoured by the shadow of the earth; oh, the awe in vastly disproportionate amounts to the every day humdrum of that science; cameras with flash; oh, the suddenly mortal voices of the boys and girls now tremulous, now thinning out to the sky growing darker. Enjoy those beers: they could be your last. And: oh, wow, oh look. The moon is not a disk so as much as it is a ball, its burgeoning roundness almost menacing. Who would have thought it such a special effect? Could that lunar imagery give a boost to the word elegiac? Mais oui. And it’s made of cheese, didn’t you know? It ain’t easy bein’ cheesy, you know. Oh, the science that has subsumed so much of a literature that capitulated to it. But whatever else might be said, and whether or not one’s thoughts were operating within or without the confines of Atlantic brogue, one understood that, at that moment, one was alive, if life was to be marked and underscored by a celestial happening. Otherwise McGravitas would liven things up. “Burnished,” said our poet of rooftop terraces, “that damn thing up there is burnished.”—

There was also palaver with Labrosse with whom I have not palavered in a long, long while – there at Uncle Jamal’s new establishment downtown, the blood moon old news. His newly acquired cane propped against a chair, we sat under a large, festive umbrella, the rain pissing down. Labrosse looked dapper and frail and full of rue in his 73rd year, long retired from the world of business and inclined now to the philosophical by way of politics. “Trudeau,” he said, “is being managed from behind the scenes in a big way, as he hasn’t got the wits to generate his own talking points. Mulcair is the more promising of the two. Chrétien, ages ago, proposed to Broadbent that the Libs and the NDPers form a coalition, Harper’s tanks in position, but nothing happened. The Conservatives aren’t really a party but ad hoc bands of malcontents. Difficult to manage, but they’ve managed well enough. Seems to me what the people want on both sides of the border is a genuine independent. Sanders comes closest to filling that bill but he elected to run as a Democrat. It’ll cost him.” And then: “And you?” he asked, “how was that literary reading experience of yours?” “Vile,” I answered. 

Yes, Labrosse believes me prone to exaggeration at times, but he understood from my tone that I was not messing about. And now that he had assessed my tone, he was willing enough to go the extra mile: “Oh? How so? What happened?” “Well,” I said, “it wasn’t the writing so much. It was the shamelessness of writers going on and on about the prizes they’d won, the grants they’d received, the publications in which they’d been showcased, and they couldn’t even wait until they repaired to the bar afterwards for a little pro bono comraderie. It was the fact I’d been sent to the wrong venue in the first place, and I’m standing in this bistro sort of set up, the crowd suspiciously less a literary crowd than a ‘going to get down’ sort of crowd, teen-ish to twenty-ish, all looking as if they had been reared on organic vegetables, and only the best-grade weed and micro-brewed ale would do them. A sylph with a high, insipid voice had just vacated the mic she’d occupied on sufferance. It seemed that, in her person, she was the embodiment of the times and its ethos: get a brand, be a brand. Art, music, literature as life-style, the post-Romantic hullabaloo.

 A trio of gut-heavy blue-collar men at a table off to the side (they had most likely staggered into the watering-hole by mistake, and were either struck dumb or were too far gone to extricate themselves) looked to be vastly relieved at the prospect of her exit, she packing up her CDs. It still hadn’t hit me that I was in the midst of an arts fest. Half hour goes by and I wonder if I’m in the right town. Now and then I get a quizzical look: ‘Hey, bud, the bingo hall is . . . .’ Another half hour and I’m thinking that, when the literati do come, they’ll come with glittering eyes; and if some will leave with eyes still glittering, others will depart with eyes gone dark, their candles snuffed, the windows of the soul boarded up, such is the power of poetry. But still no literati, no glitter-in-waiting. Another fifteen minutes or so and I’m thinking I could just mosey up and locate myself behind that there microphone and divest myself of my end of the social contract now that the crowd is being pumped by a guy whacking at his guitar, and justify the fee promised me. But then I’m fairly certain that if I so much as whisper the word ‘literature’ I’ll be stoned to death. I’m thinking they can probably smell ‘writer’ on me.” 

Labrosse was amused by what I related. Perhaps it reminded him of business conventions or election night parties. He replenished his mug with more Krombacher and sighed. He was not unfamiliar with spectacles of frisky Calvinists at play, but I thought I would spare him a blow by blow account of how I finally arrived at the proper venue. I got in the door just in time to catch the ground rules for the evening’s fracas: 15 minute time limit on the readings. Civilization. Gourmet coffee. Bizarre liquor laws—

It was the first rule thrown out the window by all parties concerned, that time limit. Perhaps because it left little room for the listing of the prizes won and perks garnered, as spoken of earlier. I mean, who pays attention to literature as literature any longer? An author is one of those electric billboards as in Close Encounters the sci-fi flick, flashing tonal sequences, perhaps hoping to strike a chord with aliens, but in any case, flashing—“Well,” said Labrosse, “I miss our talks, even if you do go on.” “There’s more,” I said. Labrosse looked alarmed. Could he handle it? 

“To wit,” I continued, “I’m sitting at the rear of the venue, my bladder screaming. Eternities to wait out before intermission and I can relieve the pressure. All the while I’m recalling that Dr Johnson, eons ago, indicated that only a blockhead writes for glory; any writer with his head screwed on right writes for money. I knew I had none of those virtues. I cringe as a revelation hits. Ah, but of course. One doesn’t write for glory; one doesn’t write for money; one writes for club membership and locker room privileges. Speaking of which, at last, I can trek to the washroom. And before the clock strikes the midnight hour and I turn into a pumpkin, slotted to do my bit, I do my bit; I pocket my cheque and get the hell out of Dodge.” “That’s it?” asked Labrosse daring me now, his old Gallic perversity back in the game, “that’s all? I don’t think so. I know you too well.” 

“Alright then,” I said, “there’s still more. Along with the cheque in the envelope I was handed, there was a form to fill out. I was to rate the venue, the promotion of the reading. I was to evaluate the organizational competence of those who coordinated and staged the event, this on a scale of one to five. Why? Because the source of my modest largesse is your taxes and it has to look as if none of it has been poured into a rabbit hole. But the only item I deemed myself competent enough to judge was the venue, which was fine enough; it had exit routes, and should one be on form, the acoustics weren’t bad. The other items? I didn’t know the people, and the fact that I was caught on the wrong end of a venue-switcheroo might only have meant a bad hair day on their part or else they were into guerilla tactics. In other words, I declined to answer. Instead I wrote that, in complying with the ‘marketing survey’, I felt so much less like a writer than an employee of state or a fixer for a pharmaceutical task force. What? You mean all this time and you thought you were, like, a writer? Where did you get off thinking that? I suppose there are years and years of accumulated wisdom, wisdom still maturing, in all the arts councils and art-arms of the government; in all the writerly unions; years and years of know-how and expertise as to what makes for hothouse tomatoes. Does all of it as a consortium serve culture? Or even the illusion of culture? 

Hell, you cannot even Google ‘define state literature’ and get a result that has anything to do with the imperative, at least not on the first page. The distinction between a national literature and a state literature does seem to have become increasingly blurred, or else I’m imagining things. Perhaps there’s no such crittur as a ‘state literature’, one replete with all the requisite platitudes made explicit or left implicit; one that, if not dictating terms to authors, is nonetheless a system in which one seeks to find the appropriate hoop to jump through, entrée to that club to which I alluded. No, no state literature necessarily. True, the arrangement is in tough against right-wing ideologues and reactionary think-tanks and the like who look to garnish the funding for their own schemes and so, the arrangement gets all the more entrenched inasmuch as it is the good people warding off evil in their capacity as the last line of defense against cut-backs and philistinism. But in the end, this sort of literature will prove useless as a genuine witness to what gives out there or will give, beyond the usual gamut of bread and circuses and fashion spectacles and moral ascendancy parades, no matter what politics the writer believes he or she plays at; no matter the condition of the Current PM’s hair. And that’s my humble prediction. Besides, it’s all such a picayune sideshow in comparison to the refugee crisis or anything else that rates a 48 hour news cycle. The more things fall apart, the more hysterical the talking-points. The more name and shame gambits. The more closed-off the mind. I’m thinking it’s time to go back to Square One and mimeograph machines. Which brings me to literature as literature and intelligent commentary on the practice past and present thereof. For that, might I recommend Patrick Kurp’s Anecdotal Evidence. The man does not play the game, which may be the better part of his value.”

 I could see that Labrosse had had enough. A sheen of surrender was spreading across his eyes. He was not yet in game-shape for a bout of protracted verbalizing, having so recently stepped out of rehab on account of bones he broke, taking a header down some stairs. But he was quite sincere about wanting to do it all again, and soon. He did look rather shaky with his cane as he rose to his feet, but he managed to ambulate with dignity, even aplomb. And I accompanied him to the rue Guy metro, he one of the few men I know who does everything he does in good faith—The blood moon had been a sight, he agreed. He had seen it from his daughter’s house in the country. “And you know what they say,” he said, “something like that shows up in the sky and then all hell breaks loose.” “Yes,” I said, “and I don’t believe it either. Even so, every nerve cell in me tingled with apprehension, as if some symphony orchestra had requisitioned my body and was rehearsing Finlandia all along my synapses. You want a level playing field? Finland has the levellest playing field of them all, no Grand Canyon yawning between the obscene rich and the grotesque poor. I know. Not making any sense here. But I’ve been to the front and I’ve seen that making sense is the least of a writer’s concerns. He or she simply has to cause perturbations in the air, as when a tongue does its thing and sound escapes the lips. The audience, hearing nothing, nonetheless pretends to have been touched by art. It’s the literary experience, is it not? That moon the other night, it was another brave new world welcoming us. ‘Kick back,’ it said, ‘take a load off.’ We did. Pizza, beer, smokes. Love of friends. Huge, huge questions. Like where is all this going? Will we love one another in the after life? Was Severus one of the good emperors or just another monster? Is there blood on Jimmy Carter’s hands? Will the Blue Jays blow it? Is McGravitas good for another shaggy dog sonnet?” “Next time,” said Labrosse, eager to get on his horse and have some quiet time in the country where his daughters attend to his needs, “and we’ll sort it out. I can see I’ve work to do to get back in form. When I’m up to it we’ll do dinner. À la prochaine—”

Norm Sibum writes Ephemeris and loves the music of John Fahey.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Elisabeth Gill

        Encore has been mysteriously inactive for some time, which may be chalked up to general summer vacancy of mind, or it may be chalked up to specific sources chaos and particularly to sudden and acute malaise of the appendix, that fearsome disease braved by small children the world over. And just as yours truly has been under the knife recently, so has this site been undergoing substantive interventions behind the scenes. Very soon, we expect it to emerge with vastly improved internal navigation and dashing new looks. As for Norm, he returns in two weeks, after an August hiatus. We hope he will bring solemnity and earnest, disgruntled self-control with him.

      To facilitate this, I trust you will forgive the use of a phrase that makes Norm peevish: Back at the ranch. Back at the ranch, there have been discussions of reconciliation and urgency over macaroni and cheese. To whit, a line misremembered from John Newlove’s On the Death of a Young Poet, occasioned by the death of a young actor of Newton, Massachusetts, a once-Hamlet, once-director-of-Amadeus, and many times life of the party, friend to the disconsolate, at 26. “And I was ashamed / to be alive / with all my sins still on me”. The guest of yours truly interpolated that he knew the feeling: the frustration that drunk drivers, Assads, shoddy poets, and fluffy-mopped politicos were still beleaguering us, while some of the good ones check out. His brother had been killed by a drunk driver. He explained that he hadn’t pressed charges because the driver, who in addition had killed another person, paralysed another, and given himself brain damage, was already punished by his own deeds.

    There’s that maddening Socratic cum Stoic notion, that vice is its own punishment, and vice cannot harm virtue. I’m not enough of an aesthete to believe it, what with torture regimes and mass incarceration. But there’s another piece to the story, too. The guest here yesterday on his way to Guelph dreamed of his brother on the night of his brother’s death: a goodbye. Whether you’ve dreamed about the dead or not, there is lyric precedent for returns-from-beyond. 

       Francis Child, the famous collector of British-American balladry of the 19th century records several ballads in which ghosts return to the grieving: The Wife of Usher’s Well (Child 79), The Lover’s Ghost (Child 248), and The Unquiet Grave (Child 78).

      All three songs have been rewritten recently as Three Little Babes by Joanna Newsom, Falsehearted Chicken by Sam Amidon, and Cold Blows the Wind by the satire band Ween (all hail the boognish). The first two have also been recorded by the very humble Alasdair Roberts of Glasgow.

     If the soul is like the music played for which the body is the lyre, as Plato suggests in the Phaedo--

“And when someone breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony survives and has not perished; for you cannot imagine, as we would say, that the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves, remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and immortal nature and kindred, has perished--and perished too before the mortal. The harmony, he would say, certainly exists somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay before that decays.”

      --new lives for old songs can attest to returns from the grave. Anyways, from these songs and the scholarship on them we learn three important things: first, that the tree that grows by the gates of Paradise, readers, is a birch; second, that its bark when worn as a hat protects the dead from the corruption of the living world, and finally, that the proper time to grieve is a year and a day, no more.

     We have been reading about reconciliation, the classic variety, in Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea by one David Konstan, scholar of emotions in the Greek and Roman world. It is practical reading for those who have harmed others, and those who have been harmed by others. In the face of death (in the guise of limited timeframes) reconciliation where possible possesses a certain urgency: reconciliation with loss, with the corruption of the living world, and reconciliation with those who continue to matter, through ties of blood or affection. I’ve gleaned just two things from Konstan thus far, over macaroni and cheese: “God’s forgiveness, it will emerge, has special characteristics, such as the ability to cancel sin entirely [...]”, implying that lowly human forgiveness never cancels sin, and that what is sometimes translated as forgiveness in ancient texts “more likely involved anger appeasement and reconciliation of differences”. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

     Elsewhere, one Toronto poet wonders why Jesus’ martyrdom should have any effect on the sins of humanity whatsoever. If a person can’t atone in this world, be forgiven on general principles, or pay reparations in one form or another, how does a single death balance the books for so much bad behavior? The mysteries of the church are ever mysterious to me. Or perhaps, over and against lists that get checked twice, three strike systems, or St. Peter’s ledger, etc., persons are more than the sum of their actions. The Shiva at the late actor’s house seemed to suggest this--the way his mother, father, and brother welcomed strangers into their house, packed with people, food, and photos--

     And perhaps we can turn our attention to those seeking another kind of second life: the refugees and migrants flooding into Europe--

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

     Received: The Hotel Oneira, Poems, August Kleinzahler, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux and Music I - LXXIV, August Kleinzahler, Pressed Wafer. The latter book is a collection of short essays on music and music’s personalities, and it covers everything from bluesmen to classical composers and all the jazz in-between. What I have read of it so far charms. The book of poems I have yet to get to, just that the book’s blurb classifies the poet as a free verser; and though I accept that there is perhaps an Old School definition of vers libre, the words, to my mind, only serve to dignify a lot of verbal sludge and sloppy practice and so, the designation rankles. In any case, Mr. Kleinzahler, at first blush, has an ear and a feel for phrasing that belie the notion of ‘free verse’. Another blurb states that the man is perhaps America’s best poet, and it may well be true. Idle thought: but I wonder how often these sorts of statements backfire and turn off more potential readers than they attract—

     Received: Leadbelly, No Stranger to the Blues, Folkways Music Publishers. Received because fished out of a moldering cardboard box in a secondhand bookstore. A collection of combined scores and tablatures. Ancient text. Well, I have always wanted to play Leadbelly on the 12 string ever since I heard Gene Jaleski perform ‘Fannin Street’ and ‘Dekalb Blues’ and ‘Easy Rider’ and other Leadbelly classics, Leadbelly-style back in the 60s; and I have only ever been able to make pale imitations of the same; and now, at least, I have got some idea as to how the man went about it. As for Jaleski, he was a Yalie who got sick one day with some ailment or other and then, while convalescing and bored, ‘picked up’ Leadbelly from listening to old ‘78s.

      He walked away from his law degree (or whatever it was he had signed up for) by way of his Porsche and never looked back until the mid 70s when the window on performing such music in coffeehouses across the U.S. and Canada closed, and we got, oh, I don’t know, the industry.—

     Otherwise, the Moesian, before he contrived to venture off the reservation, Belgrade-bound, instructed me in the politics of how it is we maintain in a ‘blame culture’, and how it is the only virtue remaining to us is the virtue of not getting caught. I have to say I have my own skepticism with respect to the virtues, but to live in a world where there is not even the barest trace of such an inclination in any genuine sense apart from camouflage and posturing – it seems like we are cutting things close to the bone. We were sitting at a sidewalk table outside a hotel on Sherbrooke St, tourist buses idling all around us; and though it was likely just a coincidence, it did seem (as the hour was the beginning of the evening commute) that so many office workers, boys and girls, had that look, that look of there’s gotta be something more to life than this, and I have this terrible feeling there isn’t.

   The Moesian went on to explain that a once internalized sense of guilt (Christian sensibility was what he meant) was now worn on one’s sleeve as a kind of fetish item. Yes, the sun, the beer, the company of a friend. Life was good. And all I needed to do was sit there and listen to a younger man disgusted by much of what he sees. Were his reasons any different than mine when it came to truth, beauty, justice and a whole new ballgame vis-à-vis the hypocrisies? The more things change the more they stay the same, to wit: the walking wounded. And a society mired in its fantasies of right living. And moral ascendancy, which is the only game in town, as ever. Ah now, a bus load of party animals about to collect their prizes. And they are about to unload on my friend and me; and we do not begrudge anyone their pleasures, just that bread and circuses, at times, do seem a poor trade-off for one’s soul: “F—k a bunch of class analysis. You’re blocking my view of the sun and we haven’t even unpacked.” 

     I had been wondering how far Trump would get in his quest for the presidential nomination, and of this moment, it would seem he has exceeded the expectations of most pundits. Clever man. He has sapped every Republican fortress of a talking point and blown it all to someone’s Kingdom Come. Hillary’s? I’m a billionaire. The game’s rigged. I know. I’m a billionaire and I help do the rigging. We’re all corrupt. Just saying.

      I watched the Canadian debate too. Different universe. But not one entirely devoid of farce. There was Trudeau with the air of a man desperate to find himself a date. There was May with the air of a woman who can multi-task and still cannot quite get past the fact that men cannot and besides, Current PM has a tendency to fudge the numbers, the rotter. There was Mulcair who oddly enough reminded me of W.C. Fields chatting up his little chickadee, who had magisterial control of the issues and could not be knocked off his spats, but who, nonetheless, was something of a card sharp. And there was Current PM himself, and he seemed to be enjoying himself too much at my expense (yes, I was taking it personally), his hair seemingly frozen in time. It just so happened that this spectacle of the ministerial hair coincided with my reading of Ann Wroe’s Pilate, an extended meditation on what sort of man Pontius Pilate may have been, you know, the guy who interviewed Jesus Christ. And one plausible profile of the fellow is that he was a buffoon, but a buffoon who had at his disposal the lethal power of the Roman state. There it was, one of the principle tensions that inform human history: the push me pull you tug of war between an equivocator and an entity staking his all on an absolute truth however ephemeral. What has this to do with a coiffed PM? Not much perhaps, but where there is smoke there is likely to be some buffoonery afoot—

     Morning. Nikas. Virgin Radio. The usual pop platitudes. We have a deepening feeling here of things coming to a head, the specifics of which shall be left deliberately vague, lest we court the charge of oracularizing, a literary game to be avoided like the plague. For instance, could be Trump’s brand of demagoguery and what makes it effective is a harbinger of something or other to come or already arrived, and the word that would identify the malaise would be one of the f-words, one of the much over-used and inaccurately applied f-words. But who would have thought, eh? Still, Mr Trump may yet shoot himself in his own toes and anything I have had to say here may then be beside the point.

 So mathematics, which measures when we do not want to measure, defines and circumscribes when we do not want to set limits (even if these are vast, even if the reality is beyond our imagination), analyzes when we do not want analysis or an intimate, exact knowledge of something we find pleasurable (even when this knowledge does not reveal any defects but rather enables us to see that the object is more perfect than we had supposed, as happens in the scrutiny of works of genius, when discovering all their virtues makes them disappear), mathematics, I say, must necessarily be the opposite of pleasure—

     Ah, Signor Leopardi. As ever. Throws a spanner in the works. And along with mathematics, I am wondering if reviewese might be considered another of pleasure’s opposites—

Contributor Norm Sibum has not washed his baseball cap since the last Clinton presidency. His novel is The Traymore Rooms.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

     Morning. Nikas. And soon Alexandra the waitress is off to Greece. She will be off as soon as she pops the toast and brings Irish Harpy her coffee creamer. The referendum, in Alexandra’s mind, has been pointless, seeing as the ‘guy’ is now signing everything, apparently buckling under to EU demands et cetera. By ‘guy’, Alexandra means Tsipras the Greek PM. And I say, “Yes, but at least the Greeks are saying they’re not Germans. Who wants a world where everyone is German? The horror.”

     And well, she gets it, gets it that it is one thing if a country consists of the picturesque, including its people, but that those people should also constitute the Protestant work ethic gone mad? And the look she gives me is the one that states: “He’s a dear lad, but nonetheless, an imbecile, móros, to be taken as an inconvenient fact of nature.” She would not mind being filthy rich, my other-worldly tendencies beside the point, and I suppose they truly are.

     Otherwise, I hear there is to be a re-make of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Is not the world a horror that just cannot stop giving? Even if the flick is to be any good, how can the fountain scene, for instance, come off as anything but a warmed-over bit of retro, of creepy-crawly fetishism? Even if the scene has everything going for it as per all the production values, it will lack utterly the – what? – the frisson, the kick, the rush, the sheer joy of its inception, the spirit of the time it which it came to be—Leopardi:

[Philosophers] believe that man will be happy when he lives entirely in accordance with pure reason. And then he will kill himself by his own hand—

     And you are free to ask what any of this has to do with above. Just that I understand that Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence is ranting on and on about bad, very bad poetry, and I am thinking: “Better him than me is all I can say.”

Norm Sibum writes Ephemeris. His most recent novel is The Traymore Rooms. He seems to be enjoying the summer.

[encorelit-blog]

Two More Poems By Grant Buday

Natural Forces

Behold gravity guide your feet to the path where trees drop limbs like bolts of dead lightning exposing stillborn rings, concentric witness to seasons lean and fat, this deer trail a habit of thought worn smooth with use and shed antlers gathered and carved of a buck that could leap this double-wide I call home in deft defiance of the same gravity that keeps Mars and Saturn in their place.

A Higher Order of Being

No nibbler of tin cans our beloved Bella La Goatsi makes a queenly progress astraddle a ripe and fullsome udder. Suffering no doubt regarding her worth to the realm of milk she selects the high road through the sheep muck, such peasants those beasts bestuck with twigs and dags while she wears her white coat like a royal stole, our dowager Sanaan with the self regarding eye brooking no insubordination or parvenus, rears on her spindled legs and rams aside the rude who eat off the ground while she dines high on the branch.

Grant Buday has published ten books. His most recent novel is The Delusionist  (Anvil Press, 2014) which was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

     Received: Heaven and Earth, An Anthology of Myth Poetry, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2015. It is a rather slim book for a subject as grand as the mythopoeic, but it contains good poems; and I appreciate the re-introduction to the verses of Jay Macpherson, one of the first Canadian poets I read when I came to these parts a long time ago. She seems startlingly sentient in contrast to – enough. 

     Received: one Greek statue, bronze. Of a veiled, dancing figure. 

Third to second century B.C. Ravishing. Absolutely. No, we do not have it in our actual possession—

     Received: bubašvabe. Which it is a word, Serb; which it is a construction meant to be read as ‘cockroach’, one of German mien, and intended to allude to a certain wartime occupation while bestowing opprobrium on the occupiers, as it were. It is an indication, too, of the fact that not all linguistic necessity, not all trash talk, is entirely the brainchild of the theoretical—

     Morning. Nikas. Alexandra is pounding on the counter where she makes the toast. The Greek debt crisis? The news, this morning, of the Charleston shooting?* Some 60 million displaced people wandering about this world? Or is she just sick and tired of waitressing? Now this stands to reason. Yes, sick and tired of Irish Harpy and retinue. Sick of me her most loyal customer. Of the heavy-haunched guy from the apartment above who has much commentary to broach on satellite TV sports patter though he cannot do the kalamatiano. Then again Eddie the cook cracks a joke. And Alexandra, ah, she laughs. Now we have a brand new day on hand, even if our waitress has no desire to cancel history and start from scratch with ideological purity, with Snow White’s serenity, all the dwarves in permanent quarantine. But did Wittgenstein really mean what he said when he said there is no private meaning, just jungle drums and a hot line to the prez in the event of a misunderstanding? Well, the PM has been catting about of late, the world stage his back alley, and if he is Puss in Boots the trickster, perhaps he has a view of Wittgenstein more professional than mine. Perhaps, because of the better polling data at his disposal, his inside track to what really boots it is more inside than my inside track—

     I have recently cured myself of an unaccountable urge to revisit The New American Poetics, which was a 60s anthology primarily devoted to the so-called Black Mountain school of poetry, some of which I probably still have affection for, most of which I bet I would now find unreadable. And then along came Po-Mo, and all was superseded or forgotten. Sent packing to some gulag where all the superannuated gene pools of literature are sent to grow vegetable gardens and count the waves coming in off the sea. They will have been rendered beside the point, as it is now: beside the point. As there is no point. Never has been, apparently. The greatest literary shell game to have ever come down the turnpike – Po-Mo and the Chantays. 

     And further discussion at the Moesian’s of what makes for dated prose yielded no more insight than it did two weeks prior at the Benelux amidst girls with issues and date rapists in cargo pants. But the cure of which I was speaking consisted of me recalling that I once quit the Black Mountain habit cold turkey, and why go through all that again? Why continue to agonize as to whether the anti-imperial pitch was truly anti-imperial or a mirage situated in the lysergically-rinsed imaginations of free-versers? Still, their heavy-lifters, their theorists, and with gusto, ragged on poets like E.A. Robinson from a generation or two previous who just happened to see Moloch beginning to round into shape. Such poets were barred from the Poetry Hall of Fame as, in the Black Mountain scheme of things, they had had recourse to steroids and reactionary rhyme—

     And then, one evening, we searched for Sugar Man, and found him in what few crumbs of humble pie are left to us, were we to speak of – what? the Greek debt crisis? So then, was Sixto Rodriguez, folk musician, possible rival to Dylan, at last vindicated when South Africans flew him over from Detroit and gave him carte blanche, provided him with a series of sold-out concerts, as this bard was, in their minds, a force to bring against apartheid and prudery? Or was he a slut at bottom for the buzz, no matter its provenance? Or was he halfway to being a holy man in the sense that his feet were firmly on the ground and he was good-humoured and good-natured, with or without a sound-system, with or without a cause, with or without a publicity agent? 

Illusions, however much they may be weakened or exposed by reason, nevertheless still exist in the world and play the greatest role in our lives….

And then: 

Man can only live by religion or by illusions. This is a clear and incontestable fact. If you drastically  curtail his religion or his illusions, anyone, even a child at the first stage of reasoning (since children  live mostly only off their illusions), would almost definitely kill himself, and our species would of inborn and material necessity be doomed at birth….

And then: 

It is no more possible for man to live completely cut off from nature, which we are constantly drawing farther away from, than it is for a tree cut off at the root to bear flowers and fruit—

     From Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi. And I am afraid the man, for all I admire his capacity for thought, who may have had the best of the argument in his time, is dead wrong at this juncture. We do live without illusions (or else we have gone the illusions one better with our fondness for fantasy and techno-know); we do live separate from nature or in an altered, re-tooled nature; we value religion not much more than we value poetry, which ain’t all that much, and there does not seem to be any piper to pay for this state of affairs, except a bevy of corporatist wizards by whose grace we are permitted to consume goods and think up more illustrious ways of saying the author of any given book is only a cultural construct. 

     Well then, gas ovens and a bonfire for all those vanities seem to be in order: it amounts to the same sort of dismissal. And who would have figured that spiritual suicide could generate so much profit (for some, to be sure), so much warm and fuzzy collegiality among drinkers of Bud, and get so many pretenders their interviews? Religion aside (the health or unwholesomeness of the thing), what illusion is more pernicious to logic than to believe that your world is inherently stable and always amenable to rationality? Indeed, you are privileged. Your life is sweet. Certainly, your life could be a lot worse. Tomorrow, who knows? And noon, and Alexandra still pounds on that counter, and men want soup and women their due. 

Note: I have been alerted to the existence of a blogsite out of Houston in which literature is daily discussed in a more intelligent and tidy fashion than is the case here. Those interested in this phenomenon can, as it were, google Patrick Kulp and Anecdotal Evidence. Recent commentary seems to centre on Zbigniew Herbert, Eric Ormsby, Dr. Johnson, and even London Lunar is reportedly due for treatment.

* Ed: This post dates to June 17th.

Contributor Norm Sibum writes the column Ephemeris. He has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England. A Canadian citizen, Sibum currently lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

[encorelit-blog]

“A Provisional Epilogue” By Eduardo Milán, translated by Helena Miguélez, Part 3 of 3

This text comes courtesy of Antonio Ochoa, the editor of a new collection of Milán’s essays in translation, forthcoming from Shearsman Press in Bristol. Ochoa also edited a translation of selected poetry by Milan in 2012.

Milán’s essay addresses the role of the poet as witness in historicity, both in the present time, and in conversation with the radical aesthetic independence of poetry from politics.

     I believe this is a knowledge acquired through writing, that is, in this case, bearing testimony. And bearing testimony, offering it, leaving it as the inheritance of memory for those to come, rectifying it ourselves. In this sense, writing’s testimony exceeds the historical specificity and is transformed into something more than that compromise with the present, which is also our own recognition. This way, writing’s testimony becomes hope, affirmation, a there must be that is not just another repetition, a necessity of necessity, to see if through this double invocation we will succeed in defeating it and not be subdued by it.

     For the writer who works with poetry as matter, as creation, the issue can become more complex. That poetry is an art that should not give account to any discipline other than poetic writing itself is still a debate repeatedly engaged. And it must be properly situated, this is a direct resonance of the victory for art’s autonomy in the eighteenth century. In fact, within art this is a revolution that parallels, even perhaps surpasses, the French Revolution in transcendence.

     Since the Enlightenment, art has been concerned exclusively with what it can or must know, matters related to its own trade. It does not have to reflect any precept coming from religion, society or history. Art and poetry will aesthetically be concerned with themselves. Interestingly, in historical terms, this particularly self-reflective position was refuted almost immediately both by the Romantic movement and the Symbolist school. The former took the road of a complimentary and totalising exaltation of poetic discourse, and the latter took one of a devastating critique aimed at any attempted conciliation, even one with art itself. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are here primary examples. It could also be argued that Mallarmé is a radical defender of autonomous art. I rather see him as the one who ventured to rescue poetic language from the claws of a worn-out, ultra-canonical language whose significance—if it had any in 1897 when Un coup de dés was published—acted out of preconceptions more than consciousness.

     An art that frees itself from the straitjacket of doctrine or mimetic spasm in order to create what it deems advantageous—the autonomous art that had the upper hand during the Enlightenment— is not the same as an art absorbed in its own signs, that bites its tail just to differentiate itself from other languages. However, a context that produces such an important concept in aesthetic history as art’s autonomy is a liberating one, emancipating in the spheres of thought and human life, regardless of the deserved criticisms of the project of the Enlightenment. In any case, this is no longer our context. Only indifference and navel-gazing, I believe, can produce art that does not attend, or listen, to people’s voices, to any person who suffers the reality that our societies suffer today. Such attention and understanding seem to be filtered through an ethical determination.

Fin.

Miguélez.

Helena Miguélez is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies Bangor University in Wales.

Eduardo Milán is the author of over thirty books of poetry, essays, and translations. Born in Uruguay in the border city of Rivera in 1952, he shared the geographical and cultural closeness of Brazil and through his mother he inherited its language also. In the late 1970s he left Uruguay due to the repressive political climate and the incarceration of this father. He settled in Mexico City where he still lives.

Born in Mexico City, Antonio Ochoa is a poet, essay writer, and translator. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[encorelit-blog]

“A Provisional Epilogue” By Eduardo Milán, translated by Helena Miguélez, Part 2 of 3

This text comes courtesy of Antonio Ochoa, the editor of a new collection of Milán’s essays in translation, forthcoming from Shearsman Press in Bristol. Ochoa also edited a translation of selected poetry by Milan in 2012.

Milán’s essay addresses the role of the poet as witness in historicity, both in the present time, and in conversation with the radical aesthetic independence of poetry from politics.

The ‘now’ of Testimony

     Without a doubt poetic writing is a specific language, not an exclusive one, as it does not need to limit itself to pre-established themes or forms. It is specific because it needs, once more and always, to identify itself before the reader’s eyes as what it is. Not for fear of producing a misunderstanding of genres but, rather, for the necessity of not incurring in any ethical omissions. Poetry is poetry—like that, tautologically—and not out of convention that dictates that the thing in front of us with a certain intentional linguistic arrangement is poetry. Poetry is not convention. It is a deep necessity. We know what convention is.

     For the whole of the twentieth century true poetry was also poetry. But it had to systematically face the constant interference of history. In the century of extermination and massacres, of decentralised ceaseless wars, of extreme manipulation of conscience—symbols of a century which, everything seems to indicate, will be perpetuated in the present one unless we try from now on to do something to prevent it—the poetry that survived did it by reminding itself that it was poetry. That memory, a resistance against forgetting its own being, rescued poetry from the persistent dragging of history. That was part of the rescue of poetry, the proper rescue by its being a specific language.

     There was another part that already impregnated poetry with a kind of irreversible pneuma: its consciousness of being made by a historical man and not just ‘by man’, a category that, almost like ‘poetry’, presents itself as a given. It is not only that, in incorporating that human condition that has been put into question, poetry would remember punctually and through its specific attributes that it is a manmade language. Vallejo, who was aware of this problem, even in his most ‘human’ poems took some distance from the demanding and insistent humanisation which reclaims what it persistently tries to forget and that emotionally blackmails when it is not mediated by man’s critical consciousness. In the same way that poetic writing emotionally blackmails when it is its own mediating role between man and the world.

     It happens, however, that the present time, today, is radically threatened in its ability to become—this is how I understand it—a time in which human life—not to speak of life in general—can manifest itself without fear. I’m not talking about insinuations or indirect manifestations here, but of concrete evidences and emergencies. Of course, it is not about sudden bursts of dread or epiphanies of fear. No, this matter has a history behind it. And it has a history as long as we remain aware of the presence of history. And then, this awareness of history not only as a more or less coherent relation of events, but also as the planned hegemonic discourse that includes the denial of history itself and the consideration of the present time as perpetual, as a straitjacket or a grid to our conscience before which only an abnegated acceptance is possible, as an already open game of interests and political, geopolitical, economic, social and mental dominance or control; and artistic and aesthetic as well.

     I am speaking of a project, not of a fatality. I am speaking of an intention—an extraordinarily well-orchestrated one, of course, as became clear after the criminal assaults of September 11, 2001, in New York. Yet I am not speaking of a commandment. Any particular game of economic and political interests can acquire an aura of sacredness, as we know too well. Over the last three or four decades there have been insistent discussions in the cultural milieu about man’s necessity to re-encounter the sacred, so why not again, and why not now, ‘sacred’ being a term that can lend itself to any interpretation and any manipulation? Everything can be considered sacred; and above all the use of the concept, the use of the sacred for the sake of projects of control, and especially when the concept is placed in lieu of a consciousness, that cannot be discerned from concrete events.

     But the proposed topic was, once more, the testimony and creativity from the writer’s point of view, not from the agents of control— even if the agents’ point of view is dominant and if their discourse seems like a fable. It is due to this, due to impregnation, due to the aura of fable with which the dominant discourse pretends to coat an abominable reality, that testimony, as a corroboration of a truth that is genuinely at stake, and at the same time as a parcel sent to a future memory, becomes unavoidable.

     Yet testimony cannot just be the neutral retelling of events but must be also an attempt to transform horror into narrative, like a translation for the children of all this ignominy. How to bear that testimony in literature? What must each genre do in order not to become a mere imaginary resonance? How should this conscious writing—aware of itself and of historical reality, this historical reality—be written? What must a writer do in order to bear testimony yet not disappear within it or right after it? How can language stand up in the face of the facts— without ‘dampening’ the facts through a methodical and safe distance from its own language—and not only save itself as language but also avoid the historical fault of not having been sufficiently explicit, a well-known offence which, unless it gets transformed, like in Kafka, into prophetic imagination, is pure and simple submission to fear? And there is too much fear already. I could not answer all these questions.

To be continued…

Helena Miguélez is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies Bangor University in Wales.

Eduardo Milán is the author of over thirty books of poetry, essays, and translations. Born in Uruguay in the border city of Rivera in 1952, he shared the geographical and cultural closeness of Brazil and through his mother he inherited its language also. In the late 1970s he left Uruguay due to the repressive political climate and the incarceration of this father. He settled in Mexico City where he still lives.

Ochoa.

Born in Mexico City, Antonio Ochoa is a poet, essay writer, and translator. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[encorelit-blog]

Ephemeris by Norm Sibum

Mary Harman Clay face.

      How define sensibility? Does a man who possesses a home library have the thing? Can a liquor cabinet well-stocked with exotic tinctures epitomize the quality? Is there sensibility in a speaker of eight languages? The Vancouverite who flies to London every weekend for the operas and Harrods? Someone who hangs about Cape Breton? The Marquis de Sade? Hannibal Lector? Wes Craven? A rapper with disdain in his nostrils? Perhaps sensibility is overrated, but then so is out and out vulgarity as per something like Hard Core Pawn or movies whose merits can only be arrived at by way of rating each their ‘gross-out’ factor, necessitating a mathematical equation of some sort.

      A woman quaintly appellated as Chiara Ambrosio recently informed London Lunar that her generation exists in a state of arrested simile, a depiction of things that certainly arrested me once I heard of it. It is as if the word this is forever unable to locate its that-ness in language or in life, and it would seem to depict more than one generation of hapless true believers and infidels. The Oxford Dictionary has it that sensibility is ‘the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotions or aesthetic influences’. Also: ‘a delicate sensitivity that makes one liable to be offended or shocked’. Well, I have found myself of late expatiating inwardly on the kind of poet who has sensibility but no ear, and, conversely, on the kind of poet who has ‘ear’ but is devoid of thorough-going responses to any aesthetic influence; and it was then pointed out to me (after I made the mistake of giving voice to these burgeoning thoughts) that I was in the initial stages of formulating a screed on poetics. Oh, the horror! Alarm. Cold sweat. Poetics. One might be better off viewing chainsaw massacres.

      So, to put all that out of my head, I took myself to a stretch of Ste Catherine’s that has a rather ‘missed-out-on-the-boom times’ air about it, and amongst the low-enders milling about, I had myself a pint on a badly-appointed terrasse and watched the Fellini-esque in the persons of various ‘low-enders’ going by, as well as other enders bound, no doubt, for grander prospects. I was in a scene from Les Enfants du Paradis. (Because street life is street life, no matter the age, race and class divides, the high rollers and their fashion wear.) Or I was in a scene of David Lean’s Oliver Twist, and there were all manner of Fagins around (wearing oversized baseball caps). Or I could have summoned up Juvenalian satire or Petronius’s Satyricon, but you must be getting the point by now. And if not, you can always avail yourself of urban scrawl.

      And one did overhear outside the CockandBull (now in the hands of a low-rent mogul) the immortal words: “I want to f—k anything that has legs.” Perhaps one would not have heard this sort of conversational icebreaker in the Stone Age, but the odds are good that one would have heard it in a Roman legion camp or at the entrance to a Roman brothel, and the source of these words – a premier stud of the day with baseball cap down around his ears – he simply had no idea that he was that rich in antecedents going back, going back as far as before the Rolling Stones, that chamber group of period electric instruments

      And perhaps in all the seeming chaos confronting one on the news every day, the world looks for its lost symmetry. Failing that, it could do with a cozy stand-off between contending forces. The world will always want its fair breeze, its hammock, its good book. Wrong epoch however. Fantasy commandeers the era, the public thorough-fares of the mind, and besides, Wittgenstein said that there is no private meaning as such, and the soul is a just a word among others. But perhaps he did not really mean to be taken as literally as all that. Speaking of which, it has been a while since I raided Leopardi’s cupboard for a heads-up. From Leopardi’s Zibaldone then: 

It is a mistake to talk about a desire being satisfied. Desires are not satisfied when we have reached their goal, but extinguished, that is, they are lost or abandoned in the certain knowledge that they can never be satisfied. And all that is gained from reaching the desired goal is to know this wholly.

 Did he have sex on his brain. Cuisine? But how did I get from world-symmetry and whatever meaning means, to the dilemma of gratifying oneself without passing through Toronto?

      History (and an answer perhaps to the above question) was on tap last night in the persons of Metcalf, Smith and Blaise at The Word bookshop. These men are writers of fiction and members of the original Montreal Storyteller group. One might also describe them as subjects of a new publishing venture on the part of Biblioasis under the rubric of Reset Books, re-issuings of what are now considered canonical works. Metcalf, dapper in a silvery sort of way, sparked off the festivities with an invocation of the Holy Ghost. It is to say he invoked Hugh Hood as having been the presiding genius of the cabal, Mr. Hood now deceased. I do not mean to make light of this invocation: Metcalf’s tone was intense; it was locked in a no-nonsense mode; it was deeply felt. We are talking lifelong dedication to literature on a number of fronts; one does not quibble with that. Moreover, and just after he accorded to Biblioasis high praise for its work as a publishing house (and it is an excellent house, and is set to become the best this country has ever seen), he then gave out with a resounding dig at poets.

      So then piss, vinegar and a few drops of carbolic acid his syntax, his timbre, his outlook, he sported with the miserable hounds that call themselves poets. He razzed them with intent to maim, injure and otherwise judiciously incommode. All in the name of good literary fun. It was his contention that poets back in the day were hogging all the action and that the writing of short stories was the manlier thing to do. Besides that, short-story writers squeeze more pleasure out of life as they are so much less liable to endless navel-gazing and other pre-occupations of self-infatuation. The short story writers, back in the glory days, were at least sentient enough to prefer boozing and wenching to a discussion of Rilke’s angels and how many of them could congregate on the head of a pin, and in translation too. The spirit of Metcalf’s remarks was well-enough received, just that I cannot quite see it in myself to utterly dismiss all poets as being effete and needlessly effusive and somehow unwholesome, though God knows I have tried. There was then the ‘reading’ portion of the reading. Each man gave of himself without too much fussing about.

      There was no 1) I am now going to read from my laptop, or 2) from my handheld device, and I’m going to kick ass.  There were passages concerned with self-discovery in an exotic setting. There was coming of age in a museum. There was picking the brain of a long-dead South American liberator not Che. It was the statue of a romantic who took up arms,  who seemed to have lived even better than writers of short stories with respect to truth, beauty, justice and sex, the modern world having corrupted one’s best (or worst) impulses and having ruined one’s spawn.

      At the bar afterwards, attendees of the event gathered to pass commentary on political and aesthetic matters. They had it in mind to drink beer. They had it in mind to ask: would Hillary sweep the field before her in her frog march to the White House? (What with all the Republicans in the hunt, it is beginning to look like a mad dash to the sea on the part of a slew of lemmings.) What would she gut by way of deregulation? Could rivals to her left force her hand and she become politically ambidextrous? Just how deep is she in the pockets of the corporate nexus? Would she allow the seal of good housekeeping to be affixed to drone warfare? As for the PM’s glass jaw, is it beveled or does it consist of fumed silica? At some point, the question arose: how does dated prose get to be dated prose? Is it inevitable that all written work will eventually come off as ‘dated’? The Moesian suggested that it was perhaps a consequence of referencing pop culture. American Psycho also dates itself, he pointed out, on account of its enthralled allusions to the music of the 80s. But might not the intensity of the enthrallment transcend the time in which it occurred? When Proust goes on about his spending all the time he could at some Parisian theatre in his youth, one does not necessarily respond to the prose by saying, “Ah, the 1890s or thereabouts, so inimitable, so identifiable. Because, man, Debussy’s music—oh, awesome—” (Or am I going to have to put it to the test and return to those pages that I read some 40 years ago such as might have ruined me in the eyes of my generation of dead-eye Dick novelists?) Now is there anything dated about Achilles’ shield in Homer’s epic? More APA. (American pale ale to you.) A ghost story or two—There followed a discussion of ISIS as seen through the prism of Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’.

     This was followed by a discussion of how Citigroup got to be Citigroup, which was followed by yet more wondering as to why Pound and Yeats were enamoured of fascists, and whether the ‘old left’, the absence of which I on occasion lament, was what had appalled them, just as what constitutes the new left, if there be such a beast, is what generally appalls me, especially when come across via the digital venue of Raw Story and the like, which is all tabloid righteousness and Judge Judy in tank-top garb, and aren’t we the real deal, having the copyright on right behaviour?

      What then are we to make of Talleyrand’s ‘too much sensibility creates unhappiness and too much insensibility creates crime’? Had he art in mind, justice, or the exercise of arbitrary power? Someone once said to me, now that we are back on the subject of literature and what a slippery thing it is when the game is on for the attempt to establish what is good, bad, ugly and indifferent about its products: “Canadian literature? Give it 600 more years, and then we’ll talk.” Even so, not much more than an eye-blink separates Pushkin from Ahkmatova, for instance, and perhaps time has nothing to do with it. Which returns us to the question of sensibility, and if not sensibility, then the capacity for ignoring time and simply getting on with whatever one has to get on with and let the dust settle where it may.

Contributor Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England. A Canadian citizen, Sibum currently lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

[encorelit-blog]

Two Poems By Grant Buday

Thomas De Quincey

They never mention how he was addicted to laxatives as well as laudanum, rarely examine the psychology of living fifty-five years with a brown python sleeping coiled in his colon, stirring only with liberal dosings of bran and hot water, black coffee enemas and green apple stews to goad the snake from its slumber, a life-long project he pursued like an epic, employing an entire regimen of asanas recommended by his daughter in India, the prune compotes employed by Coleridge, nor do the maestros of academe note the fasts that generated as many visions as the Dark Mistress herself. No, the professors judge this unworthy of their magisterial delvings, yielding only an ore of darkly impacted peat devoid of diamonds despite the decades of pressure.

Work Ethic

Don’t think I spend my time wasting my time, not at all, I’m inventing carbonated milk, tea-flavoured coffee, a light fuelled by methane that shines out your ass, the biodegradable toupee, and of course immortality.

Naturally there is foolishness. It may be the essence of a fertile mind that sows itself with every seed gusting past in the wind unedited by restraint, probity, caution, or any Christian virtue. I advise nothing less than flying as close to the source as possible so you see I don’t sit toadish in my caravan failing at crossword puzzles, glooring doomily at the rain and messing with syllables but pursuing art designed to elevate us all.

Grant Buday has published ten books. His most recent novel is The Delusionist (Anvil Press, 2014) which was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.