The Globe Reviews Our Spring Poetry

POSTED ON 08/04/06

POETRY The avantest of the avant-garde

SONNET L’ABBÉ

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists By a. rawlings Coach House, 111 pages, $16.95

The Theory of the Loser Class By Jon Paul Fiorentino Coach House, 84 pages, $16.95

Lemon Hound By Sina Queyras Coach House, 103 pages, $16.95

Toronto’s Coach House Press, once the hub of the burgeoning Canadian literary scene, where young future icons like Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels first published poetry, is now home to Canada’s best neo-dadaists, post-feminists and post-postmodern deconstructionists. This spring, Coach House offers three new titles that seek to define the latest in our nation’s poetic avant-garde. “A hoosh a ha.”

These not-quite-words float in the middle of a blank page -- the opening of a. rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. On the next page, “a hoosh a ha,” “a hoosh a ha,” is scattered five times. The page after that adds a few more, then a few more, until the last page of the section is nearly black with these onomatopoeic brushes of wings. The simultaneous sonic and visual representation of butterfly flight works perfectly, bringing us into both the formal and thematic concerns of the collection, capturing both the fluttering subject and attention of the reader with lightness and grace. Wide Slumber then moves through six sections that explore states of sleep in counterpoint with the life cycle of lepidopterae, the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths. The egg state is compared to insomnia, the movement from egg to larva is set against dyssomnia (trouble falling asleep), and so on until the emergence of the adult insect is offered as a kind of awakening.

Rawlings spins filamental connections between insect modes of being and states of sleep by excavating the scientific and sensual language around each concept, then using the page to orchestrate back-and-forth movements between her two interests. Her experimental placement of the text in blank space, here forcing the eye to flit from word to word, there forcing the reader to dig for whole words among clusters of letters and phonemes, makes the reading experience itself mimic the fluttering, beat-beat motion of both flight and electroencephalographic waves. The unexpected juxtaposition of these two realms of animal experience is interesting enough, but rawlings’s ability to reproduce, using the most clinical terms, the to and fro of a frankly copulative energy pulsing through both worlds is often breathtaking. Vulva rhymed with larva, parallels of penis to proboscis -- this is one cool collection, a fresh combination of unashamedly brainy and unabashedly horny.

Jon Paul Fiorentino’s fourth poetry collection, The Theory of the Loser Class, aims to “document the tribulations and insecurities of everyone’s inner geek” and to map “inner states of urban ennui.” Even if we all do have an inner (or not-so-inner) geek that could use validation, the “psychic terrain of abjection” this book maps may not be one all readers will be able to lay claim to.

The title of the book plays on economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” made the observation that while every society necessarily values tools and skills that support life processes, every society also perpetuates a status structure that values people according to their ability to display their own distance from productive labour. Veblen becomes a character in a poem, imagined both as a suburban kid once known by the poet, and as theoretician referenced in support of the angry poet’s apprehension of himself at the losing end of the consumerist status game.

Interestingly, The Theory of the Loser Class is Fiorentino’s least accessible poetic work to date. His style has moved further and further to the abstract end of the spectrum with each of his collections, but so far, the general reader willing to do a little work has always been allowed into his self-interrogations. Though still often playing the smartass, Fiorentino has until now spoken as a relatively humble fellow member of a larger population reliant on pharmaceuticals and mass culture to numb itself against the friction of social intercourse. Now, however, he’s “tak[ing] the piss with Von Humboldt . . . exert[ing] shun tactics, dark leisure, snob method.”

Loser Class’s heightened abstraction would be fine if abstraction were left to move us as it does best: through impression, mood and sensual affect. However, one still senses a rhetorical urge in this voice, an urge to convince that loses its persuasive power by refusing, for the sake of a rarefied aesthetic ideal, to reason out its points.

Ironically, Fiorentino’s diction and terms of reference reproduce, textually, the very display of distance from labour that would brand him at least a partial winner in Veblen’s status economy. Perhaps that’s the point: to appreciate the text is to become a member of the consolation elite, comprised of those who conspicuously waste time and education on a poetry of syntax ruptures.

Fiorentino is smart and deft; I just don’t buy the self-loathing. His argument may well work for those who prefer their high culture apologetic rather than decadent. I find Fiorentino most winning when at his most playful. I’ll forgive much of the guy who calls Amway and Safeway salespeople “Amwegian” and “Safewegian,” and who invents the adjective “Winnipeggiest.”

Of these three titles, Sina Queyras’s collection Lemon Hound shows the most restraint, achieving a lovely balance between lyricism and experimentalism, all the while unfolding a fierce intellectual and imaginative engagement with the work of Virginia Woolf.

A master of the short sentence, Queyras writes prose poems that are deceptively simple to read. The book opens with a visit to a lake, rendered in clear, descriptive language that seems born out of the West Coast lyric tradition: “Balsam poplar, tamarack -- they all look the same from the window. Jack pines feed on fire, she reads, and wonders if this is all second growth.” But this is the lucid moment before the dreaming starts, before she goes under surfaces to “enter into, finally; [and] tongue this idea of who she is.” Water waves are an image entry point to the waves of imagination and memory to which the poet is about to surrender. Queyras builds poems by layering images one atop the other, by echoing and repeating phrases -- “If you embrace all, oarlock and tidal. If you look for light, spleen, splint.” Sound and image settle like sediment into dense blocks of text. The reader is led through nuances of mood: Some journeys are spirals that return you, somehow changed, to where you began; some are incremental, where one lives a thousand small details inside a brief moment. The overall effect is tonal and painterly; I was reminded of Mark Rothko’s colour layered on colour. Like Woolf in her poetic novel The Waves, Queyras is not after story, or an argument, or a static statement on womanhood or personhood. Whether in sketches of girls and mothers or in imaginings of Woolf’s childhood, Queyras writes to share a profound sense of witnessing. Her problem is purely poetic: to represent in language the embodied depth of the modern moment, to capture the simultaneity of many truths and sensations happening at once, and to do this using the gestures and commonplaces of real life. She takes a hypnotic, almost hallucinatory approach, and succeeds.

Sonnet L’Abbé’s forthcoming second collection of poetry is Killarnoe. She teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Toronto.

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