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Glosas & a few words about rejection

I’ve been working on a glosa arising from a quatrain by our late lamented high priestess of Canadian poetry, Gwendolyn MacEwen. An interesting thing, the glosa. Aside from Marilyn Hacker, who seems to have tried every form invented, you don’t really see them much by any but Canadian poets. That PK Page has a lot to answer for! In her inspiring collection, Hologram, she defines it as a stanza form, based on a quatrain by another poet, consisting of four 10-line stanzas where the 6th and 9th lines rhyme with the 10th. (Pah, child’s play, sez I after wrestling through 9 stanzas of terza rima..)

But my research tells me that it is also considered pretty much a nonce (love that word) form, also known as a glose (that seems to be how the Americans spell it) and that you can use any number or kind of lines as your starting point: they need not even be poetry. Neither is there any law that says the stanzas must be ten lines or follow any particular rhyme scheme.

The art of it is, I think, firstly to find a way to make the source lines your own, so that they have – fully – two lives; and secondly to walk a fine balance between bringing your poem to its own life and paying appropriate tribute to the source poet’s words. Choosing those source lines is difficult enough, and it’s good to know we can look beyond quatrains for them.

Rejection. Ouch: it never stops hurting, but I guess in this world so overcrowded with words we can’t write without it. One of the AWP sessions in Austin that I wasn’t able to make centred on The Resilient Writer, a collection of interviews with writers who survived to talk about rejection. Meanwhile, I found a blog about rejection by an editor who helpfully and comprehensively explains the nature and context of rejection letters… in a way that doesn’t hurt… TOO much.

So up here in Fanny Bay we might not have escaped another day of rain, but we did get a bucket of oysters for supper last night, and this morning a real live rainbow!

Chicken and rhetoric

What I was really craving last night – and had defrosted a small flock of chicken thighs in anticipation – was Chicken Jeera, but too late discovered that the nub of ginger in my fridge was mummified beyond reconstitution. Claudia Roden to the rescue! Her Mediterranean Cookery has been endlessly helpful to me in the past, and last night she gave me Pollo al Rosmarino, which instructs that a couple of sprigs of rosemary and a couple of halved cloves of garlic be heated in a mixture of butter and oil, to which you add and brown your chicken pieces (I had 6 thighs), and then throw in a glass of white wine, some salt and pepper, and turn it down to simmer for half an hour. Very nice it was, molto facile; eaten with potatoes, onion and zucchini cubed and cooked in lemon, butter and garlic, with a bit of fresh asparagus, it was just the thing to end the day.

Anyone who read Jill Tedford Jones’ article about Elizabethan sonnets and country and westen lyrics may have been as intrigued as I by the sheer number of rhetorical devices named in the piece. We use them in our poetry all the time, without necessarily knowing what they’re called. Tedford Jones speculates that “the student in Queen Elizabeth’s day could probably easily identify and create more than a hundred such devices,” while I could define perhaps half a dozen. So I’m going to work through these ones, consciously injecting one or two (devices, not terms) into new poems, and who knows, if you’re really unlucky, perhaps make my conversation more polysyllabic from now on. I found a couple of helpful sites – American Rhetoric and The Forest of Rhetoric – to help me get started. Here’s my Greek chorus:

anaphora
anastrophe
anadiplosis
antanaclasis
antimetabole
antithesis
apostrophe
appositive
chiasmus
ellipsis
epanalepsis
epistrophe
hyperbaton
hyperbole
metonymy
onomatopoeia
parenthesis
paronomasia
polyptoton
polysyndeton
syllepsis
symploce
synecdoche

Words and water

Just looking ahead to a weekend’s literary merrymaking in Campbell River. The Words on the Water writers festival, being held in the Maritime Heritage Centre, starts on Friday. Even with a disabled website (some tragically ill-timed mishap involving corporate changes in their service provider ownership, coupled with who knows what associated administrative problems) they’ve managed to sell out their weekend passes and their Friday and Saturday night events.

We’re hoping to get to the Saturday daytime sessions at least, which will feature Evelyn Lau, Jan Zwicky, Claudia Casper, Robert Bringhurst, David Carpenter, Annabel Lyon, Gregory Scofield and Patrick Lane.

Because we can’t get into evening readings, I reckon we’ll be forced out onto the cold wet streets in search of alimentary culture instead. One pilgrimage I am never too sorry to make when I’m in Courtenay is to Tita’s, which I bet is the best Mexican food on Vancouver Island, or I’ll eat my sombrero.

Leonard on form

At the beginning of February, CBC presenter Shelagh Rogers – the best voice in the west? – interviewed our national icon Leonard Cohen about his induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. She talked to him about poetry as well, and he had some interesting things to say about the benefits he’d had from working within the “obligation of rhyme”. “Lift your heart in gratitude,” he says, because it lets you discover congruencies you’d never otherwise encounter. He likes form too:

“Form imposes a certain opportunity to get deeper than your first thought… I don’t have any ideas and I don’t trust my opinions… but when you submit yourself to a form then… you’re invited to dig deeper into the language and to discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion… If you look in the Spenserian stanza for instance, which is a very, very intricate verse form where you have to come up with many rhymes of the same sound, you’re invited to explore realms you usually don’t get to with your ordinary easy thought… I consider my thought stream extremely uninteresting and it’s only when I can discard it that I can say something that I can get behind.”

While you’re hanging around the CBC site, try searching ‘Leonard Cohen’: I stumbled upon a CBC Archives clip of him reciting poems back in 1958…

Some live to travel, others travel to cook

When I was in Santa Fe last September, I took a few classes at the Santa Fe School of Cooking to get me oriented to my new surroundings. Mostly demonstration classes, except for a hands-on session on roasting chiles and pressing tortillas, they were a fabulous introduction to the town and the food, and a great way to pass the morning, ending with a gourmet lunch prepared before our eyes.

Our chef was Rocky Durham, who was absolutely wonderful: a passionate travel resource for his home town, a quirky advocate of southwestern cuisine – though marked forever by his classical French training – with a well-travelled palate to draw on, and of course a life-long love of good food. One of the best parts of the class were the dining Q and A: Rocky gave his unadulterated opinion of any local restaurant we cared to ask him about, and both tourists and locals (there were some in all the classes I attended) shared their picks as well. But if you go there… just don’t expect to leave without a bag of chiles and seasonings from the cooking school’s well provisioned gift shop.

Rocky gave us a few enduring tips for the road as well. One very useful one was to invest in a cheap electric coffee grinder, and another was not to buy ground spices, but rather to roast whole ones (cumin, cinnamon, oregano etc) as needed in a dry pan and then grind them in aforementioned grinder. It can be cleaned easily, he said, by whizzing a spoonful of plain white rice or salt or fresh bread crumbs. Works like a damn.

One of my classmates, by a strange coincidence, was an American expat living in London, who works at Divertimenti, a stellar cookware shop that has branched out into cooking classes. Though I still have some of their cookware, I’ve never attended their classes, but I have been to some at a much beloved cookbook shop in Notting Hill’s Portobello Market, Books for Cooks, which were endlessly interesting and delicious as well.

And now, after a morning canter along the Gorge with old Anton, I must return to a meditation on rhyme. I’m giving a short presentation on rhyme to the form class on Wednesday; so far I have identified 34 kinds of rhyme and around 40 poetry forms that use rhyme (including 5 different sonnet forms). My favourite kind of rhyme so far is Procrustean Rhyme: rhyme on words which have no conventional rhymes. Uses the method Procrustes used on his victims: stretching them if they were too short to fit his bed, and lopping something off if they were too long. So you end up truncating words (enjambing them awkwardly with hyphens) or extending them into phrases.

Cauliflower and cumin

Two of my favourite things. Is cauliflower brain food because it looks like brains? And can one have too much cumin in one’s life? So I was delighted to come across a quick and easy recipe for Cauliflower Soup with Toasted Cumin and Lime. With fresh lime juice, it puts, in fact, three ingredients I like all in one place. A wonderful smooth soup, very pretty and zippy. And it’s vegetarian (if you substitute vegetable for chicken stock) and wheat free. I personally would be reluctant to lose the cream but you could omit it from a veggie portion and make it dairy free as well.

If you want to feel even better about eating it, try buying locally grown cauliflower if you can. Here’s a clever site where you can log your Food Miles. Not only do you support local farmers, you cut pollution and transport prices, and get fresher food to boot.

Back on Epicurious there was also an intriguing little snippet about cooking an egg in a glass of vodka (who thinks these things up??)