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poetry

The poetry of job loss

One more note on “luminous” as a poetry cliché: I would like to plead special exemption for Edward Lear, who wins my prize for the best use of luminous in a poem title: The Dong With the Luminous Nose.

A little more comment on Canada House, from the Guardian. I’ve been thinking about why I feel it so personally? Not only are the cuts harmful to the eternally under-funded world of Canadian culture, and not only is it tiresome to see what appears to be yet another new government thinking cultural funding is a conveniently disposable column in the spreadsheet – when as the Guardian article demonstrates, it benefits Canada’s cultural reputation in ways that go beyond the simply fiscal. But firing people to save money is also just a bad thing for those left behind, forced to try to do more with less, after having just witnessed the disposal of their colleagues.

I was really struck by a CBC Sunday Edition interview with Henry Mintzberg a couple of months ago. He talked about how the heads of organizations are axing not just people but corporate culture and corporate loyalty when they impose economic efficiency without regard for the long term health of the organization. While the big guys cycle through the corporate stratosphere collecting their multi-figure salaries and fiscal incentives, those beneath them are left picking up the pieces and selling themselves on to the highest bidder, because rounds of cost-cutting firings have taught them their experience and their knowledge of their organizations are no longer valued.

When you lose your job, you will be appalled by the swiftness with which a judgment can be made between your years of company-specific experience and skills on the one hand, and your salary on the other. More than that, you discover the obscene vocabulary that has been invented to mask the cruelty and destructiveness of the process. I actually heard someone remark – after the first unannounced round of firings in our company – that it had been a necessary and positive move, because it had eliminated “deadwood”. This person had actually hired some of the people who lost their jobs, after a dozen years of service or more. That remark showed me in a single sentence how the company I joined had ceased to be.

…
Call them
deadwood, downsized or first ones out;
right-sized, rationalized and repositioned;
call them someone we used to work with,
yesterday’s friends bent over their desks
filling shopping bags with coffee mugs
and office tat.

Computer screens gone blind, they are
erased already from the network, relieved
of their keys and shown the exit: dehired,
excessed, and made redundant…
from Survivors, in Cartography)

All fired up now? Canadian poet-workers might like to check out the poetry competition at Living Work.

Lady Sara

A year ago this week we lost our lovely Sara: Australian Shepherdess extraordinaire, aged 16.

…your gaze could cure
multitudes, the silk of your head
soothe any worry.
You teach us to taste
each morning as if it’s our first.

And day after day you lie
near my feet, dreaming and fixed
on some distant thing that is, at last,
outrunning you.

Last night we went to Alix Goolden Hall to see/hear a Ballet BC performance of the impossibly lovely Stabat Mater by Pergolesi . I hadn’t realised till I was home reading my cd liner notes that Pergolesi died at 26, and this was possibly his last composition. Quite a finale. In the recording I have, a countertenor, Michael Chance, sings the alto which is extraordinary, and it was recorded at Church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead (London) by The King’s Consort, who play period instruments. “Forty minutes of undiluted peace” said one of the Amazon reviewers.

Off to dine with the relatives tonight, and I’m bringing dessert. Thank you Delia Smith (and my apple tree) for Baked Apple and Almond Pudding.

Luminous shards

There is a word that has filtered into the collective consciousness of British poets, as memorably discussed in Peter Sansom’s enduring how-to text, Writing Poems, which first appeared in 1994, in a discussion about poetry clichés:

“Writers use them to try and lift flagging poems — hoping they will inject…emotional resonance. They do the reverse.”

He quotes Pound saying “one of poetry’s functions is to ‘keep the tools clean’… Using poetry clichés ultimately blunts the tools.”

His overtaxed word of choice is “shards”, one that I think is scarce in Canadian poetry. But I would like to nominate the word “luminous” for this decade’s hit list, a word which seems to be shining rather too brightly out of every other poem – particularly American ones – I’ve read in the last year. It’s a bit too… *poetic* to resist calling attention to itself; the poems I’ve seen it in seem to lean rather hard on it, and now I wince when I see it. It does appear a lot in reviews as well. A shame, as it’s a nice word. But it’s getting tired. Let’s give it a rest shall we? Anyone have a nomination for Canada’s most worn-out poetry word?

Rice is a fine word, one that can never be over-used in my cookbooks. And Kheer is one of my favourite desserts, a richer, runnier version of rice pudding, fragrant with cardamom, so good I have been known to eat it for breakfast. In my version, you forget the rosewater; substitute 2 percent / semi-skimmed milk for all or most of the cream; and add a third of a cup of golden raisins to the milk mixture when you add the rice.

Shriiink-wrapping culture & all about oats

So, the latest word is that the Cultural Section at Canada House is being ‘restructured’; our previous five representatives in performing arts and music, film and television, the visual arts and literature, have all been made redundant. Two new appointments will be made in Public Affairs, with responsibility for the entire cultural program.

On the one hand it’s a relief to know the program is not gone, but on the other hand, five experienced, well-connected and knowledgeable people have been jettisoned in favour of two new generalists. These are not interchangeable bolts that can be plugged in and out of a program, but dedicated employees taking their years of collective experience out the door with them. What a shocking waste.

Taking comfort in food and poetry then.

Madeleine sent me a stunning wee poem by Alden Nowlan, after we talked about the difficulties of making meaningful lives for our aged relatives. It’s called Aunt Jane, and it begins…

Aunt Jane of whom I dreamed the nights it thundered,
was dead at ninety, buried at a hundred.
We kept her corpse a decade, hid upstairs,
where it ate porridge, slept and said its prayers.

Speaking of porridge, I was interested to learn when I lived in Britain that there the word is used to mean any hot cereal, almost always oatmeal. But here in Canada, or at least as I understand it, porridge means hot cereal made of rolled oats. Our understanding of oatmeal is different too: what Brits call oatmeal we might mistake for oat bran, as it’s more finely ground than ours. And our distinction over use of the word porridge itself may be because we have so many commercially available hot cereals to choose from: Cream of Wheat, Sunny Boy, and my personal favourite Red River Cereal. Not to mention variations made with cornmeal, semolina and any combination of dried grains.

Continuing in this starchy vein, here’s an easy and simple sauce for pasta or better yet gnocchi, my current favourite comfort food. In a roasting pan, drizzle 3 garlic cloves (not peeled) and 2 large shallots, peeled and halved or quartered, with a tbsp of olive oil and salt and pepper and then roast for 20-25 minutes at 400, turning often, till golden brown. While you’re waiting, pan fry half a diced zucchini in olive oil till golden and set aside. Squeeze out the garlic and pop it with the shallots into a blender or food processor; whizz together with 1 large tin tomatoes with juices, 6 chopped basil leaves or 1/2 tsp dried basil, and 1 tsp balsamic vinegar. Sieve it so it’s smooth, and heat gently in a saucepan for about 10 minutes, until slightly thickened. Add the zucchini; heat through, season to taste, add 1 tbsp olive oil and serve over hot cooked gnocchi or pasta.

We don’t want no cultural representation

As I have been making regular visits to the UK since I stopped living there in ’02, I thought I’d let Ruth Petrie, for many years now our esteemed and capable literature officer at Canada House in London, know that I had a new book in print, and see if I could perhaps arrange a reading for next year’s visit. We launched my last collection, Old Habits, at Canada House in 1993.

So, on this the first day of Canada’s new parliamentary session, I was sickened to receive an auto-reply from Ruth, advising correspondents that “We in the Cultural section have, as of 3 April, been given redundancy notice. “

So much for the High Commission’s mandate to represent us in “Canada’s most important cultural export market in Europe and second only to the United States in the world..”

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