I’ve argued here in the past that healthy discourse about literature and poetry requires a set of objective, agreed upon evaluative criteria. As David Solway puts it in Director’s Cut,  his smashingly sharp, succinct book of critical essays: "…the issue of aesthetic judgement is notoriously cloudy and insecure, but this misfortune does not absolve us…from the obligation to sift, weigh and assess, and to render judgment as honestly and stringently as we can…"

Here is the set of ‘reasonably distinct, unequivocal and perdurable’ criteria, or determining principles, (the first four courtesy of Jonathan Culler), upon which Solway bases his judgments of poetry:

1) intrinsic significance

2) thematic unity

3) metaphorical coherence

4) formal resonance with the tradition, however remote or indirect or inconspicuous

5) memorable language, words annealed by seraphic fire, or what Yeats called ‘lyric cantillation’, and Denis Donoghue ‘ words revelling in shameless conjunction.’

True poets, and lovers of poetry, says Solway, have always known that in poetry language comes before anything else. Language, he concludes, abides, but emotion tends to evaporate and is indeed often bogus and trivial – and what is more, can be preserved only in fit and vivacious words.

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I’ve been annoyed recently by the near impossibility of finding cereal on the shelves of my grocery store that isn’t coated in sugar. Copyright crusader Lawrence Lessig explains, in part, why this is the case in the talk below. His mission is to reform the campaign finance system in the U.S. and limit the influence of special interests in Washington. This excellent presentation examines the pernicious dependency politicians have on money; their need for it, in order to secure tenure, to get re-elected. The number of lobbyists in Washington and the amount they charge has, according to Lessig, doubled since Bill Clinton left office. Washington is seen  increasingly as a farm league for "K" street… where the business model is to get experience in government and then trade it in for big bucks in the private sector. Until we remove this dependence upon money, says Lessig, those economies based on ideas, and truth, will fail. We must restore trust in the way government works, he tells us. The only way to do this is to remove the dependence on money that politicians have to get re elected, so that entities in government are free to make decisions for the right democratic reasons, not just to get re-elected.

Lessig invites the American public to withhold monitary support for its political representatives until this political funding issue is solved. In short to stop supporting a broken system, to pledge non-payment, and insist that change occurs Visit Changecongress.org for more info.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHma3ZQRVoA

Canadian poet Judith Fitzgerald interviews our favourite laconic Scots poet Robin Robertson over at the Globe and Mail:

Q: Have you ever written, on your own terms, a "perfect" poem?

A: No.

Q: Which of yours do you feel comes closest to this?

A: I’m more attracted to "flaw." I have written a few interestingly flawed poems.

Q: What would you do if you were told you were never to write poetry again?

A: In common with many writers, I often fear I will never be able to write again. If you were to rephrase that as, "What would you do if you were told you would never need to write poetry again?" I would imagine my reaction might be one of inexpressible relief.

Q: Is poetry worth it, generally, for others and yourself?

A: Important poetry — and art in general — is worth a great deal, and seems to extract a great deal from the maker.

Q: Does worth even enter the question?

A: "Worth" should enter every question.

Q: You have said, in another context, "Art is difficult" and much of what we "consume" during these gawd-awful times is disposable. Do you write against this on some atomic level?

A: I simply follow lines of enquiry. Poetry seems to me, initially, an act of curiosity.

Here’s some of the bookshop photo quarry bagged during last weekend’s foray into the U.S:

Buffalo. This has to rank as the cleanest, best organized used bookstore I’ve ever been in.

Tried the door, but it was locked

Before shuffling off…check this out: two 30-foot (9.1 m) copper replica Statues of Liberty atop the city’s Liberty National Bank Building!

Cleveland:

Owned, apparently, by the leader of the national communist party in the U.S. Note the "fuck capitalism" in Coca Cola writing, on the tee shirt in the window.

Picked up a copy of Barthes’ The Responsibility of Forms here. From

John at Mac’s Backs Books in Cleveland. Then

Pittsburgh – City of Bridges….(four more than Venice)

where Post Gazette Books Editor Bob Hoover drove me around to John Towles’:

Then (sans Bob) back to Ottawa.

For more bookstore photos please go here. For booksellers, here.

Now that we’re skating down memory lane: I saw this image in Time magazine I think it was, when I was in my teens. Not exactly brimming with sunshine. In fact it’s called The Wreck of the Hope. It spoke to me in dark, angsty adolescence. I recall particularly how modern I thought it looked for a work painted in the early 1820s. What brought this Casper David Friedrich memory back was a quick recent visit to the always peaceful, always worthwhile wood s lot.

Image from here.

Whilst searching for the ice bergs, I came across this breathtaker, from here:

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Powerful, how music can shoot one back to a place and time so quickly and completely. This piece, a close approximation of one off the Mark Knopfler soundtrack to the movie Cal, rifles me right into the sweet, little apartment we moved into in 1985 after first arriving in Ottawa. Right off the Rideau Canal it was; a half a block away. Used to be able to strap on our skates (and guards) at home, and tip toe across Colonel By Drive, down the stairs and onto the ice. Anyhow. This tune takes me straight into our small, square front room and onto the rich pages of Donald Creighton’s biography of Canada’s first prime minister Sir John A. MacDonald. Back then I liked to read  - usually sitting on the carpeted living-room floor on weekend mornings – bios of Cdn. prime ministers. That was before I developed a taste for literature. Before Somerset Maugham and Clifton Fadiman blew the top off my taste for fact, and replaced it with a hunger for fiction. Never did get to that three volume Arthur Meighen set. Still have it if anyone is interested.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QZTZ9B7M60

Good interview with Dale Peck (see my take on him here) conducted by Flannery Dean over at the CBC. From which:

"Criticism has to answer to both of these points of view. It has to explain a book’s cultural context, both contemporary and historical (and even a little prophetic as well), and it also has to personalize a book, lest it became a public totem rather than a solitary text consumed by an individual. But of course, no one can personalize a book for someone else. All you can do is show how you’ve personalized it for yourself. That’s why I wrote my reviews in such an assertive voice: to show that it’s possible to read a book on your own terms rather than the author’s, or literature’s, or anyone else’s. Although it’s always nice to have people agree with you, that wasn’t my ultimate goal. Rather, I simply wanted to remind people that they can think for themselves. Alas, I failed."

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Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the always dynamic, turn-on-the-mic-shut-up-and-listen-to Junot Diaz (listen to my conversation with him here) in STOP SMILING magazine’s third-annual 20 INTERVIEWS Issue:

 SS: Beyond the textural research for Oscar Wao, were there specific photos, records or even foods that you kept close to better evoke the people and the period you were describing?

JD: A lot of music, man. Music that never made it into the book. It was a lot of New Order, a lot of Joy Division, OMD. A lot of fuckin’ Tribe. A lot of Big Daddy Kane. TV shows. I spent a lot of time going over the old Battlestar Galactica, the old Buck Rogers and the old Three’s Company. You got to put your head in it. The historical work just involved a lot of long hours in the library. A lot of archival research. I read an enormous amount of books, opening with some Spanish and different fields. Still, my best research about the Dominican Republic came from books written about Guatemala and Nicaragua. You have to kind of stroll wide.

SS: There is also this feeling for the presence of ghosts — symbolic ghosts obviously, but real ghosts too. There’s a real feel for the supernatural. You’ve said you were very empirical growing up. Have you ever experienced a real haunted house, or seen a ghost that rattled that empiricism?

 
JD: Sure, it’s called the Dominican Republic. The whole island is a fuckin’ haunted house. I joke with my friend, it’s not an island — it’s a haunting. So many people died so horrifically on that island over such a long period of time that the echoes still resonate. To particularize or identify one specific moment downplays how significant this texture, this atmosphere, of living in the dead in that one place, how present that is. How omnipresent.

SS: From one angle, Oscar Wao is a severe horror story. What are the elements of a horror story?

JD: A horror story is identified classically as an intrusion narrative on the present or the normative reality. That’s how it’s technically defined. For me, there might be horror elements but the intrusion element of this book was the horrific violence that was brought on by the European incursion into the Americas and how the violence, the horror, the disorientation, the dislocation and the trauma continues to resonate in the present.

The issue also includes the last-ever interview given by Roberto Bolano (The Savage Detectives, 2666), and book-related interviews with:

Jonathan Lethem (author, Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude) Paul Auster (author, the New York Trilogy) Alex Ross (New Yorker music critic; author, The Rest is Noise) Jane Mayer (New Yorker staff writer; author, The Dark Side) Jonathan Gold (Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic; author, Counter Intelligence)

The two cover story interviews are with filmmaker David Lynch and underground comic legend R. Crumb. What a line-up…check it out!

A note of clarification: "Best’ is admittedly a loaded term, used here in part, yes, to attract attention, but also with full awareness of the fact that bests are contingent, and can fluctuate according to time, place, mood, diet, weather…juxtaposition, disposition, persuasion…

Another update: re: Irving Layton: have enjoyed much of what I’ve read over the past several days. Confirms in me a belief, perhaps obvious, that ones gender strongly influences ones taste. I particularly like these lines from  ‘A Tall Man Executes a Jig’ (full text here): 

He dropped his head and let fall the halo

Of mountains, purpling and silent as time,

To see temptation coiled before his feet:

A violated grass snake that lugged

Its intestine like a small red valise…

Backwards it fell into a grassy ditch

Exposing its underside, white as milk,

And mocked by wisps of hay between its jaws;

And then it stiffened to its final length.

But though it opened its mouth to scream

A last silent scream that shook the black sky,

Adamant and fierce, the tall man did not curse.

And this from The Tamed Puma, found here.

My desperation blossoms into garlands

braceleting her wrists, my sick despair

into flowering anklets.

I plug the void with my phallus

and making love on bed or carpet

we transfigure pitchblack nothingness

into a tamed puma whose whiskers

we stroke between enrapturing kisses.

in part, I’m sure, because of  this piece presented brazenly below:

The Cradle

An elliptical she-cougar from Mesopotamia

Yowled at me yesterday in a thrift store

Her woolly bosom girded by sinuous calves

Pressed up against the wall for traction.

Lured by oil eyes,

I hit, profered my card.

The cat called back

With a prowling voice

Only to say she belonged to another pride

By Nigel Beale. Copyright 2006

Small Press Month is a nationwide celebration highlighting work produced by independent publishers. The goal is to raise awareness about the need for broader venues of literary expression. From March 1st-31st, independent, literary events will take place from coast-to-coast in the United States, showcasing ‘some of the most diverse, exciting, and significant voices being published today.’

I’ve taken the liberty of listing a sampling of presses below, about half of them Canadian. Why not drop in on several.

above/ground press
Angelhouse Press
Anik Press

Archipelago Books

Biblioasis

Brick Books
Broken Jaw Press

Chaudiere Books
City Lights
Clear Cut Press
Cleis Press

Coach House Books
Cormorant Books
Coffee House Press

Dalkey Archive Press
Dundurn

ECW Press
Exile Editions
Existere

Graywolf Press
Hanging Loose
Ig Publishing
Insomniac Press

Leapfrog Press

Melville House
Milkweed

Nation Books
The New Press

Oberon Press

Open City Books
Other Press
Overlook Press

The Porcupine’s Quill

Soft Skull Press
Two Dollar Radio

Vehicule
Vertical