Poetry

POETRY 49 Pyper, Andrew. Kiss Me. Porcupine's Quill. 136. $14.95 Ratte, Paul-Michel. The Gathering of the Aspects. Cormorant. 240. $18.95 Robinson, Eden. Traplines. Knopf Canada. 216. $26.00 Rogal, Stan. Whnt Passes for Love. Insomniac. 134· $14.99 Rotstein, Nancy-Gay. Shattering Glass. McClelland and Stewart. 376. $19.99 Schoempeden, Diane. Coming Attractions 96. Oberon. 104· $14.95 Senior, Olive, editor. The Journey Prize Anthology. McClelland and Stewart. 184. $16·99 Sheward, Robert. A Home in Hastie Hollow. Polestar. 192. $16.95 Strowbridge, Nellie. Widdershins. Jesperson. 192. n.p. Toews, -Miriam. Summer of My Amazing Luck. Turnstone. 192 . $16.95 Van Camp, Richard. The Lesser Blessed. Douglas and McIntyre. 119· $16.95 Vitale, Geoffrey. The Other War. Cormorant. 288. $16.95 Walsh, Meeka. The Garden of Earthly Intimacies. Porcupine's Quill. 240. $16.95 Woodrow, Mamie. In the Spice House. Minerva. 198. $16.99 Poetry MICHAEL BOUGHN Democracy - which I take here in a loose sense as the vague and evolving embodiment of certain anti-hierarchical, anti-centralizing historical tendencies, a.k.a 'the spiritofliberty,' etc - has notbeen easy on poetry. The knowledges we've inherited about poiesis, the work of poetry, have largely come from older, more hierarchical worlds than the ones bred in democracy 's light. The values and orders we associate with poetry have tended to reflect the values and orders ofthose earlierworlds, though they are now in extreme crisis, if not moribund. In the last two hUndred years, every dimension of the poem, from generic and formal regulation to subject matter to syntax and diction, has been thrown up for grabs. Ever since the appearance of Lyrical Ballads, we (poth poets and their readers) have been trying to figure out what this new order of experience means to the work and to the evaluation of the work. Although there are those who cling tenaciously to the old hierarchies and their values, most lovers of poetry have, in one way or another, attempted to respond to theprofound mental/ cultural/political shifts of the last two hundred years by reimagining poetry's further possibilities. The most obvious development has been the widespread appearance of the psychologized lyric of personal 'identity' (and the therapeutic baggage often attached to it) articulated in everyday language. Ever since the publication of The Prelude, the 'egotistical sublime' has increasingly dominated poeticproduction,with the emphasis largelyon the'egotistical,' the sublime of Keats's notion increasingly lost in the Self-validating 50 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 clamour of 'identities.' The psychologized lyric reflects the democratic emphasis on the ordinary"person as a foundational value at the same time that it de-emphasizes the importance of technique and the knowledge and manipulation of poetic materials. 'TIlis state is often referred to as 'accessibility / another expression of a specific sense of the democratic ethos and its critique of what it proposes as 'elitism.' The values that accrue to such writing are articulated in terms applicable to person - sincerity, honesty, passion, etc - and rarely address the technical. While this development accounts for a large amount of recent poetic production, alternative modes of poetic address to the problem of democracy continue to develop along other lines, often much more interesting in their critical relation to the question of 'person,' as well as to the formal dimension of poiesis. I like to think of this work in terms of Emerson's notion of poetry as 'the science of the real' where real is understood to be grounded in imagination and imagination'S Wlceasing labour in the forms oflanguage. There's a connectionbetween this sense ofpoiesis and Arakawa and Madeline Gins's proposal in The Mechanism of Meaning that 'all elements that are in play might, as they fall into place upon this Proving Ground - a Blank (wide-open) Prototype -land in such a way as to be ostensibly self-defining.' They go on to connect this with the recreation of the reader/viewer in a deeply Jeffersonian gesture: 'For this to happen, a new order of pact with "the Taken," one requiring unusually desperate measures , would have to be entered into physically by the perceiver viewer.' Part of the weight here has to do with the...