chug chug slick slack: Or, What Newspapers Don’t Do

Reviews chug chug slick slack Or, What Newspapers Don't Do AFTERNOON STARLIGHT. Charles Noble. Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1984. TERRITORIES. Elizabeth Allen. Moose Jaw: Coteau Books, 1984. DEEP NORTH. Bert Almon. Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1984. GOLD EARRINGS. Sharon Stevenson. Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1984. A prospector needs to have some sense of the terrain. If you're looking for gold you need to know what gold looks like, where its been found before, and where everybody else is. You also hope to find it where no one else has looked. One difference from reviewing poetry is that a prospector doesn't have to spend so much time examining the slag. There is .a lot of poetic slag to sift these days, but you don't dare throw it out too quickly because you might be looking at a kind of ore that no one has seen before. Herewith a description of the kind of ore likeliest these days to contain precious metal, and a few random samples (four recent books of poetry) to test the equipment. Reading, like prospecting, is an activity in time. A lucky strike, if it comes, usually comes after years of looking. What "knocked me out" or what "grabbed me" is not an infallible test of the high grade (cf. fool's gold). Rather, we rely on what we recall later, what draws us back, what looks good on a second or third reading, what we read slowly. This may be why reviewers get so much wrong. When they call something "finely crafted" and give an example, you often Journal of Canadian Studies Vol. 21 , No. 3 (Auto11111e 1986 Fall) have no idea what they're talking about. They're forced to be paramedics doing triage: if you detect a pulse, the body is not dead. But neither is it necessarily healthy, much less a dancer, much less Fred Astaire. But we need to be good at recognizing excellence in poetry and the other arts. We are fiercely protective of at least this natural resource in our country, perhaps because we are never sure which things in the arts have how much value on the world market. Culture is not, apparently , an item in "free trade" discussions , but in these times of international competition and writers' associations, the old questions about quality, permanence, and universality return from their shallow graves. Or more likely , they were always there, but on hold. The context in which they arise is now slightly different, since the world of Canadian poetry is presided over at last by our own giants, our international celebrities: Irving Layton the Nobel bridesmaid, Leonard Cohen the absentee cult figure, and Margaret Atwood the darling of American literary supplements . Even more heartening to presentday nationalists (but something like a throwback to the days of Archibald Lampman or E.J. Pratt) , we have our own poetry heroes within the country: Al Purdy and Dennis Lee among them. So the sludge which continues to be pumped out of the poetic sump now surfaces in a shiny, even glittering world of Prizes, Interviews and Readings, and not the cold sullen terrain of yesteryear. And we feel some pressure as a result to read each new poet as a Warhol wonder, strutting and fretting her quarter-hour upon the stage. That is, poets, if not creatures of the media, are media creatures. And we are inclined to read them the way we read the newspaper. Usually we read it knowing that it will be replaced the next day, that it's headed for the bottom of the hamster cage. And the consequence for poets, if we think of reading them the same way, is that they must write poems of instant access. In order to compete with the 133 popular print medium, they write verse which is indistinguishable from the parts of a newspaper: the columns, the editorials , the personals, even the tabloid thrills. Perhaps I'm exaggerating the dangers of the transitory. After all, we sometimes clip and save bits of the paper: the historic front pages for our children (Moon Landing, Terry Fox Dies); or the notices of family births, marriages and deaths; or items of professional interest (distributed as...