Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics
By Wayde Compton (University of Alberta Press)
Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics by Wayde Compton is a collection of the 17th annual Kreisel Lecture hosted by the Centre for Literatures in Canada (previously known as the Canadian Literature Centre) at the University of Alberta. In nine chapters, the esteemed author of several books, including The Outer Harbour: Stories and 49th Parallel Psalm, confronts quandaries in poetics such as universalism, lyric and postmodern literary camps, and the loneliness of poets of colour.
In the opening lecture, “Windows,” Compton gives powerful insights on seminal ruptures in contemporary North American poetry and poetics in the last two decades. Writing about the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith whose poem “The Body of Michael Brown” presented an altered version of the autopsy report of Brown—the unarmed teenager whose murder at the hands of a white police officer sparked the Black Lives Matter movement—Compton questions, “At what cost this dialogue unfolds [and] for whom this discussion is productive.” He notes that such performances are possible because self-described “anti-racist” poets like Goldsmith and Vanessa Place do not comprehend themselves as white artists.
Compton engages with his own identity as a mixed-race man and notes that he has “never felt that [his] subjectivity is universal or outside a cultural or racial position.” He insists on the importance of positionality, a “necessary step to engage in anti-racist work” as it allows writers in the margins to “un-gaslight” themselves from the discourse of “racism-without-racists.” The somersaults involved in articulating such nuances are representative of Compton’s generous oeuvre to date.
Compton offers three “exigencies,” defined as urgent demands or needs, toward an anti-racist poetics. The first of these is “interpositionalism,” or “the acknowledgement that there are multiple cultural positions” to avoid the fallacy that the “white cultural” is the “universal cultural.” The second is “temporal interpositionalism” to acknowledge that a chain of influence of any given work is not restricted to the chronology of Western lineages. Finally, he calls for “personally inclusive praxis,” which emphasizes the importance of positionality: “Until a reader can identify that their position is indeed a position, rather than a falsely appreciated universalism, then it is unlikely that they will be able to engage interpositionally, and will be prone to misappreciation.”
It is refreshing to have such applications toward an anti-racist poetics stated with clarity and bluntness. While academics and others may find analogies in Michel Foucault’s conception of genealogy or Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the “field” to discuss a network of relations and influences, Compton’s contributions are grounded in the perspective of a racialized writer and mentor speaking to his communities.
Compton’s personal anecdotes, such as those discussing the racist categorizations of his adoption papers, how he felt like an autodidact in both his scholarly and creative work because of a lack of “Black-identified aesthetics,” and the feeling of being “intellectually orphaned” will resonate with many writers of colour.
The collection also delves into a sustained argument about the literary camps of the lyric vs. the postmodern or experimental, but the immensity of Compton’s work is in the words themselves. They say that once you name something, it no longer has power over you. Compton has done the unparalleled and painstaking work of detailing several longstanding complexities in poetics that robbed power from many, ultimately shaping the future as a space of possibility and reclamation.
The King of Terrors
By Jim Johnstone (Coach House Books)
Reviewed by Keith Garebian
The King of Terrors sometimes shimmers with dark introspection about the fear of impending death. Its author, the extremely gifted poet-editor Jim Johnstone, had faced near extinction due to a brain tumour, and his fear at the time mirrored the spreading fear induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. If the poetry was simply about death, the theme could have been handled as a simple enchantment—much in the manner of Henry Scott Holland (Professor of Divinity at Oxford prior to his appointment as Canon of St. Paul’s) who famously passed off death as a disappearing act, a slipping away “into the next room.” “Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.” Johnstone quotes Holland in an epigraph as if presaging how something can remain fixed in time and space, but his perspective is ironic because, contra Holland, death is not “nothing at all,” and even an intimation of its encroaching presence changes how we seem to others and even to ourselves.
But The King of Terrors is not really about death. Though the king of Johnstone’s terrors is disease (specifically a left frontal-lobe meningioma), other terrors exceed the body’s vulnerability by overspreading the mind with spectres and realities of incertitude and instability. As in his earlier book The Chemical Life, which dealt with violence in the natural world and the self and where mind and body were juxtaposed in disorder, The King of Terrors deals in a hauntingly stark but sometimes lyrical confessional manner with shocks of biology and mind.
The first poem “Future Ghost” incises the page with sharp images that suggest phantasmic transformations. The many trees on the other side of the lake in Anstruther stretch out branches as if they were glass, and the poet’s voice is haunted by instability of will as it attempts to formulate a confession or apology about a troubling personal relationship. Lake is seen as door, as glass, as “second home”; the poet-speaker feels forever vulnerable about his body and mind. The timing is ironic for it is the time of the pandemic when “the virus is perfect, hell-loving, / always an inch from death”—exactly how Johnstone feels, especially being cut off during the lockdown. His fear is a fear that becomes “first and last,” a fear that runs free, as when he mistakes his wife for a bird of prey.
Johnstone’s titles impart a sense of terrors: “Future Ghost,” “Hauntology,” “Kraken,” “Little Deaths,” False Finish,” etc. His mind magnifies phobia: “Say ‘I want’ / and the ceiling will loosen, twist / off, and disappear.” Boundaries break down in the sky and within his own vocabulary, and he is caught between action and passivity, synoecism and stasis. Dreams can be “the cyclone’s whip” as eyes open “to sheets tossed up / like mountains, / bodies peaked.” (“Hauntology”). The same poem quotes Jacques Derrida’s “already-always absent present,” prompting a meditation about whether disease is the disruption of presence or an erasure signifying absence.
Johnstone’s technique is strong. It constructs tender, touching confessional poems about family (“Three Sons”) and love (“Invitation [Set To Summer Radio]”) in the midst of awesome terror. And the deft octet “Little Deaths” shows how the slightest alteration by way of a single extra syllable in the final line can make a poem crystalline:
Hovering over my body
you are a river, a storm, a tent
open to the sky beyond. Hovering over my body—together, again, after a day—
we perform the season’s end.
Hovering over my body
you are a river, a storm, intent—
But the prevailing form is anti-lyrical, as is especially striking in “There is Nothing More Invasive Than Snow,” where the fluctuations of language and form, and the instability of the poet’s responses to imperatives of biology and love tilt towards emotional ambiguity. Victimized by pain as cruel as a guillotine, his skull virtually palmed in the manner of Yorick’s, but “Rewired, rewound,” the poet resurrected in body and will urges his lover to “Look / at me. Look away.” A contradictory urge. Is it because of guilt, shame, horror? Then then there’s what is probably the best poem in the book: “Slice-
Selective Excitation (Brain Scans 1–5).” Starting with a fragmented apology for not being his true self, where the splintered grammar signifies the linguistic instability caused by an afflicted brain, the poem becomes a visual construct in Part 2 via a silhouette drawing of a brain slice (filled with incomplete poetry) and in Part 4 via another outline—this one of the actual tumour (also with parts of a poem embedded within). The fifth part concludes the perilous fluctuation of language, though a reader is prone to question Part 3, a prose-poem about the “uncontrolled spread my identity, my self,” where thought and syntax are far more developed than the language in all the other sections. Perhaps it is because despite the pain (“the tumour a penny dropped from a great height,” “a planet pressing down”), he feels the freedom to rearrange thoughts into “the freedom to choose”?
Perhaps, too, poetry is the final consolation for different losses. Liar at times in his life—as are we all—he is a lyrist who has emerged from an underworld of immense suffering in body and mind. His book is evidence of poetry and love’s “saving grace.”
My Effin’ Life
By Geddy Lee (HarperCollins Canada)
Reviewed by Andrew Scott
In 1982, when I was barely twelve years old, my mother, who played what is sometimes pejoratively called “cocktail piano” in the Imperial Lounge at the old Inn on the Park hotel on Leslie Street in Toronto, used her music industry connections to snag us a coveted pair of grey seats at Maple Leaf Gardens to hear the rock group Rush.
Like most Canadian boys my age and demographic (white, urban, and hockey-crazy), I loved the band. The lunchroom at Bessborough Drive Public School was often the site of impassioned conversations about whether Jon Bonham, Stewart Copeland, or Rush’s Neil Peart was the greatest drummer of all time. The right answer, of course, was Peart. And so, when my mom surprised me that November afternoon by picking me up from school in our faux-wood panelled station wagon while clutching two tickets to the Toronto stop of the trio’s Signals tour, I was beyond thrilled. In large part because of that concert, music continues to be a meaningful part of my daily life.
Music, be it ritualistic, patriotic, escapist, cathartic, didactic, or otherwise, holds the promise of truly transformative power for many. Such was certainly the case for Gershon Eliezer Weinrib, better known as Geddy Lee, Rush’s bassist, vocalist, and front-person, who has penned a fascinating 512-page autobiography, My Effin’ Life. Growing up in the bedroom community of Willowdale, Ontario, as the son of Jewish immigrants, rock music provided an escape for Lee from what today we would call the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust experiences of his parents. They were survivors of the Starachowice ghetto, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. In addition to the general angst of being a self-described “nerdy kid” trying to find one’s place in the world, hearing his mother’s near-daily stories about her upbringing, coupled with the premature death of his father when Lee was just twelve, proved formative. Similarly foundational was, as the eldest son, the subsequent religious pressure to appropriately mourn his father’s death by reciting the Jewish prayer for the dead (Kaddish) three times a day for eleven months while avoiding all temptations including music and dancing.
Music provided an escape, offered Lee purpose, and helped reify an identity entirely different from that of his parents. As Lee repeatedly makes clear in this revelatory book, these early years were foundational to the person and musician whom he ultimately became. It was because of these formative experiences that music was elevated to a place of such import. Through the transformative power of music, Lee found camaraderie and community with childhood friends Alex Lifeson and original Rush drummer John Rutsey, jamming blues rock and writing ersatz Led Zeppelin and Bad Company tunes in his suburban family basement. Music was the social lubricant needed for Lee to meet his high school sweetheart Nancy Young, to whom he remains married to this day and who snapped the intimate cover photo that adorns the book’s first edition. And, perhaps most importantly, music provided a cathartic outlet for Lee to channel the harrowing stories of his parent’s early life into an admittedly polarizing vocal style that is part Torah incantation Bar Mitzvah boy and part banshee wail. “I was releasing all those suppressed emotions just by stepping up to the mic and screaming,” writes Lee.
There is much to like in this book. There are, of course, the predictable “war stories,” of a band both on the make and on the road in the early-to-mid 1970s. They played gigs, memorable and otherwise, trying to forge a path that ultimately led to a meaningful and lucrative career as one of the most sui generis rock bands of all time. And while such de rigueur tales are entertaining and provide enough inside-baseball minutiae to satisfy even the most ardent of Rush fans, it is the stories of World War II and Lee’s family experiences therein that comprise the book’s earliest chapters and make My Effin’ Life such a powerful read.
Thankfully, Lee has not genuflected towards the cult of Marie Kondo. As such, from what I understand to be the cluttered office of his Toronto home in which every Rush set list, ticket stub, and the various ephemeral artefacts of memory still exist, a rich panoply of stories have sprung forth, providing both insight and inspiration to Lee and co-author Daniel Richler to pen such a compelling narrative.
Although Lee’s upbringing and life story was perhaps not wholly unique, there was certainly a paucity of obvious models in the music business to illuminate a clear path forward. Accordingly, Lee, and his childhood friend, current self-described “BFF” and long-time Rush collaborator Alex Lifeson—himself a product of an immigrant “new Canadian” home—carved out their own unique career and life path. Starting out by channelling obvious blues rock influences into an eponymous 1974 album that, while satisfying, remains asymmetrical from the majority of Rush’s ultimate discography, the group soon expanded their oeuvre to include a new drummer (Peart) and an amalgamation of progressive influences that included fantastical themes, shambolic and virtuosic musical playing, and lyrics that are equal parts teenaged suburban angst, science fiction, and Ayn Rand–inspired screeds on individual responsibility. An unlikely amalgam to be sure, but for the legions of worldwide Rush fans, of which I consider myself one, an intoxicating elixir. As the proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and just as Lee helped create a sound, career, and musical legacy perhaps unlike any other, My Effin’ Life is a biography unlike any other as well.
Finally, returning for a moment to the book’s early chapters, Lee recounts how he and his siblings had the opportunity to accompany their mother back to Poland and Germany, and emotionally, to the Bergen-Belsen camp. According to Lee, the trip provided an opportunity for his mother to reflect upon all that she had accomplished post-war, and to get a sense of closure from what had happened earlier in her life.
I got the sense that with this book, the telling of his family’s story of resilience and triumph, as well as the story of Rush and the emotional journey that was the passing of Peart in 2020, My Effin’ Life provides closure for the author as he embarks upon what undoubtedly will be a new and exciting life chapter.
Elementary Particles
By Sneha Madhavan-Reese (Brick Books)
Review by Amanda Earl
In Elementary Particles, Sneha Madhavan-Reese depicts science’s intimate connections with the personal and the everyday. She opens the book with the title poem, a long poem-sequence in which she eloquently describes the particles that make up the universe, connecting them to what it is to be human: imagination, grief, estrangement, parenthood, culture, love, and faith. These fundamental connections are threaded throughout the book, leading us from the cosmological to the personal.
Abstract scientific terms are made concrete through reference to “bits of torn paper” and water in a jar. In the title poem, Madhavan-Reese shows how these particles are an intimate part of us:
In the atoms of my fingertips, your hair, this chair:
quarks, antiquarks, and gluons wink
in and out of being.
There are numerous instances of figurative language, such as references to having “vacationed at the tip of my pinky,” in “Mapping,” and to “water […], laughing / with all its glittering faces” in “My Mother Never Speaks Her Fears” The poet provides vivid descriptions, such as her depiction of women in Kerala in “Mapping”:
In a clearing, women took nimble backward steps
as they spun coir rope from the fibres of coconut husks.
Or her description of a gourd growing in a garden in “Little Song from the Kitchen Table”:
The tendrils of the bitter gourd would grip
the wires of the kitchen window screen,
and I uncurled their dainty fingertips
Madhavan-Reese extrapolates meanings and etymologies, connecting the Greek word “kosmos” to the concept of order in the title poem, or grammar to glamour and Alice in Wonderland in “Etymology.” There’s a playfulness to her writing, as when the speaker muses that
Words make wizards
of us all—even your using
a possessive before a gerund
is something akin
to magic.
Likewise, in “On the First Direct Detection of Gravitational Waves,” the speaker wonders:
If two black holes collide but no one hears them,
do gravitational waves really exist?
By pairing the discoveries of science and its scientists, such as Archimedes, Dirac, Einstein, Newton, and others with autobiographical and metaphysical musings, Madhavan-Reese manages to make these concepts not only accessible but also playful and amusing. In “Kangaroo Conservation,” for example, a kangaroo is used to demonstrate the principles of quantum physics and then invited to jump out of the box and have tea with the speaker.
The poems are full of wonder, whether it is the dust that collapses into fiery stars in “Cosmology,” or the imprinted letters on the back of an old library catalogue lending card in “Save Our Stories,” depicted as “little ghosts on the back of each typewritten card.”
It is startling how great a distance Madhavan-Reese can travel within one poem, from a fragile China teacup to its shattering “as it hits the spinning earth” in “Free Fall.” She connects gravity to a glass shattering and threads it through the speaker’s memories of her children’s “Parcheesi games and banana cakes,” not being able to get out of bed, and her tears falling. She succeeds in connecting disparate elements that, when gathered in her poems, make for an effective picture of a feeling, tone, or experience.
In “Frenulum Tongue,” Madhavan-Reese writes,
By now, you must know
the power of small,
hidden things.
In “Frost Flowers,” she speculates,
If I could convey in words the splendour of such small things,
I would not be afraid of living such a short time.
Throughout the book, Madhavan-Reese reveals “small hidden things,” such as the dung beetles that “roll their balls in straight lines” at night in “Dung Beetles.” Through these revelations and depictions, she helps us to “navigate by galaxy” because she connects these small things to the bigger picture, to science and the stars. She has done a beautiful job of conveying “the splendour of such small things.”
Elementary Particles is a wonderous and intimate book, one that I will treasure and read again, looking to it not just for philosophical musing but also comfort and joy.
