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Forge

by Jan Zwicky
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2011
80 pp. $20

Prison Songs and Storefront Poetry

by Joe Blades
Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2010
77 pp. $22

Jan Zwicky is a philosopher, musician, and an award-winning poet who lives on B.C.’s Quadra Island. Forge, her new book, does take the mystical turn that Tim Lilburn notes in his blurb. Treating sex and loss – of love and of life, it deals with adult preoccupations (the pleasures and perils of family, career, and trying to plot the future).

Astutely, Lilburn identifies Zwicky’s lyrics with Spanish mystics. He’s not wrong; there’s introspection, a hesitant meditation, born from the fact that our mortal love doesn’t transcend the grave and may not even survive unto its threshold. You – we – hold desperately onto offspring, lover, sibling, parent, but time cheats us of them all, sooner or later: Death claims us first – or them; or they stop loving us or we stop loving them. Zwicky says, “Even knowing what you love / is no salvation.” In The Cantos, after all his politics, prejudices, and pain, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) concludes that pity and charity matter most. There’s a like lustration in Zwicky, who writes, “You’ve seen / some women do it. Love.”  It’s that “tenderness we cannot teach perhaps / until we die—that leaving from which / there is no return.”

Zwicky refers to philosophers and composers, liberally, in her titles and in her epigraphs. Like poets, they are attentive to silence and echo, the silence of thought and the echo of one’s breath and one’s heart in tune with another’s – or others. But the “forge” of empathy, of union, is “love.”

These poems are prayers cast in the shadow of splittings. One poem treats “Your own death, lifting from your past / to meet you….” Another – the beautiful “Song of Farewell” (so reminiscent of Leonard Cohen) – tells us, “Love, beloved, hollowed out my heart. / It took my eyes, my hands, my voice / and left me glad. Sorrow / buried them beneath the gateway where you stood.” Zwicky knows Greek thought and German song, but Forge doesn’t forget Canadian poets – Leonard Cohen, John Thompson, Don McKay, and Robert Bringhurst (the latter pair are directly named).

Forge evokes another poet for me. Read it in tandem with the latter volumes of the late Ralph Gustafson. There’s an uncanny similarity of tone, style, and form that, if intended, is a splendid homage, and if unintended, seems the echo of a previous maestro finding fresh expression in the work of the newer.

Joe Blade’s is a singular voice, an extension of Jack Kerouac to poetry. Indeed, in Prison Songs and Storefront Poetry, he is a prosaic Beat, much more in sympathy with the Kerouac of Mexico City Blues (1959) than with the Allen Ginsberg of Howl (1956). So, it’s fitting that Blades is published by Ekstasis Editions, of Victoria, B.C., the closest thing to a Beat publisher like City Light Books (of San Francisco) that English Canada has.  (Blades even mentions City Lights in “prison song 07.”)

In Mexico City Blues, Kerouac drafts “242 choruses” – some spontaneous, jazzy, typewriter riffs. In turn, Blades give us 30 “prison songs” and 24 works of “storefront poetry,” all spur-of-the-moment, helter-skelter pages (not poems, per se, but pages) scrolled onto and then yanked from a vintage typewriter.  These pieces have been pounded out – on the sort of keyboard that makes your fingers hurt – as quick as the writer can think a thought to type.

The poems look like skinny columns, but their content is random. There’s magic and immediacy in such alchemy, but the result is more cast-offs than gold pieces.  Few poems are worth their page-length or word-count. One stand-out is “prison song 18,” where thoughtful diction allows for a poignant genealogy to emerge:  “not me … the offspring of dirt / farmers and fishers far from gulag.” The proverb is earned: “each and everyone / of us change the world // by being born and living / however wherever not why.”

“prison song 28” actually works like song: “for this life I’ve thrown away / there’s nothing acceptable to say.” “storefront poetry 24” also escapes mere cataloguing of incident to get at personal emotion: “I have wasted my mind for countless / days and nights in the kitchens of / others for their profit and leisure / in the bottles and tins of oblivion.” The moral?  Even Beat-ific poems need a lil discipline.

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