The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Paperback)

The editor of an anthology, being a specialist, keeps one eye fixed on other specialists familiar with the range of work produced in, and the polemics that cross-hatch, the field. At the same time, an anthology must stand up as a general representative of something or other-a period, a form, a school-and so its editor has to keep the other eye focused in the opposite direction, on the uninitiated reader whose innocence the anthology’s job it is to take. Reviewers usually count amongst the former. No great expert on Canadian poetry as such, I consider myself amongst the latter and am here to report that my innocence was not quite taken.
The New Canon, edited by Carmine Starnino, is not just a collection of poems, it’s an argument. And while the impulse behind the argument is sound, the anthology as a whole doesn’t hold up. The trouble may be summarized in one sentence: Starnino’s main criteria for selecting poems are insufficient to attain his main goal, that all the poems selected be “very good”. Make that two sentences: in addition, the selected poems often fail to meet the criteria by which they have supposedly been selected. I’ll not quibble with the arbitrariness of the selection parameters, based on birth dates that fall between 1955 and 1975, with Starnino “picking up” where his “predecessor anthology” left off, that is, with the birth year of the youngest poet (Erin Mouré) in Dennis Lee’s anthology, New Canadian Poets. As Starnino acknowledges, all such parameters are largely arbitrary anyway. Nor am I going to (or know enough to) wonder why a specific poet born within the calendrical limits was left out while another slipped in, since in spite of 316 pages, inclusiveness was thankfully not the editor’s goal.
The criteria for selection are a different matter. That’s where rules and practical limitations give way to judgements, an anthologist’s real vocation, and while Starnino is not one to shy away from judgements, I feel that his polemical stance clouded his editorial vision. His clearly articulated criteria are based on old principles of poetic craft, which the anthology gleefully claims are resurfacing in Canadian poetry. The poems had to be “aurally ambitious, lexically alert and formally intelligent.” I like this. I share the enthusiasm for aesthetic purpose. I admire eloquently-stated criteria. And I believe in form. The struggle with form is what makes artists good. But it’s not enough to make their art good.
Ironically, Starnino is aware of the missing ingredient; or rather, he is aware that the ingredient is missing in the kind of poetry he is actually arguing against, namely, postmodern experimentalism which, he points out, made up the bulk of Canadian poetry in the 70s and 80s. The weakness of experimentalists anywhere is not that they experiment, but rather that in breaking things up too much they leave a jumbled mess on the floor. Nevertheless, the good ones are good enough to last and open up new paths. There are leaps in some of the poems in this anthology that, as Starnino duly acknowledges, would not have been possible without the smashing open of language and perspectives that came with those experiments; how else can one read Iain Higgins’s disjunctive thoughts and multiplicity of voices? But in their dismantling of language as structure and their view of form as a reactionary inheritance, postmodernists withdrew from language’s importance as bearer of public meaning. “The chief danger for this sort of writing,” Starnino wisely notes in his introduction, “is that its words . . . begin to wither from an anorexia of sensibility: language is starved of its inner life.”
If the life force of poetry is a struggle for new meaning, that quickness is also lacking in much of this anthology, sacrificed as it has been to the craft principle. Poetry must echo not just in the ear chamber but also in the chamber of consciousness, nicking its outer walls, drilling for a possible opening here and there.
I read lines like the following, of which the book is chock-full:

It doesn’t matter a damn how early I venture out,
or for how long I roam, haunt the sun-full and
endless-seeming streets of Toronto. I still won’t
see you. Not a hope. There are plenty of shop keepers
about, their sleeves rolled up and rolling out reluctant . . .

and wonder what they are doing here. What could have struck the editor as “aurally ambitious, lexically alert and formally intelligent”? I hope it wasn’t “sun-full and/ endless-seeming streets”, and please don’t say it was the rolling ‘r’s. Clearly, the lines are straining for something formal but the result is plain ugly, even worse, amateurish. As I read on, I find myself thinking, shouldn’t poetry be more than ornamented prose plus line breaks and neat metrics? The landscape must indeed be bleak if we are reduced to counting these as luminous images and metaphors: “Moments that have been carved in with/ the permanence of woodcuts and can now again/ be rekindled. Only peripherally-as if regarded on a rear-/view mirror while fresh traffic piles up more demandingly ahead . . .” But I keep going to see if, perhaps, the ending will lift off from the deadening streets with their pile on of words and rise above the occasion of the poem. It seems to be a meditation, after all, on the nostalgia of those moments mentioned earlier:

They bring you as near as anything just
down the road, any of those so-pretty stores
opening up
and full of nothing I need to buy, except a little later some
paper for this poem, a couple of stamps, and a decent pen.

Alas. If only the stores had remained shuttered. As is, the poet purchased his paper and pen and has me asking, just what is the inner life of language here?
My intention’s not to pick on a particular poet or poem. The above is merely an example, and not the most egregious either, meaning that there’s road kill all over these country roads. Dead poems full of lifeless description, putrid metaphors, stiff juxtapositions, unripe politics and second-hand observations trying to pass for deep insight: “The paper weight was like a crystal ball,/ or half of one”, or “Millstones rest their weathered bulk/ against a glazed lawn”, or “Some beauty will be born of this,/ said my friend’s blind mother”, or “we shell out millions on Roman candles that take one/ Quarter-hour to exhibit/ While the gene pool shrinks,/ the ice caps melt,/ And forests go to shit”, or “from the laws of nature, from the nature of having laws”, or “But then, a home’s not real unless it’s half/ imagined”.
Form for form’s sake impoverishes not only poetry as a whole but actually impedes a more complex understanding of form itself. Metre is not rhythm and good line breaks do not add up to good pacing. Poems may be well-wrought line by line and still fall slack in the sum of their lines. For instance, Starnino makes much of metre and line breaks, lacerating the avant-garde for not knowing when or even why their lines break. Now here is the opening stanza from one of the selected poems:

the name is familiar,
and on the platform sign it is even the same colour
as the famous sausage wrapper
salam de sibiu
the only meat for weeks and now,
just another late night railstop,
another wheel inspection,
another chance to listen to the darkness of the hammer
on steel, me stretched
across three seats
in an unconscious compartment

Instead of where the lines break (their ends), consider where they begin. Virtually every single first word in the stanza, and the rest of the poem, is a dull adverb, preposition or definite article, except for one, ‘salam de sibiu’, which is not even English. The beginnings of lines are as important as their ends. Form is everywhere, not just in a few old principles. The result of a restrictive leash on form is, in fact, to choke form.
Starnino’s formal severity is not stringent enough and he forgoes resonance in favor of textbook principles. Too much description, too little elation, and not enough tragedy; very few booming themes worthy of a Canon and almost no wrinkles made in the fabric of collective existence by acute personal imaginations. Amongst the mediocre, there are a few decent, and fewer excellent poets, but overall the visions are neither wide enough nor narrow enough to add up to “very good”.
Now the good news: a handful of poets in here soar, as they grapple with themes larger than individual lives, and larger even than our collective one; conversely, they engage in highly idiosyncratic rearrangements of the world and the place of things in it. And they demonstrate good form to boot.
There’s George Murray wrestling in his wacky way with heaven and hell, hoping in one poem that “paradise might never fall to earth/ and we might never be crushed/ under bliss”, while in another placing us all in a cage outside that garden walled by “an insurmountable idea/that keeps us out and heaven in”, claiming that our predicament ties us together “in modes more unfortunate than blood”. I can interpret ‘blood’ with enough richness-kin, crime, struggle-to read the poem several times over.
And there’s Sue Sinclair who can see into the life of things. Of shoes in shop windows: “Don’t, they say, don’t,/ like all things behind glass”. The line breaks perfectly, along the seam of our expectations: don’t what? we want to know at first. But there’s no more. Just don’t. Like all objects behind glass. Amongst which we suddenly recognize ourselves, and see the pane separating us from possibility at the juncture of each one of our ‘don’t’s. She’s got the gift of making us feel like the thing, rather than the opposite, more ordinary poetic trick of making the thing seem like us.
Bruce Taylor is the only one who really engages the adjective around which the anthology’s built, “Canadian”. He feels the tug between general and predicated being, between the irrefutable fact of existence and its arbitrariness, tied to a particular country, which on the map looks like “a spilled drink . . .vast and milkshake pink”. Canadian-ness is the learning of a “grid” or map, anchored by proper names, covering up “inexact/ contours” and the mess of events that has “somehow led to this”. Here’s the final meeting of the land with its animal and human beings, strung in perfect rhythm and rhyme:

The country I live in is a patch of thorns
below a culvert in a sunken plot
where burly geese with necks like flugelhorns
intimidate the pigeons and are shot
by a district sales manager named Russ.
And that’s it. Our lives, our landscape, us.

the football field is hard as frozen meat,
enormous gulls are swaggering around
with snowflakes on their orange rubber feet.
They cruise through stubble with their beaks ajar
shrieking that what they are they are they are.

Gull shrieks actually sound like that, ‘theyare theyare’, so the special consciousness of humans, capable of making maps and datelines, is at the poem’s end given a visceral existential jerk through an onomatopoeic device. Taylor’s other poems are equally accomplished and complex (except “The Slough”, which reads like an exercise). Though every line is interesting, lexically, aurally and in terms of image and meaning, nothing comes across as forced, which generally is a good indication that it was wrought with quite a bit more hard work than the visibly over-wrought.

I sleep in the red of my rising
arc
starts Stephanie Bolster like a spark out of nowhere, welding abstraction to concreteness. While I think she has better poems than those representing her here, there is enough evidence of her quick imagination, dashing ahead while her hand is desperately trying to keep up, taking us along for the ride, up through wave and stone and the taut skin of water, placed on earth so we can watch her seawolf “surge/ through all the layers,/ my own incessant crest”.
Finally, Ken Babstock’s sinuous syntax deserves mention along with Steve Heighton’s diction and measured pace, as well as Christopher Patton’s engagement with that old world concept called wisdom, and Tonja Klaassen’s original ear for jagged words mixed with good rhymes in lines beautiful and shattered, like stained glass crashing to the floor:

Pheromones. Something Roan. Billy Bragg on the stereo.
Broom handle, collarbone. Just a lucky so-and-so.

I may have done disservice to a few I’ve not mentioned only because the selections are not consistently good. Diana Brebner, for example, glows in only one poem here, “Port”, in which her empathy and fears meet to cause havoc, while Richard Sanger comes alive in “Travels with my aunt”. It doesn’t matter. This is not a names or numbers game. If it were, then the anthology would’ve been successful, demonstrating by dint of volume that a new generation of Canadian poets has turned to form. It is encouraging to see so many poets taking on the challenge of form and the anthology introduced me to a number of good poets I had not read before, so in such things it does attain a part of what any anthology aims for. But Starnino’s truer goal is a gauntlet, a demonstration of criteria and a reshaping of our views of quality. For that, we would have needed-still need-a convincing anthology of maybe fifteen poets, rather than fifty amongst whom in order to find our way we risk falling asleep at the wheel.
Abou Farman (Books in Canada)

"Magisterial... There's no denying it: The New Canon is an amazing document... [it] will define the standard for years to come."