Skip to main content

JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY'S LAND

SOME ANTHOLOGIES WEAR THEIR POETICS OPENLY ON THEIR JACKETS

Canada has so many poets it is hard to keep track, due to an impressive arts council funding regime that, at one point saw a census reveal 12,000 living poets with books out from small and larger presses.

Much like in the UK or the US, but perhaps even more notably, every small town, every large city, every province, has a laureate poet. It is therefore impossible to anthologise them all - but when in 2010 Evan Jones and I put out an anthology of Modern Canadian Poets for Carcanet, the 40 or so poets we included were all out of print or unknown in the UK, except for about three. Today, in the UK, for instance, there are about five contemporary Canadian poets in print.

Back in 2010, a young Toronto-based poet, with a large press behind him, with the wonderful name Jacob McArthur Mooney, attacked (there is no other word) this anthology, as if it had been the baseball bat that had clubbed his parents to death. He stomped all over it, and suggested it was basically a fraudulent hoax - because a few poets were not included he might have expected; in point of fact there were about 11,960 poets missing, but hey....

I have not forgotten this, because a year or two before, I had written a very glowing review of his debut for Canada's leading paper, The Globe and Mail - which is Canada's New York Times.  I did not expect any favours from this young fellow, but I hadn't counted on a strange willingness to tear off the kid gloves and kick a friendly critic in the shins, then cut his head off. But Canada has a thing with young thug-critics making a name for themselves by arm-wrestling in bars. Figuratively. Sort of.

I only mention this now because our main thesis of selection for this book he reviled was an internationalism moving beyond parochial Canadian concerns (landscape, especially).

Anyway the other day Mr Mooney's new anthology arrived from Toronto, called BEST CANADIAN POETRY 2015 (IN ENGLISH) - caps mine but hey again - and I was in this two times in its brief life so am pleased but hey again (thrice).... and can you guess what Mr Mooney's main thesis is?

We must move to a "post-Canadian" kind of poetry.... which, yes, you guessed it... is exemplified by the sort of complex, smart international poetry written by A.F. Moritz (who we highlighted in our anthology).

So anyway, this goes to confirm what Evan and I felt then - Canadian poetry remains behind the times, parochial, backwards, and mired in local tribal squabbles of little global import. Want to wrestle with me Jacob?

Oh, his third book is out soon, and I assume will be quite good.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".