the continuous poem: May 2011

Monday, May 09, 2011

"Cushion for Owls"

Contemporary poetry, in incessant flux & search of new poetic formulas, appears to have an unbounded arsenal at its disposal: cultural overtones, literary experiments, clever page layout, use of extended character sets and creative fonts, vertical sections through the depth of a vocabulary, manufactured words and so on.

An arsenal that delights and simultaneously imposes a distance (entirely worth discovering) from what we tend to call ‘traditional’ poetry. Traditional poetry: a somewhat conventional & old-fashioned organization of poetic ideas, a bit out of sync with the efforts of the avant-garde, a poetry written in what could be referred to (borrowing a term coined by the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu) “the sweet classic style.”

How can then poems that appear to have been extracted out of a forgotten cardboard box, poetry without too much declared poetic invention even aspire to be modern poetry?

Is this not mission impossible?

The poetry of Patrick Lane (b. 1939). one of Canada’s best known poets, is proof in my (outdated) opinion that the gist of poetry does not necessarily lie within the poetic formula, but rather in the substance and stature of its poetic text.

Patrick Lane’s poems are made of ‘simple’, intuitive texts, woven out of an accessible poetic vocabulary that any beginner or poetry aficionado would tend to operate with (moon, night, snow, and singing). It is the way the words play out in the ensemble of his poems that leads us to the discovery of the essence of modernity in his poetry.

Since I was unable to entirely guess the nature of the miraculous binding element that forges soaring metaphors out of every day words in Patrick Lane’s poems, I thought to quote a few lines from Witness (a book that includes poems written between 1962 and 2010).

As we read these lines and continue to bask in their afterglow, the quest for their elusive poetic alchemy fades in the background yielding place to their net effect: a luminous sight.

"The night is summer

and the hour is heavy with air that moves

like a slow mouth in the leaves of the chestnut,

the branches of the elms."

from Dominion Day Dance.

"The country of snow we lived in

was a cushion for owls to walk on.

Birds don't understand windows.

They never did."

from For Ten Years

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A review of Witness on the page of CBC Books page -->here.