By Catherine Owen
Imagining Imagining
by Gary Barwin
Wolsak and Wynn (2023)
“I love the syncretic web of experience,” Gary Barwin states exuberantly in his essay “The Selected Walks,” from his compendium of celestial proportions, Imagining Imagining; in another meditation on “Writing as Rhizome,” he ponders how the making and distribution of art forms a “network of communications…you’re both the centre and there is no centre.” The centre does not want to hold! So if you’re seeking a conventional text on prosody or poetics or even a straightforward, common garden autobiography, Barwin’s pastiching leaps aren’t for you. Dear reader, this book is an informal invitation to the ball of a creator’s mind with all its unique whirligig whoops of history, literature, familial bonds (including those with a trio of dogs) and more than a few lexical lunacies. A panoply of intimate galaxies to zip-a-dee-doo-line through, in fact. The narrational arc approximates a fusion of Barwin’s “ever connecting” eyebrows, his grandfather’s possibly inflammatory moustache, the gold limned scars of Kintsugi repairs, a Mobius strip walking into a bar and a puppy’s moon-lit leashlessness. In other words, it’s a loopy ride without predictable parameters, which ends up being both the text’s strength (if you’re willing to hang upside down from time to time, it’s delightful and provocative) and potential weakness (if you’re not, the lunging between subject matters could be seen as a scattershot blurt of gooberish proportions).
Barwin delves at depth into his diasporic origins, from South Africa to Ireland and thence to Hamilton, Ontario, with reverberations from Lithuania, recounts small press publishing adventures, traces his musical kicks, sketches out his eccentric library, traces the nexus of some of his books (and especially his Giller award-nominated Yiddish for Pirates) and discourses on what it’s like to stroll purposively about in the dark (an indubitably different experience to Tanis MacDonald’s, in her book about walking as a woman called Straggle). Along the wonky way, Barwin peppers (and salts) all his essays with singing bits of word play. My two favorites may be “joie de livre” and “not-stalgia,” the latter referring to his grandparents’ memories that, due to the traumas of the Holocaust, lacked a “bittersweet tenderness.” There’s also jokes aplenty, poetic paraphrases, quotes from Wittgenstein, hilarious non-sequiturs, drawings of eyes with legs, and recursive mental jaunts such as: “What does writing write? Writing writes writing. Writing writes the unwritten. Birds, by virtue of being birds, write of un-birds and the flightless. This is like writing. And also birds.” Now whether you’re in the mood for this serious flippancy could depend on if you’ve eaten your toast yet or not. But truly, Barwin’s loosey-goosiness allows his readers freedom. He shows us his mental processes and initial uncertainties as to possible theses. He manifests random inclusions and wonky deletions and, in the process, enables us to envision our own wild connections and “rhizomatic” elaborations. Imagining Imagining could be sub-subtitled (after Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity) “Entering One Writer’s Mind” and when it’s Barwin’s unique cortexical playground, well, it’s wowza.
The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema
by John Wall Barger
Louisiana State University Press (2024)
I’ve always been a sucker for a lay person’s guide to anything and, as John Wall Barger introduces himself in the preface to The Elephant of Silence, “I’m a poet and cinephile, not an academic” (despite the fact he teaches in an institution, I understand his framing of this text as that of an outlaw scholar). I would almost call this approach one of “emotional scholarship,” a term I coined to refer to the melding of personal life joys and traumas and one’s reading, seeing and hearing experiences. It’s thus neither memoir nor is it research; it is a combining of the two into, say in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, a way of making intellectual pursuits like textual analysis not an end in itself, but a mode through which to more deeply enter and honour everyday life. Barger is imminently approachable, engaging, warm and a bit goofy. Like Barwin, he brings his whole character into the text; like Whiteman he has a plethora of references at his fingertips: from Pound to Eisenstein and from Stein to Nolan. These essays are both focused meditations on the connections between cinematic recollections, literary delvings and intimate acknowledgements of childhood, travel and marriage, and wild gatherings that readily lunge with the spirit of Lorca’s duende that Barger elaborates so avidly on in his first segment, “In Praise of the Goblin.”
I was immediately drawn in by Barger’s mention of Roald Dahl’s “The Swan” story, its macabre delights, and then by how he dipped quickly into Lorca, Gilbert and Bacon, with whom I’m also familiar. My mind in a yielding state, I was fully able to absorb his discussion of a film I had never seen, The Cremator (1969). Baerger casts this magic spell in almost every essay, my favorites being not only on the duende, but on “cold art” in Gluck and Kubrick, and Tarkovsky’s foreboding Zone. Others on Nabokov’s cheeky “poshlost” concept and Huizinga’s “ludic” transcendence also compel. At times, Barger can strain towards a pat conclusion such as with the closing statement in his Underglimmer essay: “Because looking is prayer,” or in the least successful set of thirteen numbered bits called “The Energy Charge.” They are meant to be “little land minds” of pondering but the zap doesn’t really happen. However, these are pieces, overall, that are mostly so fascinatingly layered that the reader is guaranteed the urge to re-enter Barger’s visions. In his epilogue, he relates how these essays began with a desire to puzzle over something, and how they aim to offer paths down which to enter randomly where one can roam about mysteriously, rather than be pummeled by “noisy explication.” It’s certainly eminently readable, not just in style but in design. The Sentinal font, Roman numerals and the OM symbol as dividers, and a smattering of filmic stills throughout, along with Barger’s gently rolling tonalities, all contribute to an unforgettable book of pachyderms and hush.
Work to be Done
by Bruce Whiteman
Biblioasis Press (2024)
Bruce Whiteman’s Work to be Done is about as different from Gary Barwin’s Imagining Imagining as can be. It’s an impersonal, deliberate compilation of essays and reviews published over the years (having the dates in the subtitle and even as a footnote to each piece would have been welcome) on translations, scholarly works, poets and books. Whiteman’s scholarship is prodigious and his style engaging as he addresses subjects that might be viewed as archaic or passé in a unique way, his tone intelligently conversational, quirky and eminently readable. He begins the collection with a short entrée called “What’s Poetry?” At first, the approach depresses with a typical acknowledgment: “The average Canadian or American doesn’t give a pinch of prairie dog scat for poetry,” listing all the possible reasons that “civilized society has turned away from [this] literary form” (even though on average 10 000 poetry books are published in the US and Canada each year!). But then Whiteman homes in on the core of it all, which is the poet’s “compulsion centered on the music of language,” a definition he elaborates on later in a discussion of PK Page, where he clarifies powerfully that the primary characteristic of a poet is their interest in “what happens inside, between, and among words when they are spoken.” In five sections and over three hundred pages, Work to be Done might have been published in two volumes, one attending more to his incisive critique of translations of Virgil, Hesiod and others (it’s unclear as to why his Sappho-musings don’t reside in this “Antiquity” section but in the initial “The Art of Poetry” one), and the other centered around his Canadian Poetry essays on such poets as Louis Dudek, Phyllis Webb, Dennis Lee and Leonard Cohen (the latter two of whom he mostly trashes, rhythmically-speaking). His attention to the crucial choice of diction for translators and the essential sensitivity to sonority for the poet is relentlessly compelling. And he can be quite funny. He notes that Emily Wilson’s translation shouldn’t use the term “homeless person” for Odysseus as, “None of the homeless people in my Toronto neighbourhood eat meat and drink wine every day of their lives,” that as Beethoven’s doctor was Dr. Wagner and his lawyer was Mr. Bach, maybe his dentist was “Herr Brahms,” and that in Larkin’s poems the British reality is “bad architecture, bad food and bad lovers with imperfect teeth.” These examples represent just a few sparks within Whiteman’s humorous prose. After delving into so many poets, both core (Whitman) and oft-ignored (Wilkinson), he arcs into books themselves, from “Jeremiads on the regrettable death of the study of the classics,” to the relative question of rarity among collectors, and issues of automation in Canadian university libraries. Who is Work to be Done going to appeal to? An eclectic reader with encompassing interests in poets from Homer to Norris (possibly a tall order?), but more importantly, a person compelled by a mind as gargantuan and generous as is Whiteman’s.
Catherine Owen is the author of 15 collections of poetry and prose. Her latest books are Riven (ECW 2020) and the essay collection Locations of Grief (Wolsak and Wynn 2020). She also writes reviews for Marrow Reviews at WordPress.com, hosts a poetry podcast called Ms. Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws, and runs the online magazine The The.