Unfit Criticism 1-6

A record of lifelong dedication to poetry criticism.

1 (retractable devil horns: criticism 1999-2018):

“Poisonous Frame”; “Public Hanging”; “Harbourfront Pigs and Lipstick”; “Rules of Thumb for an Aspiring Critic”; “Pretending to be Great”; “High School Confessional”; “Measured Advice”; “Reaching for Al Purdy”; “Solway the Sad Balladeer”; “Critics at Large”; “The Invisible Man is in your Caesura”; “Introduction to The Pre-Poem Moment“; “Eventual Development”; “McCartney Sings the Blues”; “Recovering the Stars”; “Beauty and Representing Mental Illness”; “Interpreting the Interpreter of Dreams and Culture”; “True Words in the Word Cloud”

2 (personal investments): “Time and Fever”; “Freedom”; “Language on Holiday”; “The Festival of No More Words”; “Explosions”; “Finnegan’s Wake in the Porridge Universe”; “Borrowing Magic”; “David Shields and the Laziness Inherent”; “Coda”; “The Poetics of Plot”; “Zero Chronology”; “But Transcendence”; “How Bad is this Book?”; “It’s Not All About the Brain”; “Healey and Goliath”; “The Paradox I’m Really Pulling For”; “Anticlimax”; “Nice Try, Dostoevsky”

3 (marginal): “How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing”; “The Backwoods Sobriquet”; “Regionalisms 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond: Reading Maritime Poetry Anthologies Backward”; “Foosty Boost: The First Two Books of Anne Compton”; “Dr. Acorn, or: How I Joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and Learned to Love the Stern Nurse Fusion Bomb Sun”; “We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Progressive White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems“; “Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger”; “Visiting Lane”; “Visiting Wayne Clifford”; “Crossing the Campus”; “Clifford the Not-Sonneteer”; “A shared text is an act of friendship”; “Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack“; “In Some More Distant Key: an Interview with David Helwig”; “Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: on J.J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds“; “Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Chaisson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc“; “Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.”; “Obituary”; “Angelic Salutation.”

4 (the negative review season one):

“Return of Thematic”; Spoiled Identity and the Frozen Now”; “Crito Revolta”; “Missing Vision”; “Like My Dad, Rapping”; “Dionne Brand is the Most Powerful Poet in Canada”; “The Rebranding”; “CanLit Twitter Matchmade me and Holy Wild“; “The Protest is this Way”; “The Neilson Ratings”

5 (the negative review season 2): “Rocky Mountain Opportunity”; “How the Hell Did Waldo get Published by Dionne Brand? A Tetraptych”; “Sharing and Staring: I Give Best Canadian Poetry 2021 a 1/3 of a Pea rating on Goodpeas (max 5 peas)”; “The Topic of Whiteness in Canadian Poetry”; “Reviewing Reviewing”; “Runaway Griffin Jury 2022”; “Imaginary Griffin 2022 Conversations”; “Can Kevin Connolly Do Anything Right?”; “Maybe . . . Recuse?”

6 (the negative review season 3): “Trend Unsettler”; “Behind the Progressive Times”; “Science Flowers”; “Essaya*ona*Selecteda*Poemsa*ina*Threea*Partsa*”; “The Mid to Mild Kinglet”; “Unpublishing the Archive”; “Men at Play”; “Repetition and Gallstones”; “No Joke”; “On Wunker’s The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth-and-Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry“; “All’s Punny in Ding-Dong Land”; “Marred by Association”; “Losers Gotta Lose: Smile for the Screenshots”; “The Marvel Superhero Movie Post-Credits Scene: TNR Project Debrief”

Two class visits

A couple of class visits this week, the first in ENGL 1000 at the University of New Brunswick for a virtual reading and gloss on two poems from Meniscus (Biblioasis, 2009). My thanks to Fawn Parker for asking, and I’ll paste the brief address (minus the poems) below. The other is at the Trent campus in Oshawa with Concetta Principe’s ENGL A105 for a talk on Saving (Great Plains Publications, 2023).

TW: suicidality, though if you’ve got this book in hand, you already know that

Poems are, quite frankly, better than diagnoses. They might offer diagnoses – one of the tasks of writers is to diagnose the culture, just as one of the tasks of readers is to read symptomatically, to diagnose the gaps, silences, and oppressions embedded within the world-view of the writer.

But I digress. One benefit of poems is to describe the things which are, a term I first encountered from Alden Nowlan and his book of the same title, but which I later learned was actually taken from the King James Bible. Again, I digress. That is its own interesting story that offers its own diagnosis. Perhaps one last digression: I’m currently writing a book about the ontology of poetry itself, simply how to be as a poet, from my own positionality as mad and autistic heterosexual man. Quite ironically, it seems to me know, I write of how to be.

And yet – once upon a time, I had no idea how to be. I wanted to die, so passionately; and the feeling has never completely left, though I have learned how to be with that feeling. I didn’t know how to make it another minute, let alone hour or day. I had a clear choice offered to me: take this, or die.

I simplify a little. It was more like, “Try this batch of probably ineffectual drugs that will give you side effects and maybe we’ll hit on one or two or three that help and prevent you from acting impulsively when mixed-manic, wanting to die.” I also simplify in the sense that I wasn’t able to process choices as choices at the time I’m invoking here. I’m not quite sure how I made the choice to live, to have faith and take the tablets in their sequence and many kinds, but make the choice I did, for I am here now, and if any of you out there understand what I mean – those that have come close, either by intent or act – then I offer you the purest respect and cherish the desire to live within you.

Poems point in many directions and once, cunning ambiguity being their methodology. I hate to flatten poems into a didactic message, and so offer this prefatory history to you as context and not explanation. To conclude on a medical point: though there are many drugs to treat bipolar disorder now, the flagship drug remains lithium despite its many drawbacks to the kidney and thyroid gland, as well as its potential to induce both acute and chronic toxicity. From the perspective of biomedicine, bipolar patients can be divided into two categories, lithium responders and non-responders.

But what is the poetic response to a family history of wreckage, of addiction and major mental illness, of abuse and rural loneliness? How might a person articulate the results of an entire alternative way of being, of madness, of perceptual and conceptual difference being exorcised, flattened into a planar surface?

(reading follows — “Lithium” and “There is no cure”)

Wordsfest 2023 — “Stories of Medicine, Illness, and Disability” panel

Honoured to be taking part in Wordsfest’s 10th anniversary this year. Hope to see some friends in London ON (in the Museum) on Sunday Nov 5 at 4:30 PM. I’ll be discussing The Covid Journals (U Alberta P, 2023), The Suspect We (Palimpsest Press, 2023) and Saving (Great Plains Publications, 2023), and will be part of a panel including Therese Estacion, Bahar Orang, and Vivian Chong. Not to mention the theme of this session, I love the overarching theme of the anniversary: crisis, creativity, & care. Schedule can be accessed by site navigation here. & if you can’t make this event, do remember that I’ll be in London the Wednesday before, on Nov 1 2023 at 6:30 PM for the Black Mallard Reading Series with January Rogers (Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N). I’ll read from The Suspect We.