Reading a Poetry Reading and reading a review

I went to a poetry reading at the library the other night. It was kind of serendipitous. I felt like going and I didn’t have to sell the idea to anyone else. There wasn’t anyone else. The headliner poet was Patrick Lane. He’s a famous Canadian poet. I haven’t read any of his poems. His celebrity has percolated into my consciousness enough that I know the name of his wife (another famous Canadian poet whose poems I’ve never read) and I know that he is a recovering alcoholic (don’t ask me why I know this – he did mention a friendship with Al Purdy whose work I have read & loved, so that may be why I know this fact about PL or maybe it was on the poetry news or something…).

I liked the poetry reading and I liked the poems that PL read. They were very narrative and prosy so they were easy on the ear, easy to follow. He even generated quite a bit of suspense when he read the one (it may not have actually been a poem) about his dad getting killed at work by a disgruntled former employee.

The poem I liked the best was the first one he read, “The War”. It was partly about the Holocaust but also about the irony of murder – how it’s bad when we’re the victim but somehow justified when we’re the perpetrator or at least that’s how I read it. It was the image of fly-catching that really nailed the poem for me. I liked the way PL read this part, how he made it complicated just like the way a fly flies, how he moved his hand when he read it. I liked the rhythm of his reading – he paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

Of course, I would (with my fascination with all things animal) zero-in on the fly wondering as I always do, if the fly would speak and, if so, if it would speak out of its own subjectivity or if it would speak with some kind of anthropomorphized voice – cartoonish or simulated real… PL, I think, let us hear the fly speak for itself. We heard its last “word,” its sound as the speaker’s friend taught the speaker how to catch the fly in mid flight and dash it to the ground and kill it. Before he killed it, he held his hand up to the speaker’s ear to let him hear the caught-alive fly speak. The episode was repeated twice in the poem. It had to matter.

The day after the poetry reading, I went on the internet to see if the text of the poem was printed anywhere. I wanted to read it. There were other things in the poem that interested me. PL’s sense of place was very powerful and he listed a lot of endangered species and, of course, being a war story, there was a lot of allusion to memory, re-membering and nostalgia (stuff I’m preoccupied with right now). I wondered too if he could be called a nature poet and thought, vaguely, that I might try to find out.

I didn’t find the poem but I found a review of the book (Go Leaving Strange) in which the poem appears and a reference to the poem with a quotation from the very section I was interested in.

The heat/ and a single fly he caught in the middle of the telling, his one hand/ holding what was left of the bread and his other, the left one, coming/ behind the fly and then sweeping slowly, catching the fly as it rose/ backwards as flies do when they first lift from what they rest on, bread/ the crumbs fallen on the slick surface of the table, a lick of wet butter./ He held his fist to my ear so I could hear the buzzing/ then flung the fly to the floor, the single sharp click of its body/ breaking there. And the story going on, the fly an interruption…

But the reviewer,(for The Danforth Review) Shane Neilson, read this poem completely differently than I did! He described the “fly episode” as a “paragraph of digression”, a “monster-size digression” and “irredeemably prosy”. I saw it as central to the poem (really nailing the message that we really don’t learn from our pasts despite the stories we tell, that, in fact, our pasts interrupt the ongoing story, the one we want to, ironically, get on with). Neilson saw the fly episode as something that should be edited out of the poem along with a lot of other stuff (which is funny as PL said at the poetry reading that he doesn’t edit his work, that most of it is published in first draft because he types slowly and figures he edits in his head). Maybe Neilson needs to see PL and hear him read it - the way he moved his hand, paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

I learned other stuff from reading the review of Lane’s book – that Lane is thought of as a superb poet who hasn’t changed much over the years and that Neilson sees this as a major failing. He champions the poet who “upon acquiring a style, first exhaust[s] and then relinquish[es] it in favour of seeking out another”. This assumes that we read the complete works of a poet and follow them along their poetic path rather than just read selected greatest hits etc. I read a lot of some poets but for the most part tend to flit through anthologies dipping deeper into the work of poets who tantalize me with a work I like. And I liked “The War” so I’ll dig deeper…and keep digging at the questions of DQ's ongoing and unfolding story and our own reasons for moving.