Julia Williams is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, This magazine, filling Station and CV2, as well as The Mercury Press anthology, Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Her first book, The Sink House, was published by Coach House in 2004. She lives in Calgary with her husband and a couple of cats.
Carolus Linnaeus. Seduced not by tooth and claw but by names: slick, sussurant. He went north to view a maelstrom. He walked one thousand miles wearing animal skins. Aped Adam.
In the trees, plague soldier beetles, glistening harlequin shells. A jewel family. Karl names shield bugs, rummages burrows, seeking the ghost moth, cuckoo wasp, the wee velvet ant.
Karl is afflicted by tropical dreams, continental friction, colonized islands dense with displaced life. Pets and stowaways: ants, rats, mongooses, the strangler fig, feral pig, norfolk pine and avocado.
Karl would eat bananas and wear frangipani in his hair. Plumeria is fragrant, but on his fake islands the public squares are swine-scented.
Karl measured the bells of each flower, the blubber of each landed seal. He walked north to view a maelstrom. He wore a white wig, kept his footing in snow. If only he had loved finches, not flowers, swapped an alphabet for sweet, lush Galapagos. A green island - now there's a kingdom.
Karl was no Barnum, had no feegee mermaid. A naturalist does not sew a monkey to a fish. He looks for stitches. No Mendel either, that filthy old monk, gamete swapper, slavering over his peapods. Just Karl, blood thick with venom.
peel beeswax to rob golden honey
stolen nectar ripens on my gums
Wait. His ambition took him north and south, to rich harvests. He was a man of science.
soft apocrita, gorged on husks
of bell flowers, sterile pollen
sweet ancient ignorance
What more poetic than a million corpses?
The Swede Karl von Linne adopts a Latin name. In a word: form is how we separate the beast from its herd. He snatches a dead language, conjures a hierarchy and grants animals class, kingdoms.
Gentle Adam, only human, understood at least this basic flaw.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading