Shane Neilson is a poet from New Brunswick who published Exterminate My Heart with Frog Hollow Press in 2008. My Manic Statement will be published with Biblioasis in 2009, White Coat, Black Bag (a book of medical poems) in 2010 with the Porcupine's Quill, and Alice in 2011 with Goose Lane.
Making Sense
I'm flummoxed: hock me up in a big hammock,
spin me. All top-heavy me, and let the lummox
go, watch the lunkhead stagger, watch the ox
stomp, watch him at angles to the world,
watch me. And I'll tramp and stamp,
swagger dizzy and abuzz, I'll be headlong,
I'll have no line, far-flung, and as the world
stems to lacklustre, as I am stemmed,
as sense rights, the hammock empty
and I've travelled far, flung far
into a lesson: the world is not vested,
it has no angle, it sets you, and atwitter
your head goes.
The Inventions of Love - "Love invents the sadness of tolerable departures." Dannie Abse
Love invented me; my patent is pending.
Love took my pain and invented the succour
of tolerability; love was a niche market,
a special-order product, sadness its brand name.
But this three-word naming,
this I-love-you of destitution,
I feel each time I say it like I
am waving bon voyage at a cruise ship;
you are on it, laden with the inventions
of love. The boat is named, ominously,
The Good Goodbye,
and I invent other words to call you back.
I invent a magical trombone to call to your
purely invented heart,
that you would ever come back
the invention I have come most to love.
Just Saying
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. -from Philip Larkin's "Talking In Bed"
And I converse in double negatives,
that negation of negation that is pillow talk;
that not love could unsay, but there is not still,
not silence nor anything I don't mean,
and in this rush to unclaim declension
and any part of not you, not you,
or not unkind and not untrue,
at once, at once, it is not undifficult to find
the basest reasonings of will; and here, I am,
I am not willing to say these unsimple words,
but I am also not unwilling. The hinge of or,
the sulk of not. I stare. It is not morning,
nor night either. Your back does not balk;
It has no non. It is aware. Perhaps you will not hear.
I love you.
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