"I shal byjaped ben a thousand tyme / More than that fol of whose folie men ryme."
In one of the great narrative love poems in English, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus speaks to his friend Pandarus. Troilus, who once ridiculed lovers, is afraid he will be mocked widely should anyone find out he loves someone, let alone whom he loves. Chaucer's love poem is a masterful narrative, and can be contrasted to Lynn Crosbie's Liar, a confessional long poem about being cheated on by her boyfriend, and the long breakup afterward. While Troilus longs to hold in the truth and ends up telling everything, Crosbie wants to tell the world the story of her love and betrayal with endless, frivolous details dedicated "to the one I loved." Although Liar is quoted on the cover copy as being a "scorching" narrative love poem, the book is without narrative or great force.
Liar is more like a long list of peculiar facts about Crosbie's relationship than an actual narrative poem. Written in a stream-of-consciousness way, the events are told in a mishmash, out-of-order way without reference to dates or times. Lines begin "You" did this, "You" did that or said that, or "We" did that: "You're not a happy person, you said," and on the next page: "You did come to clean out your room, then. Swiped at the dusty shelves, and cleared / everything but a Styrofoam cup and a garbage bag." It's a bit tedious, and after the first few pages, it is enough; but the book is 149 pages long. "Selected Diary Entries" might be a more accurate category than long poem. Though a diary, it does have a few good lines, such as: "Like a lamb outfitted in the skin of its dead offspring, I chase / the one who has the power to starve me, or leave me behind." Imaginatively forceful, and sonorous, the lines are reminiscent of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem "Whoso list to hunt" and they are memorable for their brief flashes of brilliance -- even if they seem un-relatable to the surrounding text.
Sometimes long poems can be effective without a narrative, relying on repetition, themes, rhyme and meter to structure the poem, but this book has none of those. The many unmoored anecdotes such as "Before I left, she had just moved out," are bits of biography that do not seem to be carefully or economically chosen. Details like "To the right of this balcony was a Baptist church. I used to go to their / bazaars, and buy distressed rayon skirts and garish blouses" are prosaic and forgettable. The mess of details is formless moping.
Indeed, Crosbie seems too emotionally devastated to speak clearly, and to be without a grasp of the actual the narrative of the breakup as it happened in her own life, as suggested in the lines "I feel I am on the verge of understanding what transpired between us, / when I think of these socks, nestled in their black bouquets." The speaker does not have a strong grasp of the subject; there is a great deal of coming close to knowing, of almost grasping -- the whole book is on the verge.
As such, Crosbie seems concerned with attempting to cross this verge by mentioning many details of those years of her life, as a way of setting it all down on paper, to perhaps understand it all, as she says. The writing has a self-healing aspect, as confessional poetry does. The point of the book appears to be contained in these lines: "Writing about you is like hurrying through the litany / before confession proper // Taking a Gravol before a trip." Good for her health, then. But not good or interesting for the reader. However, the healing, the understanding, never comes; what we get is the unintended demonstration that intensely biographical writing becomes reflexive and experimental, that is: the writer stops writing about the relationship when all the details have been described, and starts writing about the act of writing about the relationship. So Crosbie may be speaking to herself when she says "You should learn. // How to stop speaking, how lies emerge, dependent on unspeakable clauses, / how fragments form, in syntactical infractions, // in a refusal to deny what is half-said --." Perhaps speaking to herself, perhaps not, but Crosbie's book is always moving inward so that the poetry is relevant only to herself and her ex, disabling any possible narrative. Though Crosbie would like to be the confessional victim, tricked and betrayed, she seems to be too sick with love -- too messed -- to write the genre.
Michael Goodfellow's chapbook Arrows is out from Laurus Press.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading