Upcoming Events: UNB Poetry Weekend & WFNB WordTravels

The University of New Brunswick invites you to our annual celebration of Canadian poetry, Poetry Weekend! Join us on Saturday and Sunday, October 4th and 5th, at 11am, 2pm, and 8pm at UNB Fredericton’s Memorial Hall for a series of readings by Canadian poets and authors. Featured guests this year include: Don McKay, Stevie Howell, James Arthur, Robin Richardson, Linda Besner, Rob Winger, Travis Lane, David Seymour, Jeffery Donaldson, as well as many others!

Poetry weekend is presented by the Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the UNB Department of English, the UNB Bookstore, The Fiddlehead, Icehouse (Goose Lane) Poetry, Biblioasis, and the Porcupine’s Quill.

Admission to Poetry Weekend is free and anyone is welcome to attend. We look forward to having you join us at one of our most exciting events of the year!

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Writer's Federation of New Brunswick presents inaugural WordTravels in Florenceville-Bristol featuring Nancy Bauer, John Barton

September 22 event features workshops, art exhibit, poetry, theatre, music & more

Nancy Bauer, author, founding member and honourary president of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick (WFNB), will join Malahat Review editor John Barton as guest presenters at the inaugural WordTravels in northern Carleton County, Saturday, September 27, which will also feature an art exhibit by Aunty Political, book launch, readings and music. WordTravels is a new outreach initiative of WFNB, to provide writers in non-urban communities with learning and networking opportunities, with Canada Council assistance.  

The September 27 event leads off a series of events that will take place throughout the Province and will pair authors from outside and within NB to share and showcase Canada’s rich literary tradition and talent. A second full-day get-together will take place in Shediac on October 2, as Barton, former writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library and at the University of New Brunswick, continues his New Brunswick tour in support of the Province’s writing community. For the first two events, the featured NB authors are Ann Brennan, author of The Real Klondike Kate, The Hawthorn Bush, as well as several collections of poetry, and poet Rose Deprés, a literary mentor and creator. She is also an accredited translator, musician, spokesperson, dancer, actress, artistic and literary director as well as a teacher and yoga instructor. 

Cost for each workshop is $20 and can be paid at the door. For more information and to pre-register, email WFNB’s executive director Warren Maddox, at info@wfnb.ca or telephone (506) 260-3564.

UNB's New Writer-in-Residence Jeramy Dodds to Read Thursday, September 8

The University of New Brunswick would like to invite you to a reading from our new Writer-In-Residence, Jeramy Dodds, on Thursday, September 18th, 2014 at 8:00pm in Memorial Hall on the Fredericton campus.

Originally from Ajax, Ontario, Jeramy Dodds is a poet, translator, and editor and a graduate of Trent University and the University of Iceland. Called “a landmark of Canadian poetry,” Jeramy’s debut poetry collection Crabwise to the Hounds was a winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His recent translation of The Poetic Edda promises to capture the imagination with his careful attention to the details of these vivid Norse and Icelandic myths.

Please join us for a night of imagery and inventiveness as we share our excitement in welcoming Jeramy Dodds!

Summer Poetry Issue Launch!

Cultural Stoicism & Atlantic Canadian Vernacular: Phillip Crymble reviews Carmelita McGrath’s Escape Velocity

Having reviewed Danielle Devereux’s Cardiogram for The Fiddlehead blog in 2012, I was reminded, in reading through Escape Velocity, of the cultural and aural vernacular that’s so much a part of the literary geography of Newfoundland. The trick, I think, with any brogue, is to try and do it justice without putting the idiomatic  phrases and language used in jeopardy of being considered a caricature. McGrath deftly straddles the line in this new collection, and her ability to recognize and resist the impulse to essentially reduce native Newfoundlanders to a comic commodity through exaggerated dialect is one of the book’s great achievements. Despite the fact that he was a Maritimes mainlander, Alden Nowlan also had a highly nuanced appreciation of Celtic-influenced Atlantic Canadian speech patterns, in all likelihood because of the impoverished circumstances of his youth, and the vernacular of the Maritime underclasses he was immersed in. “The Red Wool Shirt,” for instance, in which a fisherman’s wife is surprised by a family friend’s sudden news “It’s bad, Mary”, demonstrates his acute understanding of not only the rhythms and rhetorical singularity of this peculiar dialect, but the cultural stoicism that accompanies it. How different, ultimately, are the woman in Nowlan’s poem, who finishes hanging her husband’s shirt on the line before asking “Charlie, it’s not / both of them [?]” and the speaker in McGrath’s “Old Crooked Fellow,” who remarks of her companion, “Now he’s gone. She’s better off. She gets more done. She don’t miss / him”?

In each of these poems, and for that matter, in poems from Danielle Devereaux’s chapbook like “Mainland Man,” we get the impression that we’re being met with something authentic, something similar to the stress-laden utterances of the “big-voiced scullions” of Seamus Heaney’s youth discussed in the introduction to his Beowulf translation. When reading through “Old Crooked Fellow,” for instance, it’s hard not to think of Dan Taggert in “The Early Purges,” from Death of a Naturalist, and his Ulster-inflected insistence “Sure isn’t it better for them now” in reference to the kittens he’s just drowned in a bucket. Both poems employ cats as subjects in unusual ways, but again, it’s the stoicism we encounter as an almost inseparable companion to the related dialects that’s the true crux of these poems. Just as Heaney’s youthful speaker tries to convince himself that such lessons are crucial to his own emotional survival, the same can be said of the woman in Nowlan’s poem, or McGrath’s speaker in “Crooked Old Fellow,” and her attempt to deceive herself into believing that the cat’s disappearance from her life is welcome.

What we also encounter in McGrath’s collection is a kind of poetry that reads as almost entirely contrary to the earthy, vernacular-driven narratives she does so well. Poems like “Interstice,” “Dispersals,” and “Unsent Letter #5” are as restrained, accomplished, and high-mindedly literary as what we’re accustomed to encountering in the work of our most celebrated academic lyricists. Demonstrating that she is as adept at turning artful and intricate phrases as she is at accurately capturing the native speech patterns of her tribe, McGrath blindsides those new to her work with meditations like “as if absence / itself were a force of permanence,” or, in the same poem, her description of a suddenly vanished clapboard derelict:

Then, one day, gone, not even skeletal evidence
to frame the sky, not even a scattered
old board on the new, tidy driveway,
rolled gravel where the tangle
of goldenrod and aster had drifted
above a well-worn path.

In “Unsent letter #5,” too, we’re met with similarly adorned phrasing that is both elegant and precise: “Stillness for the first time in days; something bronzed / and grey and made of light has laid an overlay / on the maples and the rowan trees.” She does slip into sentimentality on occasion while in this mode (“Light: Variations” comes to mind), but that McGrath is as comfortable and skilled at the high-artifice of lyric poesy as she is at accurately rendering the idioms and cultural sensibilities of native Newfoundlanders really separates her as a pioneering Canadian talent in this respect. And as Danielle Devereaux’s collection clearly demonstrates, there are others as well who are determined to follow in her path.

Phillip Crymble is The Fiddlehead's Poetry Co-editor

Our 2014 Summer Poetry Issue is Out!

You are never old, fair friends, our readers, as long as summer’s near. If poems appear as naturally as leaves unfurl on trees, then let the leaves of this our summer issue unfurl easily in your hands. If winter is the time for vistas, if from the warmth of your home you can see through the bare sticks of winter trees, then summer is intimate, as leaves fold over and against windows. Some poems like this intimacy, speaking the lassitude of a copse or grove. But, hey, it’s summer! Play ball! Home run! Head for the beach, the lake, the ocean’s curling surf, the sidewalk bistro, the ice cream parlour, the lettuce-crisp air conditioning of the Cineplex. That’s where some of these poems have gone. It’s the summer poetry issue!

We celebrate this summer with two special sections dedicated to the magnificent poets Travis Lane and Rae Armantrout. Travis is close to our heart; she has given her head and hands to The Fiddlehead for so many years now. She lives right here in Fredericton and drops in to say hello, to pick up books for review, never afraid to encourage or prune as she sees fit. She has lent her gorgeous poems to us in many issues. If you have overlooked Travis Lane, here is the opportunity to peruse her work and marvel, in this selection so carefully tended and introduced by Shane Neilson.

One day, a student came into my office and said, “my favorite poet is Rae Armantrout.” And it seemed perfect. I recalled a winter at Arizona State reading her poetry assiduously, amazed by her sly and spooky juxtapositions and resonances. I recruited Rebecca Salazar, and we spent afternoons in a café talking, thinking aloud, laughing, debating, and puzzling over how to select what seemed to us to be the too few poems that would represent Rae Armantrout. Rae has given us new poems, and Rebecca and I have selected writing from across her career to introduce Rae’s poetry to Canadian readers unfamiliar with her, and to present the dynamic range of her melodies to those who already love her work.

The purpose of these retrospectives has been to place the best of international authors in the context of Canadian poetry, though this year for the first time we present Travis Lane, who came from the U. S. to become one of our most treasured Canadian poets. But it wouldn’t be The Fiddlehead if we didn’t present these poets together with some of the finest new poets, poets who have yet to publish a book or have just published their first or second. Pay close attention to the inventiveness and surprise of Richard Kelly Kemick, Jenny Haysom, Cassidy McFadzean, Nyla Matuk, Kayla Czaga, Michael Pacey, Shoshanna Wingate, Bren Simmers, and Steve Tomasko.

We are in a poetry renaissance in Canada at the moment, recorded in the explosion of poetry in so many directions at once, scattering its exquisite debris all over the place. The Fiddlehead summer issue cannot sort out all of the pieces, but an impression of the different trajectories can be found in the work of Sina Queyras, Patricia Young, matt robinson, Miranda Pearson, Jan Conn, Jan Zwicky, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Compton, Robyn Sarah, A.F. Moritz, Patrick Warner, and Shane Neilson.

You never grow old, friends in poetry. I know it is but summer poetry, yet it will remain in the full four seasons of your heart.

Ross Leckie
Editor

Day on Salamis’ Seacoasts: Eric Miller Reviews Emery George's translation of Frederich Hölderlin's Selected Poems

Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, introduced, edited and translated by Emery George. Princeton: Kylix, 2011. 963 pages. Hardcover.

Reviewed by Eric Miller

1. Nobility

What is “nobility”? In a society, such as ours, that makes a fretful, often duplicitous, yet admirable pretence to democratic practice, the word may seem insistently, even discouragingly, to flaunt a feudal livery, contaminating all the situations into which we import it with the ghost of a titular presumption over the rest of society: an intractable case of most ancient bloodlines. But the origins of the word “noble” offer a means by which to parry, even to disarm, such narrow atavism. “Noble,” like “nobility,” derives from the same root as “gnosis”—“knowing”. When therefore we call a work of literature “noble,” we may address kinds of knowledge. We may designate not what literature knows, but how it knows: or—better—the specific knowledge that literature, only this literature, can both comprise and produce. Then much knowledge is not of some thing, some circumstance, or some fact. Literary knowledge often concentrates or, rather, dilates—as birdsong, that world-building music, also does—into a case of authoritative tone. Can literary tone be properly “noble”? Must nobility be banality, “fine ideas,” inelastic adherence to a stately elevation? I think not: the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) makes me think not. It is true that to invoke knowledge or “gnosis,” as I do above, already reinstates, in some measure, it must be conceded, the idea of an elect: an elect of knowers. Election is choosing. What could we choose to know? These questions, as they stand, are too broad: and, to modify or retract my earlier assertion, do require the focus of an instance, a thing, a circumstance, a fact. Herodotus and Plutarch provide coordinates for a theory of knowledge, as ironic as it is defiant. Hölderlin supplements that theory with all the resources of his time and place.

2. Our climate of consensus

Fortuitously, a friend of mine, Iain Higgins, wrote me recently that he was translating Hölderlin’s “Archipelago,” an elegy from 1800; that he was enjoying doing so; and that the poem would certainly not fly in our climate of consensus. The poem, if not the poet, too plainly venerates ancient Greece; the law of the father is not just assumed, but reinforced, with important reservations (the Greeks in their actions and their myths are not as unanimous in their conception of paternalism as the culture of their Persian foes, Darius and Xerxes). What we have learned to call “orientalism” compromises the fabric of the 296-line elegy—if by “orientalism” we mean to denote the depreciation of the invader Xerxes, whose horde (bridging the Hellespont with ships lashed together) fought to break and to occupy a contrastingly heroified, if disunited, Greek heartland.

Hölderlin’s partisan poem is divisible into several movements, like a piece of music. It opens with an apostrophe of Poseidon, the sea-god apposite to the sea-fight that history calls “Salamis” and dates to 480 B.C. (lines 1-61). The tutelary deity of Athens is explicably assumed to be Athena, but Themistocles, the statesman and strategist instrumental to the Greek victory at Salamis, in order to develop support for the shrewd high value he placed on nautical strength, instigated a theological campaign to magnify evidences of Poseidon’s interest in the city-state. Following Hölderlin’s address to Poseidon comes a lament for Athens as it was before the Persian invasion, with a cameo of Themistocles himself (61-85). From verses 86-103, Hölderlin describes the antagonist Xerxes’s arsenal and meditated plans of attack, with the corresponding despair of the Athenians, their city already despoiled. Battle in the straits by Salamis is joined and the fluctuating fortunes of the day are delineated, between lines 104 and 124. Xerxes’s disconcertment at the defeat of his great fleet occupies lines 125-135; the desolation of Athens regardless of the triumph, lines 136-160; the rebuilding of that city 161-178; its cultural acme 179-199; a melancholic allocation of all this to the long-ago past (200-256); at last the testimony of the poet’s persona in the first person singular brings Salamis and a revivifiable Athens into his present—into our present, a present substantiated (for example) by Iain Higgins’s translation. The poem ends with a fresh apostrophe of the immortal Poseidon (288-296).

Fiddlehead contributor Charles Wright Named US Poet Laureate

Photo credit: Holly Wright, poets.org

Charles Wright, Pulitzer Prize winning US poet and past contributor to The Fiddlehead (nos. 236 and 252), has been named the next US Poet Laureate.

According to the announcement on the Library of Congress website, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, says, "Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric. ... For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls 'language, landscape, and the idea of God.' Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality."

In the summer of 2008, The Fiddlehead published a Charles Wright retrospective along with a selection of new poems. In the summer of 2012, Wright contributed two more new poems to the magazine.