Prize Culture Auctioneerings: The Lampert Edition, 2013

By Shane Neilson

From the Cattle Assessment Manual, Auctions Plus Pty Ltd.:

Two assessment options are available on Auctions Plus:

◊ INDIVIDUAL, where the mob (or sample) are weighed on farm and manually assessed for fat, muscle, dentition etc. This is the most accurate method, giving a high degree of credibility with buyers.

◊ GROUP assessments, where the mob may not necessarily be weighed (though a sample may be), and are visually assessed for fat, muscle etc.

Debuts are beginnings, the first brand of the poet. The call begins at the country fair:

a thousand a thousand a thousand dollah dollah two thousand…

The word “debut” is most commonly attached to the following two superlatives in Canadian poetry reviewer-speak: “assured” and “accomplished.” The reason for the linkage is simple: reviewers feel the need to un-debut the debut, to assess the debut according to preconceived criteria designed to mask the poet’s relative lack of experience and romanticize their origins. Or, to trick LL Cool J’s phrase from way back, “Don’t call it a debut. I’ve been here for years.” The strategy is not to praise the debut for what it is but to praise the debut for lacking the faults it by rights can be permitted to have, moving the discussion of the poet further down the line of career, putting the first book amidst the mass of books of more experienced poets.

And it’s understandable. Whenever there is someone new in any aesthetic field, the public is enthralled when the artist displays precocity. The problem comes with a critical cadre whose business it is to knight books according to how developed they seem. If the goal is to write books that supersede beginnings, then poets out there will begin sounding like one another even more, ironing out their individuality to garner the usual superlatives.

Yet debuts are beginnings and the focus should not be upon how they don’t seem like beginnings. But perhaps “beginning” isn’t quite right. Rather, debuts are origin stories that attempt to refuse the nature of origins. The new and pretty face tries to look experienced because the public is compelled to ask: where did the young one come from? Some reviewers channel their inner Cool J and just put the poet beyond the question. But the question is more interesting than it seems, more interesting than the lazy seconding of material as more “mature” than what is typically expected of a first-book poet (How deep are they into their poetic project? one reviewer recently asked in print, a question that reflects how sanctimonious the business of first books is getting). Things are so bad now with our critics that a poet’s fate is cast with the first book.

In terms of my own practise, there are ways to approach a debut that are improvisational and I think this method is preferable to a fixed means of assessment. But such critical work doesn’t access the system because it doesn’t use prize culture vocabulary, leaving the reviewed poet without a document to wave at awards and grants juries. For the purposes of this piece, I enter the fray of deciding how our poets’ fates are cast into fixed futures by playing the familiar game of “assuredness.”

The first order of business is to explain the rules of the game, though the guild critic would never admit that determining assuredness and the related magical critical term “maturity” is like the proverbial judge’s definition of obscenity. Yet there are some principles at work:

(1)  Quality always will out (as a matter of taste.)

(2)  Origin stories are to be avoided unless something unique is done with them. Origin stories are tells intrinsic to debut poets in which mommy, daddy, or some youthful experience burns to exit their pens (the conventional wisdom is that “mature” poets don’t talk about themselves so much, whereas immature ones do.) In this sense Sharon Olds will always be a debut poet.

(3)  Vary style and form.

(4)  The book should be “book-like,” meaning structured. A formidable structure fools reviewers into thinking that the book has sat around for a long time on the road to perfection before being published but really represents only some of that, the rest of the equation there being how much the poet actually thought about structure. Assessing structure goes like this: the more interlocking the book, the more individual poems lift up and parade theme or theme(s), the better the look of the pretty face.

If I had to place importance upon the principles, then (1) is of course most important and (4) the least. The talentless can think a lot about what poems are required and where they should go but they seem to have rather more trouble writing good poems. As a reviewer it’s far easier to see structure and praise principle (4) than it is to apprehend how good something is, making (1) not only the most important principle but also the real business of the review (surprise, joy, exhilaration, and why). (1) is also the point where the review is most likely to go wrong, but I happen to know many good poets who would disagree about this hierarchy. (Poetry isn’t just a matter of taste; so are ideas.)

An idea to tilt at: the annual fashion show of debut cows is unseemly in Canada because the life of a poet in this country is dependent upon prize culture. Every one of the poets in the Lampert cow show would very much like to be awarded the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the first rung up on the ladder to Prize Culture greatness. Just a $1,000 purse, but winning constitutes a proverbial career-bathing in the Styx. My friends at AuctionsPlus put it this way: “Marketing begins at weaning.”

Reviews written by esteemed critics don’t matter as much as a cheap award like the Lampert. Yet awards don’t contextualize poets. They represent factional allegiances and tastes, just as reviews often do, but awards are always factional. Even with biased reviews, the thinking has to be displayed. Awards juries don’t release their thinking in prose. Yes, citations are released, infested with blank and blanket superlatives (“assured” and “accomplished” to reassure and make accomplished the debuts) but that’s it, a few sentences to justify the winner and shortlisted quasi-winners.  Reading citation bilge is an argument for reviews as the most substantial way of assessing poets, of looking at strengths and weaknesses, and comparing these within a group.

Two thousand dollah and hundred dollah, yessss a twentyonehundred dollah yess…

Hack reviewers resort to the “assured” and “accomplished” markers for debut poets meant to inveigh on jury members’ minds when it is deliberation time. But there is no deliberation time, believe me, in Prize Culture. The fix is in. As opposed to an award, a review’s suasion has to be convincing and it’s easier to tell if a reviewer’s following orders from the culture or if he’s resisting it. A review has to justify “assured” and “accomplished” but juries never do, their job is to pick and not to prove.

Because last year’s Lampert cow assortment was a worst-in-show, as far from a meaningful or relevant selection as possible, I thought I’d helpfully provide the Lampert jury some notes about some of the most notable bovinities this year and help them with data like fat thickness, muscling, carcass quality, and dressing percentages. Since the jury’s already made up its mind anyway, I’ve written draft press releases for them that lead the assessment of each poet. The intention is to show my thinking and not inveigh as to which book should win. Reviews show thinking; juries pick winners.

The natural behaviour of cattle should always dictate the method of handling: The IOWAMO[1] Edition

Stewart Cole, Questions in Bed (Goose Lane, 2012)

Up out there in the ring is a fine fine specimen of a Hereford gentlemen…

Jury Citation: This book shines in its intelligence and beauty, asking a-glitter questions of the numinous world with a pressing clarity that is liminal in its curiosity. Cole ranges through his questions with an archeological splendour, unearthing different categories and eras of the self so as to demonstrate a life that is moving through different modes of knowing and in the process demonstrating an examined life.

Auctioneer’s General Notes:  Cole is a very smart man. His poetry is of the same cloth as thought. He’s not trying to outsmart the reader through allusion[2] or grafted-on philosophy. What he does is ask pertinent questions, and in poetry the questions are tricky because there must first be a poem within which to ask such questions. Cole’s rhetoricals leverage poemstuff-before and poemstuff-after so as to earn their place and venerate the asking of the question. His questions can become the point of poems, and this sometimes works when the language keeps the charge running through the question-poem; sometimes the questions derail the poetry and a professorial “serializing the question” game occurs. The means of earning his questions occur primarily through image and sound. The view of this voice, or this debut, is that the man comes through: Cole is always pushing at something in his poems, he’s always trying to discover the “other side” of the answer by asking the kinds of questions to get to the other side. The knock of such a strategy is that the reader stays in his intellect, kept too far from emotion; the other problem is that though asking the right question can be a thing of genius, at some point the reader wants an answer to a question or two or three, some data from the poet that will function as an answer to the questions posed within poems but also as a meta-answer to the question: does this poet have what I need to know (not just what I need to ask myself?)

Carcass Quality (Quality): constitutively good, with some great individual poems. Jury members should refer to “Merman,” “Sirens,” and “Bedroom Commute” in particular. Strong moment in miniature, taken from “Weed ‘Em and Reap”:

…But in this blitz
of music hissed into by muted civic
stimuli – whispers of speed, guttered leaves,
prongs of skyless light –  I refuse to miss
the country, golden and oblivious
and hunkered out there harvesting our needs.

Fat Thickness (Baby Fat Origin Story): not much to pin on Stewart here. He’s not divulging much of the self as data. His questions serve as the ambassador of his mind, not drunk-puking in a pit somewhere. There is something admirably discreet in his presentation, but more detail and personal material might have tempered his intellectualization.

Dressing Percentage (Range): other than the question-generator as an undeviating technique that had to be used with abandon because of the structure/theme of the book, Cole is a lyric poet. His poems do show formal variation: he has list-like accumulations of aphorism, there’s a long poem sequence, some riffing off epigraphs. Sometimes the poems become sonic shouts “In Emergency.” Sometimes they are contemplative.

Muscling (Structure): solid. Cole is an asker of questions and this is maintained throughout the book. The asking of questions is signalled in the title, and three poems throughout the book reinforce this idea. The rhetoricals can become tiresome when they become prissy, but the questions are most often resonant.

***

Bifford, Darren. Wedding in Fire Country (Nightwood, 2012)

This here’s a Black Angus, just one year old, a real darling of a thing…

Jury Citation: Darren Bifford has written like a poet crying like a wolf. His inhabitation of the animal world is shamanistic and preternatural, causing the reader’s hair to stand on end. His poems insist on the drool from incisors and the panting howl at the moon. This is a poet to watch as he watches the moon and howls at the moon and writes about wolves howling in a fraught, wolvy land that is cold and snowy and trackless and full of Kantian being-itude-ity.

Auctioneer’s General Notes:  Bifford is gifted with an ability to cannibalize the works and lives of other writers and bend them to his own purposes. He resists outright Listafication because the texts he’s using are ones he’s lived with for years, his dedication to these texts is extended and sustained for many pages and his engagement with them is passionate at the level of intellectual engagement (he quibbles with ideas, he chides the masters) and with a dramatization of their pain. He also hasn’t predicated every poem on an overarching structural principle. Yet Bifford can insert himself in larger narratives involving the gods of poetry and work some personal effects. He is less comfortable writing straightforward narrative poems using a first-person perspective. Like Cole, Bifford is a thinker in poems, albeit without the overt perseveration of thought.

Carcass Quality: uneven, from dazzling to underwhelming. See the sonnet sequence “Letters to Milosz” for as strong a recommendation a poet can make to a jury. But because poets are hungry for awards like a wolf, I provide this excerpt from “Wolf Hunter”:

…So, little wolf,
you might as well hold your full-throttle pace
across the scree: easier to aim. There’s a rivet here
on the window ledge to gully the gun barrel,
set its scope to your barn-wide belly, x mark
your shaking heart. You’re almost dead before
I start, but there’s a moment you linger
a little more alive; time like a room we enter
together, a second or so before I pull the trigger.

Fat Thickness: enough personal detail on offer to situate the poet, though not so much as to make the collection confessional in nature. The problem is the nature of the presentation of personal detail. The poems in which the details come are the weakest in the book (see “Late Summer”); the poems where the poet is backgrounded are better. The real origin story is what Bifford loves to read and think about.

Dressing Percentage: there are sequences, themes are carried book-length, Bifford moves the camera inward and outward, there is formal variation (sonnets, prose poems, couplets, some play with lineation). An undeviatingly lyric voice.

Muscling: not completely realized, though many elements ensure aesthetic coherence. Bifford’s book is not a squarely themed book, and because of its several feints towards such a nature the problem is that he doesn’t go all the way. The one smart structural move is to tie one of his poetic gods in at the end of the book but this gesture is a good idea, not one made part of a general policy.

***

Henderson, Matthew. The Lease (Coach House, 2012)

Yeehah Texas! Ladeez Texas! Texas is here! Gentlemen lookit this Longhorn and dontcha think this stud will sell goin’ forward

Jury Citation: Henderson builds on the all-hallowed CBC literary award to write about one of the most environmentally pertinent subjects of contemporary Canadian life. He writes about the oil sands of Saskatchewan and Alberta as if it were a work-church where he goes to pray in the blood and the sweat and the beer and the oil. His poems are lugnuts turned right, are using an immense sky-wrench with precise motion, are pure jury bait, mmm, catnip.

Auctioneer’s General Notes: Henderson is perhaps the greatest devotee to the current sonic school of Canadian poetry. The entire book sounds great to the ear, but the effect at book-length is akin to listening to insistent treble. He penetrates the brain with his keen. But there is a true achievement in this book comparable to that of Bifford’s (signal engagement with the greats) and Cole’s (remarkable indulgence in a clean thought process) and this is the capturing of a place. Henderson writes about physical work in terms of locale, in terms of atmosphere, with menace and fatigue and the beauty of black sweat. Prize Culture loves landscape. Within Henderson’s book are a number of poems that could have been distilled to make one of the most powerful sequences ever seen in a Canadian debut. When writing about the oilfield, Henderson approaches magic, but when writing about people, he’s less “assured.” His cast of characters are just cameos (and often stereotypes). He often gives up on his people and reverts to the oilfield, where he’s more comfortable.

Carcass Quality: The graph is like this: total descend with poems about people, then sudden, explosive ascension when focusing on mechanical devices and oil. The landscape is this poet’s métier, the oil fields are now a part of him. But the book is padded for length, the same poem is written over and over again. Some of the poems are near-duplicates of one another, thematically, and I’ve already said they sound similar. But poems like “Migrant” are great when rationed:

You see bats, owls, palm-sized moths, all backlit
by the flare, known by their shadows, the little hairs
or feathers or dirty white dust that shingles their wings.
The pipeline hisses around you, cools under a white
frost that grows thick even in the unsunned swelter
of the night. You grip the line like a throat, squeeze
until water falls down your forearm, your fingers ache.

Fat Thickness: Henderson avoids the usual coming-of-age tales by situating his book in an unfamiliar place. Thus the coming-of-age narrative is itself displaced; the didactic narrator is of the oil field, providing the new arrival (Henderson worked in the patch as a younger man, so it’s hard not to think of the new arrival as the poet himself) with instruction in pain, disappointment, loneliness, and sex. But the old second person trick gets wearying after awhile.

Dressing Percentage: Limited but on purpose. Both geographically (of course, this is the best part of the book and the point of it) but also formally and prosodically. But in terms of emotion, by bringing forth the place, Henderson gets further into emotion and is episodically more powerful than either Bifford or Cole. Jury ho, this is a pertinent recommendation. Henderson’s by-now obligatory long poem/sequence (See Bifford, Darren and Cole, Stewart) is just stanzas extended overmuch, one to a page, reflecting padding again.

Muscling: inadequate, due to thick repetition. Some strange attempts at intentional structural repetition (the cow poems) display a lack of confidence and judgement. In all a badly edited book reminiscent of Flux, Joe Denham’s debut from years ago, another book with incredible poetry in terms of its core (also material focused on work/place) but a lot of other material that didn’t belong.

The natural behaviour of cattle should always dictate the method of handling: The CWILA[3] Supplement

Pinder, Sarah. Cutting Room (Coach House, 2012)

Out there that piebald beaut’s a Slovenian Cika, not much seen ‘round these parts but if ya got a mountain you cattle mountaineers then this here critter’s small stature lets it graze on rocky slopes, no need for ya to worry about erosion…

Jury Citation: Pinder’s technosoak and fragmentary technique rivets image to the eyes, her metaphor of lost spaces and lost narratives resurrected through close attention and imaginative investment creating a montage of lonesome snippets. Pinder explodes the contemporary landscape and films each piece of shrapnel, from trajectory to impact to decomposition to construction of the video mausoleum. Pinder’s fragments appear as both alien and natural, as if she sharpened their edges as much as she could so that the pieces would themselves cut if handled without care, so beware, the tweet of the culture is cutting.

Auctioneer’s General Notes: The screen test for Cutting Room is a formidable one because the poet made several choices with its composition that are either strengths or weaknesses depending on one’s view. This is the kind of book that is unlikely to be a consensus favourite but has a high likelihood of being an individual love, which according to the laws of consensus second-choice jurydom means that it could win. The book largely consists of very short poems, one stanza or two stanzas to a page, though there are some “longer” pieces (a page). In this instance faulting the book’s editor for padding and inconsistency is fair for there are many pages with a single three-line haiku-like stanza on them and there are also other pages where such units are clumped together, reflecting a random sequencing strategy. Mitigating the charge is that Pinder is herself a poet of rather strict concision. The fate of this book is in the fragments and on a word-for-word basis Pinder’s book is remarkable for its elimination of phrasal mortar. Pinder’s plucked her poems of the rudiments of narrative and created an accumulative, non-linear method. This justifies the book’s short strokes: if Pinder diluted her small stuff with dead lines then she’d be without control, but her small pieces are relentlessly pared. The small pieces themselves are tonally of one register which is unfortunate in that the scenes and images that are presented are disparate, but again the choice is that a stamp of control is placed upon the materials and in montages a creator’s hand should be seen to prevent a feeling of randomness. There are also quite a few instances where Pinder’s nonlinear method leads to quite arresting phrases (such as “proofed stun backwards into the practical”).

Carcass Quality: The feel of a “poetry journal” is unavoidable here, and the constraint of each poem being a kind of vignette, though not presented by the author or the press as being fixed and firm, is felt by me to ask too much of credulity. Fragments are fragments and at some point no matter how much work spent arranging the fragments and justifying the fragments is going to hide the fact that they’re fragments. But in a jury’s eyes, bringing to bear the earlier potato-potatoe argument, fragments may be preferred, and here a complicating factor is “Archipelagos.” This sequence forms Cutting Room’s last section, and consists of fragments that cohere into a story that remains nonlinear but which display as much ability with the crafting of narrative and sequencing as Cole, Bifford, and Henderson. With poems this short, titles are made to do a lot of work and that’s the case in the beautiful “Praising and Disparaging the Functional”:

This is how a string of ghosts appears in your inbox,
and this is how you answer them,

always, little sails.

Fat Thickness: Pinder avoids for the most part the clichés of origin stories. This is because she avoids story. But “Archipelagos” is as deft a handling of childhood (although it’s many other things too) as I’ve read for Lampert consideration, perhaps because of the non-linear and fragmentary nature of the telling. In other words, Pinder has it both ways, although this category will no doubt be determined by the judges’ willingness to accept very short – albeit flawless – fragments as prize-winning constructs.

Dressing Percentage: Pinder hasn’t yet shown she can write a good “traditional” poem that’s about a page long and sustained in its development of image and idea, but compensating for this lack or explaining it is a wide range of formal styles for her fragments. These can be in list form, they can become pithy jokes like those in Gabe Foreman’s A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Kinds of People, they can be traditionally stanzaic, they can be presented paragraphically, and they can be littered over the page. And Pinder’s written a great poem “sequence” that, perhaps, could have been compressed into a single poem by a different poet, but based on the beauty of “Archipelagos” I doubt that such a poem would be the same. Pinder’s doing something there that I think only she can do.

Muscling: hyper-short poems all the way through, check.

***

Savigny, Gillian. Notebook M (Insomniac, 2012)

Ladeez this introduced species was never native to Galapagos but gosh they’re sure givin’ it a shot there and the results do look promising what we’ve got is a Charolais, yes it’s common in Canada but not so in Galapagos c’mon gentlemen bidding starts at

Jury Citation: Gillian Savigny’s inhabitation of the mind of Charles Darwin is so scientific, there is no margin of error, talk of p values is made irrelevant and the Higgs boson particle was found by Savigny first, as dreamed up by Darwin on the Beagle in Savigny’s thought-experiment mind. Furthermore, through the magic of science poetry Darwin is presented as able to cure for cancers of all kinds. Darwin brings back the dodo, and through lengthening his hair, Darwin scoops Einstein with the general theory of relativity. (Well, these results aren’t reproducible if a jury reads the book, Darwin doesn’t do these things. Have I mentioned Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle yet? Well, that too!) Science is good for you, science is good for poetry, everyone do the science, everyone be blinded with science! Eureka! There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill, it’s a Blue-Footed Booby! Everybody rush to give this scientist/explorer///…///poet a prize!

Auctioneer’s General Notes: Savigny is part of an onslaught of texts reliant upon science (though actually reliant upon biographies of scientists, images and magic-sounding names of/from branches of science). This is the zeitgeist. One wonders when science will once more be uncool. Notebook M is bonafide Listafied: throughout it is dependent in some way upon sponsoring source quotes or actual materials from Charles Darwin or his biographers. The book consists of full poems and is structured in a way that suggests structure came first and poems later (the first element of the book is a description of its technique/conceit, the next is a frame poem which sets the voyage of the book on its journey, the next long element is an erasure of a Darwin text composed while Darwin was on the Beagle…). The conceit is that the book springs, spiritually, from one of Darwin’s metaphysical notebooks, but in actual fact Savigny gets most of her materials from outside Darwin’s Notebook M specifically, ranging much further afield amidst the Darwin canon.

Carcass Quality: Because Savigny moves to a broad sampling of Darwin, the trouble is that plundering a beautiful writer like Darwin is far too easy for a true devotee of the hard ’garde. For example, Savigny’s initial erasure, which runs for over twenty pages, doesn’t run sequentially from the book it rips from, to the best I can tell. The erasure cheats and the resultant discovered text is so thin that one wonders at the skill of the poet who needed over twenty pages of Darwin to get such paltry results. Furthermore the erasure appears in various font sizes and the background “erased” text has different contrast making the actual reading of the Darwin text quite difficult. This kind of poem (occurring at length, with attempted font tricks) is best left for online presentation, doesn’t do anything new (the obscuring effect has been done before) and it’s incredible that it makes up a quarter of the book. With respect to the “original” material on offer in the book, though good, one has to compare the results with Darwin’s own prose. Savigny doesn’t come off as strongly as she might have if Darwin were a purely invented character because of the structure of the book, which is erected on the shoulders of a giant. But as Sachiko Murakami’s first title as editor, it is a big step forward from the usual Insomniac debut and has a distinct advantage over the other shortlisted books. The advantage is Charles Darwin. Because metaphor is the real business of poetry, I’ve included the following from “M is for Metaphor” for real jury perusal:

If metaphor is a form of experiment,
I would like to use it to test a hypothesis:

that a bird is a cage for the sky.
Something has tunneled through the bones of the finch.

To find out what I will ask
if there is a key that can open the bird

without breaking it. Is a knife a key? Is a pin?
Is there a lock hidden under all those feathers?

My results will show that knife and pin can open a lock
as small as a pore or as large as a beak,

but one opens too wide and the other just wants to fasten
the bird to the page. All I want to do is open and close,

find true and false. I will keep searching for the right key
to test my theory, because what else could have made the finch

more space than substance? What else
could give it the ability to fly?

Fat Thickness: As planned, complete obliteration of authorial identity. Origin story subsumed in the origin story of Darwin himself, relying upon biographical data from Darwin’s life in order to plug into poems that use Darwin and his ideas as their substance.

Dressing Percentage: Excellent variability, as planned. Erasure, inventory, footnoted poems, prose poems, visual poems, a poem consisting solely of Linnean taxonomy. Of all shortlisted books Notebook M, while keeping its home base in the lyric, has the most formal moultings and shows the greatest deliberation in terms of the book as whole.

Muscling: slight imperfection with the range of materials used (too broad, making generating a book of poetry about Darwin less of a feat than it could have otherwise have been) and with anachronisms (Darwin wouldn’t have been so sloppy) but there is no doubt the book owns this category at auction. Charles Darwin is the muscle.

***

Jury Postmortem, By Lone Juror

Remember, Auctions Plus is here to help you. We are used to comparing within a species. We know our breeds. Lampert jury, please do not forget:

◊ When unfamiliar groups are mixed before slaughter they do not settle down and the incidence of dark cutting is increased.

◊ This is particularly so for bulls. Redrafting aggravates the situation.

◊ If practical, sorting stock one week before slaughter allows them to establish a social order and to settle down before going to slaughter.

◊ The incidence of dark cutting meat increases as the time between farm and slaughter is increased.