By Jeffery Donaldson
John Thompson keeps not going away. He left us almost forty years ago, at a point in mid-life when he was emotionally and mentally at the edge of his own chopping, looking to clear a path into the unspoken without actually falling into it. Or perhaps by falling into it. That he lingered on the margins of the livable life is part of what seems to have kept him on our radar. He never quite steps into the open of poetic celebrity (such as it is), but we keep hearing his axe-work at the edge of hearing. Thompson remains not just because his Collected Poems & Translations has got a facelift and reappeared under the Goose Lane imprint with corrections and minor revisions. The outsize figure in Canadian letters is like a bear you can’t quite make out in the depths of the forest, going about doing its thing, shy, independent, unpredictable: you have to watch it from a distance.
The editor Peter Sanger has been Thompson’s tireless advocate for decades. The corrections and additions to the new edition are further evidence of Sanger’s patient, unstinting attention to detail, his scholarly sifting and sorting in search of final versions, his measured evaluation of the biographic and bibliographic stakes. Sanger shows us what we have to work with: two small books of poems, appearing closely together in the mid ’70s: At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets, and a posthumously published series of ghazals entitled Stilt Jack; a set of translations of the French poet René Char; and all the uncollected poems that have surfaced. Sanger makes a convincing case that the translations are a central part of the achievement and a clue to its secrets.
I’ve been slow, lazy even, in coming to Thompson’s work. I felt I understood his place in the big picture. He was gathering up the energies of the Poundian Imagist and Vorticist movements from the teens and twenties, shaping a hybrid sixties expression of them in familiar nature poems that were complicated by cryptic psychological interventions. The quintessential Canadian themes were there: bone, wood, axe, hammer, chopping, digging, the underground root, the buried specimen. It is the work of a genuine primitive looking to build simple sustaining structures out of the materials of nature. I felt I understood the experiment: the poems were an exploration of the spare style (“laconic, controlled, percussive,” is Sanger’s excellent formula) leaning in the direction of the private, enigmatic, and recondite. I was stuck between feeling that his poems were either too hard or too easy, that I didn’t have the patience for either, and didn’t in any case know how to decide. I would read a few lines —
I try for oblivion, dirt
and a woman:
my right hand breaks;
new snow …
— and think how easily this could be mistaken for magnet poetry, with its penchant for the oh-so-cryptic, meaningful meaninglessnesses of random juxtaposition. The problem is one with which every reader must come to terms at some point or other: how do you judge the rightness of lines you don’t understand? Some reviewers of the first edition of the Collected Poems were demure on the question, proclaimed themselves undernourished. Fraser Sutherland wrote, not unsympathetically, in Books in Canada:
[Stilt Jack] has powerful imagistic moments and considerable cumulative force but Thompson wrote some of these poems while drinking, and it shows. Lines that one writes while drunk seem like stunning epiphanies at the time; regarded during a hangover, they’re more like crossword puzzles. Thompson didn’t puzzle over his: he just wrote more ghazals.
Sutherland reminds me of my own impatience. I must have been stuck at the time in a certain attitude of reading: approach it like a cold bath, quickly in and quickly out again. While the idea can favour the immediate splash a poem makes, the shock, the tightening of the mind’s scrotum if you like, there isn’t much chance of learning the other lesson about a cold swim: stay in long enough and your balls will adjust.
A Thompson poem says “back off,” not in a rude or unwelcoming sense, though not perhaps entirely excluding these either; his poems, like the man himself, liked to live on the edge. But you have to let the thing breathe, do what it does in front of you. This isn’t passive or laissez-faire reading, but an active making room, preparing a ground where a thing might dwell. You can’t force a Thompson poem, try to solve it quickly, make logical sense of a continuous narrative argument. A Thompson poem does much of its work in the interstices between words, phrases, stanzas. The metaphoric energies, in their stillness, are a form of static electricity: every touch gives a shock.
In any case, Thompson was ahead of his respondents. A Thompson poem is partly an inquiry into what it can accomplish, being what it is; it thus becomes a confession of its own challenges and frustrations.
Apple Tree
Cauldron of leaves,
the sun a deadly furnace
under the branches;
I cannot contain this summer
nor the charred dancer
exhausted
on the snow:
a head of burnt hair
crackling faintly,
the thin smoke
where a crow drifts
toward no home;
to be possessed or
abandoned by a god
is not in the language,
only the impure, the broken
green, the half-
formed fruit
we reach for in desire,
calling it our harvest.
Three images for an apple tree in late summer: a cauldron of leaves, a charred dancer, a head of burning hair. These are not just imposed abstractions but a wrestling with the wonder of appearances and what they hide. An apocalypse burns in the heart of nature, a revelation of its original godhead. We try to find the words. Which ones? The metaphors gesture towards it, but “a crow drifts towards no home.” Then the setback, the seeming resignation: “to be possessed or /abandoned by a god / is not in the language.” We make do with “the half- / formed fruit we reach for in desire, // calling it our harvest.” That extraordinary metaphor, “the broken / green”: we pluck from all we see, too soon, the immature, not-yet-ripened language-fruit. The poem has, in just being what it is, moved too quickly to harvest its meanings from the ineffable; it expresses as much a disappointment in itself as a caveat to its readers. If only we could wait longer in the poems we make, in the poems we read, not be in a hurry to say what we say, frighten off what we might have said. And yet we have to say something. Like a poem whisperer, Thompson wants his words to be there, but keep still, that shy things might come to them.
The series of ghazals published posthumously in Stilt Jack were Thompson’s attempt to back off still further from language’s impatient tendency to say things outright, missing other truth. The Persian form, with its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated couplets aligned in the service of a latent gestalt, was ripe for Thompson’s picking. It allowed him, even forced him to experiment with the question that haunted him: how long can a poem let its meaning-fruit ripen on the branch before it becomes inedible and wasted? Again, the tension is between seemingly impenetrable encryption on the one hand and a slower gestation of the possible on the other. Anticipating naysayers, Thompson wrote in his own defense, in the preface to the book, that his poems do indeed try to get somewhere:
These are not, I think, surrealist, free-association poems. They are poems of careful construction; but of a construction permitting the greatest controlled imaginative progression. // There is, it seems to me, in the ghazal, something of the essence of poetry: not the relinquishing of the rational, not the abuse of order, not the destruction of form, not the praise of the private hallucination. The ghazal allows the imagination to move by its own nature: discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense — a chart of the disorderly against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps. The ghazal has been called “drunken and amatory” and I think it is.
Let’s have, for no particular reason, the ghazal that includes the book’s title:
XXVIII
I learn by going;
there is a garden
Things I root up from the dirt
I’m in love with.
First things: lost. the milky saucer,
of last things a siren.
Please, please be straight, strait,
stone, arrow, north needle.
I haven’t got time for the pain,
name your name,
the white whale, STILT JACK, in her face,
where I have to go.
Some readers may not know of Sanger’s careful parsing of these poems in his book Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack (1986). It saves a certain kind of reader a great deal of time. It identifies allusions (here for example to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”), relates lines and poems, recalls, restores to attention, while still leaving the poem plenty of room to be itself, not rush it into contractual paraphrase. I think Sanger would agree at the same time that Thompson’s futurity will partly depend on the ability of new readers to adjust their reading habits generally, their expectation of outcomes when reading a poem like this. We must learn to “make do,” at least at first, with what is there, to take the poem at its word. To back off while coming near.
What is a Thompson ghazal like? Think of a leisurely walk, say, in the woods, and the thinking that you might do on it. Is the thinking you do on that walk heading somewhere? Well, yes and no. As the body carries you forward, there are the gentle allowances of this or that next idea, images that come to mind, sudden detours, gestured towards as you move otherwise. And there are moments of reciprocity where the encounters along the walk intersect with the wanderings of the mind to realize a further progression. Ends are reached all along the way.
Does that mean anything goes, so long as we move towards an end? Are we back at magnet poems? I don’t think so. But we are at a point where intuition and a kind of free but inquisitive admission of what follows come into play. The secret of a Thompson ghazal is to have the next gesture be both “out of the blue” and at the same time the only thing that could ever have appeared there. Here is a line. What is it like? Why does it belong there? The words are themselves: fruit ripening on the branch. What are its textures, its plumb weights, its roots, its relations to everything around it? Something unexpected but ineluctably there: where are you now? The drawing of a circle wider and wider.
It may be that Thompson left us the best key to his poems in the title of his first book, At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets. Thompson tried to work at the edge of the chopping, to find a way of getting words to say something that they weren’t already going to say. To chop away at their own underbrush, make new clearings. Poems that cut and split and pile: breakings-off, severances; out of it, a whole assembling. What is rightness but that feeling of astonishment when the axe falls keenly, just so? Nothing left to desire, once it comes off clean, for at the edge of that chopping there are no secrets.
Goose Lane | 296 pages | $24.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0864921451
John Thompson’s Chop Shop
Articles
John Thompson keeps not going away. He left us almost forty years ago, at a point in mid-life when he was emotionally and mentally at the edge of his own chopping, looking to clear a path into the unspoken without actually falling into it. Or perhaps by falling into it. That he lingered on the margins of the livable life is part of what seems to have kept him on our radar. He never quite steps into the open of poetic celebrity (such as it is), but we keep hearing his axe-work at the edge of hearing. Thompson remains not just because his Collected Poems & Translations has got a facelift and reappeared under the Goose Lane imprint with corrections and minor revisions. The outsize figure in Canadian letters is like a bear you can’t quite make out in the depths of the forest, going about doing its thing, shy, independent, unpredictable: you have to watch it from a distance.
The editor Peter Sanger has been Thompson’s tireless advocate for decades. The corrections and additions to the new edition are further evidence of Sanger’s patient, unstinting attention to detail, his scholarly sifting and sorting in search of final versions, his measured evaluation of the biographic and bibliographic stakes. Sanger shows us what we have to work with: two small books of poems, appearing closely together in the mid ’70s: At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets, and a posthumously published series of ghazals entitled Stilt Jack; a set of translations of the French poet René Char; and all the uncollected poems that have surfaced. Sanger makes a convincing case that the translations are a central part of the achievement and a clue to its secrets.
I’ve been slow, lazy even, in coming to Thompson’s work. I felt I understood his place in the big picture. He was gathering up the energies of the Poundian Imagist and Vorticist movements from the teens and twenties, shaping a hybrid sixties expression of them in familiar nature poems that were complicated by cryptic psychological interventions. The quintessential Canadian themes were there: bone, wood, axe, hammer, chopping, digging, the underground root, the buried specimen. It is the work of a genuine primitive looking to build simple sustaining structures out of the materials of nature. I felt I understood the experiment: the poems were an exploration of the spare style (“laconic, controlled, percussive,” is Sanger’s excellent formula) leaning in the direction of the private, enigmatic, and recondite. I was stuck between feeling that his poems were either too hard or too easy, that I didn’t have the patience for either, and didn’t in any case know how to decide. I would read a few lines —
I try for oblivion, dirt
and a woman:
my right hand breaks;
new snow …
— and think how easily this could be mistaken for magnet poetry, with its penchant for the oh-so-cryptic, meaningful meaninglessnesses of random juxtaposition. The problem is one with which every reader must come to terms at some point or other: how do you judge the rightness of lines you don’t understand? Some reviewers of the first edition of the Collected Poems were demure on the question, proclaimed themselves undernourished. Fraser Sutherland wrote, not unsympathetically, in Books in Canada:
[Stilt Jack] has powerful imagistic moments and considerable cumulative force but Thompson wrote some of these poems while drinking, and it shows. Lines that one writes while drunk seem like stunning epiphanies at the time; regarded during a hangover, they’re more like crossword puzzles. Thompson didn’t puzzle over his: he just wrote more ghazals.
Sutherland reminds me of my own impatience. I must have been stuck at the time in a certain attitude of reading: approach it like a cold bath, quickly in and quickly out again. While the idea can favour the immediate splash a poem makes, the shock, the tightening of the mind’s scrotum if you like, there isn’t much chance of learning the other lesson about a cold swim: stay in long enough and your balls will adjust.
A Thompson poem says “back off,” not in a rude or unwelcoming sense, though not perhaps entirely excluding these either; his poems, like the man himself, liked to live on the edge. But you have to let the thing breathe, do what it does in front of you. This isn’t passive or laissez-faire reading, but an active making room, preparing a ground where a thing might dwell. You can’t force a Thompson poem, try to solve it quickly, make logical sense of a continuous narrative argument. A Thompson poem does much of its work in the interstices between words, phrases, stanzas. The metaphoric energies, in their stillness, are a form of static electricity: every touch gives a shock.
In any case, Thompson was ahead of his respondents. A Thompson poem is partly an inquiry into what it can accomplish, being what it is; it thus becomes a confession of its own challenges and frustrations.
Apple Tree
Cauldron of leaves,
the sun a deadly furnace
under the branches;
I cannot contain this summer
nor the charred dancer
exhausted
on the snow:
a head of burnt hair
crackling faintly,
the thin smoke
where a crow drifts
toward no home;
to be possessed or
abandoned by a god
is not in the language,
only the impure, the broken
green, the half-
formed fruit
we reach for in desire,
calling it our harvest.
Three images for an apple tree in late summer: a cauldron of leaves, a charred dancer, a head of burning hair. These are not just imposed abstractions but a wrestling with the wonder of appearances and what they hide. An apocalypse burns in the heart of nature, a revelation of its original godhead. We try to find the words. Which ones? The metaphors gesture towards it, but “a crow drifts towards no home.” Then the setback, the seeming resignation: “to be possessed or /abandoned by a god / is not in the language.” We make do with “the half- / formed fruit we reach for in desire, // calling it our harvest.” That extraordinary metaphor, “the broken / green”: we pluck from all we see, too soon, the immature, not-yet-ripened language-fruit. The poem has, in just being what it is, moved too quickly to harvest its meanings from the ineffable; it expresses as much a disappointment in itself as a caveat to its readers. If only we could wait longer in the poems we make, in the poems we read, not be in a hurry to say what we say, frighten off what we might have said. And yet we have to say something. Like a poem whisperer, Thompson wants his words to be there, but keep still, that shy things might come to them.
The series of ghazals published posthumously in Stilt Jack were Thompson’s attempt to back off still further from language’s impatient tendency to say things outright, missing other truth. The Persian form, with its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated couplets aligned in the service of a latent gestalt, was ripe for Thompson’s picking. It allowed him, even forced him to experiment with the question that haunted him: how long can a poem let its meaning-fruit ripen on the branch before it becomes inedible and wasted? Again, the tension is between seemingly impenetrable encryption on the one hand and a slower gestation of the possible on the other. Anticipating naysayers, Thompson wrote in his own defense, in the preface to the book, that his poems do indeed try to get somewhere:
These are not, I think, surrealist, free-association poems. They are poems of careful construction; but of a construction permitting the greatest controlled imaginative progression. // There is, it seems to me, in the ghazal, something of the essence of poetry: not the relinquishing of the rational, not the abuse of order, not the destruction of form, not the praise of the private hallucination. The ghazal allows the imagination to move by its own nature: discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense — a chart of the disorderly against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps. The ghazal has been called “drunken and amatory” and I think it is.
Let’s have, for no particular reason, the ghazal that includes the book’s title:
XXVIII
I learn by going;
there is a garden
Things I root up from the dirt
I’m in love with.
First things: lost. the milky saucer,
of last things a siren.
Please, please be straight, strait,
stone, arrow, north needle.
I haven’t got time for the pain,
name your name,
the white whale, STILT JACK, in her face,
where I have to go.
Some readers may not know of Sanger’s careful parsing of these poems in his book Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack (1986). It saves a certain kind of reader a great deal of time. It identifies allusions (here for example to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”), relates lines and poems, recalls, restores to attention, while still leaving the poem plenty of room to be itself, not rush it into contractual paraphrase. I think Sanger would agree at the same time that Thompson’s futurity will partly depend on the ability of new readers to adjust their reading habits generally, their expectation of outcomes when reading a poem like this. We must learn to “make do,” at least at first, with what is there, to take the poem at its word. To back off while coming near.
What is a Thompson ghazal like? Think of a leisurely walk, say, in the woods, and the thinking that you might do on it. Is the thinking you do on that walk heading somewhere? Well, yes and no. As the body carries you forward, there are the gentle allowances of this or that next idea, images that come to mind, sudden detours, gestured towards as you move otherwise. And there are moments of reciprocity where the encounters along the walk intersect with the wanderings of the mind to realize a further progression. Ends are reached all along the way.
Does that mean anything goes, so long as we move towards an end? Are we back at magnet poems? I don’t think so. But we are at a point where intuition and a kind of free but inquisitive admission of what follows come into play. The secret of a Thompson ghazal is to have the next gesture be both “out of the blue” and at the same time the only thing that could ever have appeared there. Here is a line. What is it like? Why does it belong there? The words are themselves: fruit ripening on the branch. What are its textures, its plumb weights, its roots, its relations to everything around it? Something unexpected but ineluctably there: where are you now? The drawing of a circle wider and wider.
It may be that Thompson left us the best key to his poems in the title of his first book, At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets. Thompson tried to work at the edge of the chopping, to find a way of getting words to say something that they weren’t already going to say. To chop away at their own underbrush, make new clearings. Poems that cut and split and pile: breakings-off, severances; out of it, a whole assembling. What is rightness but that feeling of astonishment when the axe falls keenly, just so? Nothing left to desire, once it comes off clean, for at the edge of that chopping there are no secrets.
Goose Lane | 296 pages | $24.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0864921451