Reviewed by Shane Neilson
Best known as a book reviewer for the National Post, Michael Lista is a controversial figure in Canadian poetry. It is possible that Lista’s strategic and managed controversy might colour the reception of his book in terms of reviews by others, but at the outset of this review I mention Lista’s status as reviled yet powerful figure only to acknowledge it on the way to discard it. This review is about poetry, not personality. This review is about the aesthetics of transgression and Michael Lista’s poetic practice in the context of that tradition.
Lista’s first book, Bloom, initially impressed me. I wrote as much in Quill and Quire. Yet my review came shortly after the book’s release. I faced a tight deadline and, under that time pressure, I made a mistake unique to the kind of book Lista wrote. Bloom is a text dependent upon the greatest writers of poetry of the past 200 years, a book dependent upon a scaffolding of conceit. Bloom features poems meant (a) to follow elements of Joyce’s titanic work Ulysses in terms of narrative structure, (b) to follow the biography of Canadian nuclear physicist and Manhattan project personage Louis Slotin, and (c) to alter, schmooze, or cross-dress (I can’t decide which verb is more accurate) poems by the greats. Don Paterson, D.H. Lawrence, Seamus Heaney, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ted Hughes are but a few of the poets Lista schmoozed. Especially Ted Hughes, who was ripped off four times in the book. If, when reading this, you are wondering how a poet could pull off such a feat, how a poet could juggle all those conceits in the air, then you are thinking along lines the poet likely wished. It’s exactly what I wondered, amazed at the grand cathedral Lista had made. More problematic, though, is the micro-level of the individual poem, and zooming in from there to the level of the line. Since the time of my sentinel review, the poems in Bloom have been closely examined for their derivativeness. I’ll put this charitably: Lista’s work is disconcertingly similar to original works. Bloom’s cross-dressings have been cross-referenced, for example, on Rob Taylor’s blog in 2011[1], and simple head-to-head comparisons are not edifying for Lista[2] – or for me, who didn’t notice when I first had the chance.
Though Lista’s self-described “creative plagiarism” got past me, it was hard not to notice the hype preceding Lista’s second book, The Scarborough. When word got out that he planned to write a text about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canada’s most infamous serial sex killers, I thought: only a few texts in the Canadian poetry canon are transgressive and aesthetically successful. The combination is rare. To see the perils inherent to such projects, survey the aesthetic graveyards of Lynn Crosbie’s Liar or R. M. Vaughan’s Troubled. The challenge books of this ilk fail to meet is simple: the poetry aesthetic must rise to or surpass the level of the original transgression. As poet, one must draw in the black air and breathe out the beautiful. George Elliott Clarke pulled off the feat in Execution Poems, and it’s possible Leonard Cohen did in Flowers For Hitler, but the point is that the dark matter is more inspiration than ticket.
World literature offers many examples of artists who were able to do this: de Sade, Dostoevsky, Bataille, and Ginsberg to name a few. Though every writer will rely upon myth and archetype (especially Ginsberg), the four quoted here didn’t require their myths as set programs, a series of 1s and 0s that set what came out on the page. Bataille wrote L’Oueil and Dostoevsky wrote Notes From Underground to make readers uncomfortable, to push society beyond what was considered permissible and safe. They presented fringe opinion that was detestable, and yet beautifully rendered. Ginsberg took on everything in his “Howl,” from drug use, sexuality, identity, you name it, and he punched up the transgression by studding his masterwork with Judeo-Christian iconography. While he was at it, Ginsberg stole from Whitman, the father of American transgression. The trick is possible to accomplish.
Compounding the problem for Lista is the strong precedent set by Lynn Crosbie, who beat The Scarborough to the punch in 1997 with Paul’s Case (Insomniac Press), a horrible and awful black box of a book that had Bernardo’s evil as its central concern. Ostensibly a book of prose, the book is in truth a prose poetry masterpiece, a song from the dark by a mind fascinated and repulsed by Bernardo and the culture that spawned him. Crosbie puts Bernardo’s name in her title, his face on the cover, and his address at the Kingston Penitentiary at the top of letters to him in the book. Crosbie directly names the victims, listing not only the crimes but also details of the crimes, using those details as a trampoline into further dark. Crosbie writes in her frame letter to Bernardo, “John Rosen, your lawyer, showed Karla a photograph of her sister’s dead body and she looked away. Look at it, he commanded. This satisfied many, though I will carve out her eyes instead. She has become the blonde starlet of my Senecan drama. Like Vendice (and you my Gloriana), I’ll make the bad bleed and the tragedy good” (19). Key to these sentences is the forceful confrontation, the resolute look at evil and then the vindictive infliction of blindness upon evil itself. Crosbie took that on and wrote her masterpiece. She didn’t look away, nor did she, like Lista and his showy use of the Orpheus myth, make her book about looking away. She made a full look at evil her book’s power source, and she clearly knew her Greek myths, too.
Notwithstanding the sponsoring dark matter of Bernardo and Homolka’s crime spree, about which more anon, The Scarborough features a Big Daddy Writer of Myth layer. This time out, Lista leans heavily on Dante and Virgil. The Scarborough also has a biographical layer, this time Lista’s own. It should be apparent by now that in terms of idea, Bloom has been put in the witness protection program somewhere in Scarborough. I will not carefully unpack Lista’s use of the myth-kitty because anyone passingly familiar with the works of Lista’s presiding geniuses will easily spot allusions in the book. Though Lista didn’t need the myth for this book, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps because Lista is the kind of writer who’s into an ornate portcullis when a simple door keeps out the cold better.
As if to one-up Bloom’s old ideas, Lista unconceits his book. He chucks Bernardo and Homolka to the side almost completely and prefers instead to use those murderers as ghostly presences. Their infamous names appear on the back cover so as to alert the reader that the book’s action occurs over the course of three days in the life of its author as a nine-year-old, but the cover goes on to say that “The Scarborough is a book about Bernardo that doesn’t show us Bernardo, a conceptual project that ignores its concept.” This, folks, is dark matter gone black hole–it’s nonsense, or what my friends at age nine in New Brunswick over any three day period you like called horseshit. How can a text be conceptual by ignoring its concept? How can a text be anything while not being it? How can a text transgress by not transgressing at all?
It can’t. Moving from the cover to the text, The Scarborough is a book that abdicates itself. It’s a grotesque self-promotional trick, atrocity rendered into solipsism. Lista’s Homolka and Bernardo content is detectable only through inference. Some poems mention body parts, another obscurely represents sexual violence, but there are a lot of poems like this in the world and they do not self-consciously brand themselves as an uber-scandalous package as Lista’s poems are branded. Lista’s avoidance of the marketed source material, his failure to engage with the generative impulse of the book, is unfortunate–even cowardly. Though of a piece with the banality of evil, Bernardo and Homolka were nevertheless specific in their Canadian cultural moment. The terror and disgust they inspired were unique to their shared crimes. Because the poet dips just his big toe in the enormity of their transgression, the transgression becomes the pretext of his book rather than its substance. In contrast with the spot-the-Dante game, one does have to be on one’s toes to play spot-the-Bernardo. Consider the opening of “660 HFH”:
How droll the selfsame vehicle that drives
Boredom through a day’s interstices,
The stopgaps between pigeonholes and droves,
Should waylay – more: should shanghai – both of us
And curb our shouldered duties with a chase.
By your command we freeze in a Boethus,
Boy and goose, locked in a stone détente
Of civic role play blent with violence.
Apparent here is Lista’s sometime elegance, effective slant rhyme, concision, and variable tone (high alternating with low.) But Where’s Bernardo? All we get is “civic role play blent with violence,” a line too dependent upon knowledge of the actual crimes in order to conjure the killers. This is also true of “Radar,” a three-pager written in terza rima in which all we hear of Bernardo is that the “CBC reports a missing girl.” I stress that I am not practising selective quotation to prove my point; rather, I’m purposefully including poems in this review (and there are a few others) which take a step towards more direct representation of Bernardo and Homolka to give Lista a chance.
In the hands of this formalist, the concept component of conceptual writing has gone Cheshire, the poet’s gleaming smile showing through some kind of ostentatious poetry POOF, a presto-changeo statement-joke.[3] But this cat’s got caries. Yes, Bernardo lethally lurked in the free world and his victims didn’t have foreknowledge of his nature or intentions, just as Lista’s book casts the Bernardo as non-character. Bernardo’s victims died because they didn’t know. But The Scarborough’s a cop-out. Without specificity it’s as if the Scarborough Rapist were once again, in metaphorical terms, “out there somewhere” and uncaught. This makes a difference to the people of Scarborough, but they must modify their behaviour based on the threat of a presence, whereas Lista’s book seeks to write absence with cheap hints. Besides, Bernardo was caught. His evil got catalogued and was all the more horrible for that, setting in motion a series of further judicial horrors–that’s something to write about, surely. But The Scarborough avoids looking evil in its face. Its mug shot is a screen shot from Super Mario Brothers. Bernardo as non-concept is an idea that sounds good until it’s on the page and there’s no dark heart to find, and soon no heart to find at all. “660 HFH” proceeds to provide Lista with some advice he should himself take:
Too soon. Nothing to see here. Moved along
The loved and lonely avenues, violins
Our traffic frets, whose melodies aren’t long
For this or any other world, unless
The myths are right, and drag us sight-unseen
Into some upper dream.
Though Lista likely intended the above as a prescription for Canadian society, it’s too applicable to his own poetic method for comfort. His poems are dragged into an upper dream, are surrounded by a moat and castle of myth, and, kids, the myths aren’t all right. He hasn’t earned the conversation with the greats yet and this overreliance on the outstanding dreams of others shows him up. Lista falls down at the feet of the greats because, like an overeager contestant on Dancing With the Stars, he tries too hard to copy their dance moves. His overdeliberate performance is too obvious in its wish to ding the bell of multiple conceits and image patterns and themes, a mere “dancing the steps” as opposed to a “becoming the dance.” Worse is the arrogance on offer. Who compares himself to Dante, as Lista does in “Radar,” with “I’m nine years old, the same age as Dante/ When he trembled, first seeing Beatrice”?
Compounding Lista’s macro-problems of vision and structure are the by-now familiar problems at the micro-level of the poem and individual line. Lista’s first and framing poem, “Mistletoe,” features Aeneas and the Sibyl as its high culture, the T-1000 as its low–so far so predictable, and the poems that come after don’t deviate from that strategy by invoking Orpheus, Eurydice, King Kong, Mickey Mouse, etc. But the poem employs a terminal capping procedure in which the poet rhymes out a pithy conclusion that’s oversold:
So [Aeneas] grips the bough. But the bough fights back.
Then like an ice cream truck, or knife sharpener,
All hell comes jingling from a tiny crack.
The deadheading perfect rhyme and oncoming train pentameter spoil the poem’s mix of myth and suburban imagery. Lista’s poems crack under the strain of the stress of their ends, a problem that recurs in the book. At the level of image patterning and theme (below the myth level, below the three conceits) are ghosts, eyes, and blindness. Any book-length work requires cohesiveness, and it’s here on which a book’s foundation is made. Lista takes great care with superstructure but pays too little attention to his foundation. His light sprinkling of ghosts and blindness peppered with a 1990s assortment of pop culture isn’t enough to make the work come alive; there isn’t enough elegant repetition. Maybe the non-concept of a concept blinded his editorial eye, preventing honest self-assessment. But once a concept becomes a non-concept, or a non-concept is conceptualized, or whichever non-thing we aren’t talking about here, I suppose one can have it all ways and argue that having actual ghosts and blindness in the image pattern suffices as concretization of the non-concept of a concept.
Furthermore, Lista’s too enamoured of fill-out-the-form iambs. A few examples that stick with screams:
“Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl/ Scream across the sky their only vowel.” [Fowl]
“Soundless into the long unbreaking scream,/ Inartfully blending into the green screen.” [Maid of the Mist]
If he’s not steamrolling the meter, as in the first example, then he’s cramming too much into a mouthful in example two. To make matters worse, his poems often devolve into programmatic perfect rhyme, like when in “Today’s Special” he rhymes “night” and “starlight”. What’s the difficulty level, triple conceit and myth layer aside, of a stanza like the following from “Mickey Mouse Watch”:
At six time bends his smaller arm
Out of its joint, but seems to do no harm,
Ascending backwards to time’s forward charm
As Mickey’s face registers no alarm.
This is not preternatural redemption of perfect rhyme on offer here, just an incredibly belaboured procedure replete with obvious puns that show every one of their grinding gears. Worst of all, clock-punching performances like the above are repeated. Consider “Lot’s Wife”:
When the cabbie showed up, and honked us down,
With strict instructions not to turn around
As the dead patted the trunk like wet leaves.
Then beside me came the exquisite sound
Of a hillock of salt dumped on the ground –
This is moon/June stuff, rhyme on autopilot. Perhaps the poem Lista belabours most is “Judgment Day,” a piece inspired by the film Terminator II. Lista weaves religious iconography and family biography into the narrative of this film and spends nineteen of twenty-two terza rima stanzas just with the movie. The first stanza doesn’t refer to the James Cameron film, nor does the fourth or final two stanzas, but the rest of the poem narrates the film action with a weak effort to link the movie to something larger. Clearly the nine-year-old Lista really enjoyed Terminator II, but the poem lingers too long on technology.
Lista is better with short, tight forms that can’t get away from him. Poems that carry beyond a page like “Superman” and “Radar” owe their lengths to boring rhyme filler, though even shorter pieces can sometimes be marred by a craven predictability (ie. “Super Mario Brothers 3” and its perfect rhymes of now/how, ghosts/hosts, bare/air, Italians/stallions). There are passable poems in the book, including “The Scarborough Bluffs,” “French Vanilla Ice,” and “Holy Cross.” There’s even a poem that’s almost great called “Tenebrae” and I expect this poem pulled up its bootstraps because it’s one dedicated to a “KF,” initials that must mean Kristin French, one of Bernardo’s victims. “Tenebrae” tries to memorialize a life and exists as the requiem of a little girl lost. The spirit of this poem is true, even if Lista oversells things at its end too.
Using big but brittle ideas and reaching for the end-of-poem big finish is part of the fabric of Lista’s big problem as a poet. All of this stuff no doubt seemed good to do at the time, but clever ideas don’t always make for good poetry on paper, no matter how much classic allusion makeup is applied. Unlike Bernardo and Homolka, aesthetics won’t lie. That’s why transgressive texts are so hard to write–norms police and protect the arts, too, and they exist as a challenge for great artists to transcend. The problem might ultimately be greater than the challenge inherent to transgression. The challenge might be inherent to Lista’s intertextual, and probably doomed, use of mega-myth. James Matthew Wilson writes,
“Sadly, the work of most of [Dante’s] modern heirs, which fragments and reduces Dante’s grand structures, suggests that we are still far from understanding poetry as something more than as species of ethics or ritual. We, the lamenting moderns who depend on Dante . . . to re-envision the daily horrors exploding in our streets, have yet fully to grasp poetry as the Tuscan, who knew much of suffering, certainly did.”[4]
Improving upon Dante as a template to explain us to ourselves is a tall order, and improving upon Dante in a context of emotionless psychopathology was probably impossible. Suffering was the subject of the great master.
[1] as of July 28, 2015, found here.
[2] Argue if he’s improved the lines, moved sideways with them, or ruined them; all three occur in my opinion. What’s more troubling is how close he stayed to them (for example, look at the beginning of Lista’s “Do. But Do.” and Robyn Sarah’s “The World Is Its Own Museum.”) That makes four possibilities that distract one from Lista’s poetry as poetry–a problem that seems to have carried into The Scarborough, but in a different form.
[3] Which is not to say that Canadian poets who write intelligible narrative with rhyme and meter aren’t conceptual writers. Hiram and Jenny by Richard Outram, anyone? Or Wayne Clifford’s four-book sonnet sequence? These texts are world-class, but it’s books that don’t write about Bernardo that get all the press . . .
[4] “Four Ways of Encountering Poetry and Religion,” James Matthew Wilson.
Signal | 68 pages | $16.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1550653885
‘The Scarborough’ by Michael Lista
Articles
Best known as a book reviewer for the National Post, Michael Lista is a controversial figure in Canadian poetry. It is possible that Lista’s strategic and managed controversy might colour the reception of his book in terms of reviews by others, but at the outset of this review I mention Lista’s status as reviled yet powerful figure only to acknowledge it on the way to discard it. This review is about poetry, not personality. This review is about the aesthetics of transgression and Michael Lista’s poetic practice in the context of that tradition.
Lista’s first book, Bloom, initially impressed me. I wrote as much in Quill and Quire. Yet my review came shortly after the book’s release. I faced a tight deadline and, under that time pressure, I made a mistake unique to the kind of book Lista wrote. Bloom is a text dependent upon the greatest writers of poetry of the past 200 years, a book dependent upon a scaffolding of conceit. Bloom features poems meant (a) to follow elements of Joyce’s titanic work Ulysses in terms of narrative structure, (b) to follow the biography of Canadian nuclear physicist and Manhattan project personage Louis Slotin, and (c) to alter, schmooze, or cross-dress (I can’t decide which verb is more accurate) poems by the greats. Don Paterson, D.H. Lawrence, Seamus Heaney, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ted Hughes are but a few of the poets Lista schmoozed. Especially Ted Hughes, who was ripped off four times in the book. If, when reading this, you are wondering how a poet could pull off such a feat, how a poet could juggle all those conceits in the air, then you are thinking along lines the poet likely wished. It’s exactly what I wondered, amazed at the grand cathedral Lista had made. More problematic, though, is the micro-level of the individual poem, and zooming in from there to the level of the line. Since the time of my sentinel review, the poems in Bloom have been closely examined for their derivativeness. I’ll put this charitably: Lista’s work is disconcertingly similar to original works. Bloom’s cross-dressings have been cross-referenced, for example, on Rob Taylor’s blog in 2011[1], and simple head-to-head comparisons are not edifying for Lista[2] – or for me, who didn’t notice when I first had the chance.
Though Lista’s self-described “creative plagiarism” got past me, it was hard not to notice the hype preceding Lista’s second book, The Scarborough. When word got out that he planned to write a text about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canada’s most infamous serial sex killers, I thought: only a few texts in the Canadian poetry canon are transgressive and aesthetically successful. The combination is rare. To see the perils inherent to such projects, survey the aesthetic graveyards of Lynn Crosbie’s Liar or R. M. Vaughan’s Troubled. The challenge books of this ilk fail to meet is simple: the poetry aesthetic must rise to or surpass the level of the original transgression. As poet, one must draw in the black air and breathe out the beautiful. George Elliott Clarke pulled off the feat in Execution Poems, and it’s possible Leonard Cohen did in Flowers For Hitler, but the point is that the dark matter is more inspiration than ticket.
World literature offers many examples of artists who were able to do this: de Sade, Dostoevsky, Bataille, and Ginsberg to name a few. Though every writer will rely upon myth and archetype (especially Ginsberg), the four quoted here didn’t require their myths as set programs, a series of 1s and 0s that set what came out on the page. Bataille wrote L’Oueil and Dostoevsky wrote Notes From Underground to make readers uncomfortable, to push society beyond what was considered permissible and safe. They presented fringe opinion that was detestable, and yet beautifully rendered. Ginsberg took on everything in his “Howl,” from drug use, sexuality, identity, you name it, and he punched up the transgression by studding his masterwork with Judeo-Christian iconography. While he was at it, Ginsberg stole from Whitman, the father of American transgression. The trick is possible to accomplish.
Compounding the problem for Lista is the strong precedent set by Lynn Crosbie, who beat The Scarborough to the punch in 1997 with Paul’s Case (Insomniac Press), a horrible and awful black box of a book that had Bernardo’s evil as its central concern. Ostensibly a book of prose, the book is in truth a prose poetry masterpiece, a song from the dark by a mind fascinated and repulsed by Bernardo and the culture that spawned him. Crosbie puts Bernardo’s name in her title, his face on the cover, and his address at the Kingston Penitentiary at the top of letters to him in the book. Crosbie directly names the victims, listing not only the crimes but also details of the crimes, using those details as a trampoline into further dark. Crosbie writes in her frame letter to Bernardo, “John Rosen, your lawyer, showed Karla a photograph of her sister’s dead body and she looked away. Look at it, he commanded. This satisfied many, though I will carve out her eyes instead. She has become the blonde starlet of my Senecan drama. Like Vendice (and you my Gloriana), I’ll make the bad bleed and the tragedy good” (19). Key to these sentences is the forceful confrontation, the resolute look at evil and then the vindictive infliction of blindness upon evil itself. Crosbie took that on and wrote her masterpiece. She didn’t look away, nor did she, like Lista and his showy use of the Orpheus myth, make her book about looking away. She made a full look at evil her book’s power source, and she clearly knew her Greek myths, too.
Notwithstanding the sponsoring dark matter of Bernardo and Homolka’s crime spree, about which more anon, The Scarborough features a Big Daddy Writer of Myth layer. This time out, Lista leans heavily on Dante and Virgil. The Scarborough also has a biographical layer, this time Lista’s own. It should be apparent by now that in terms of idea, Bloom has been put in the witness protection program somewhere in Scarborough. I will not carefully unpack Lista’s use of the myth-kitty because anyone passingly familiar with the works of Lista’s presiding geniuses will easily spot allusions in the book. Though Lista didn’t need the myth for this book, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps because Lista is the kind of writer who’s into an ornate portcullis when a simple door keeps out the cold better.
As if to one-up Bloom’s old ideas, Lista unconceits his book. He chucks Bernardo and Homolka to the side almost completely and prefers instead to use those murderers as ghostly presences. Their infamous names appear on the back cover so as to alert the reader that the book’s action occurs over the course of three days in the life of its author as a nine-year-old, but the cover goes on to say that “The Scarborough is a book about Bernardo that doesn’t show us Bernardo, a conceptual project that ignores its concept.” This, folks, is dark matter gone black hole–it’s nonsense, or what my friends at age nine in New Brunswick over any three day period you like called horseshit. How can a text be conceptual by ignoring its concept? How can a text be anything while not being it? How can a text transgress by not transgressing at all?
It can’t. Moving from the cover to the text, The Scarborough is a book that abdicates itself. It’s a grotesque self-promotional trick, atrocity rendered into solipsism. Lista’s Homolka and Bernardo content is detectable only through inference. Some poems mention body parts, another obscurely represents sexual violence, but there are a lot of poems like this in the world and they do not self-consciously brand themselves as an uber-scandalous package as Lista’s poems are branded. Lista’s avoidance of the marketed source material, his failure to engage with the generative impulse of the book, is unfortunate–even cowardly. Though of a piece with the banality of evil, Bernardo and Homolka were nevertheless specific in their Canadian cultural moment. The terror and disgust they inspired were unique to their shared crimes. Because the poet dips just his big toe in the enormity of their transgression, the transgression becomes the pretext of his book rather than its substance. In contrast with the spot-the-Dante game, one does have to be on one’s toes to play spot-the-Bernardo. Consider the opening of “660 HFH”:
How droll the selfsame vehicle that drives
Boredom through a day’s interstices,
The stopgaps between pigeonholes and droves,
Should waylay – more: should shanghai – both of us
And curb our shouldered duties with a chase.
By your command we freeze in a Boethus,
Boy and goose, locked in a stone détente
Of civic role play blent with violence.
Apparent here is Lista’s sometime elegance, effective slant rhyme, concision, and variable tone (high alternating with low.) But Where’s Bernardo? All we get is “civic role play blent with violence,” a line too dependent upon knowledge of the actual crimes in order to conjure the killers. This is also true of “Radar,” a three-pager written in terza rima in which all we hear of Bernardo is that the “CBC reports a missing girl.” I stress that I am not practising selective quotation to prove my point; rather, I’m purposefully including poems in this review (and there are a few others) which take a step towards more direct representation of Bernardo and Homolka to give Lista a chance.
In the hands of this formalist, the concept component of conceptual writing has gone Cheshire, the poet’s gleaming smile showing through some kind of ostentatious poetry POOF, a presto-changeo statement-joke.[3] But this cat’s got caries. Yes, Bernardo lethally lurked in the free world and his victims didn’t have foreknowledge of his nature or intentions, just as Lista’s book casts the Bernardo as non-character. Bernardo’s victims died because they didn’t know. But The Scarborough’s a cop-out. Without specificity it’s as if the Scarborough Rapist were once again, in metaphorical terms, “out there somewhere” and uncaught. This makes a difference to the people of Scarborough, but they must modify their behaviour based on the threat of a presence, whereas Lista’s book seeks to write absence with cheap hints. Besides, Bernardo was caught. His evil got catalogued and was all the more horrible for that, setting in motion a series of further judicial horrors–that’s something to write about, surely. But The Scarborough avoids looking evil in its face. Its mug shot is a screen shot from Super Mario Brothers. Bernardo as non-concept is an idea that sounds good until it’s on the page and there’s no dark heart to find, and soon no heart to find at all. “660 HFH” proceeds to provide Lista with some advice he should himself take:
Too soon. Nothing to see here. Moved along
The loved and lonely avenues, violins
Our traffic frets, whose melodies aren’t long
For this or any other world, unless
The myths are right, and drag us sight-unseen
Into some upper dream.
Though Lista likely intended the above as a prescription for Canadian society, it’s too applicable to his own poetic method for comfort. His poems are dragged into an upper dream, are surrounded by a moat and castle of myth, and, kids, the myths aren’t all right. He hasn’t earned the conversation with the greats yet and this overreliance on the outstanding dreams of others shows him up. Lista falls down at the feet of the greats because, like an overeager contestant on Dancing With the Stars, he tries too hard to copy their dance moves. His overdeliberate performance is too obvious in its wish to ding the bell of multiple conceits and image patterns and themes, a mere “dancing the steps” as opposed to a “becoming the dance.” Worse is the arrogance on offer. Who compares himself to Dante, as Lista does in “Radar,” with “I’m nine years old, the same age as Dante/ When he trembled, first seeing Beatrice”?
Compounding Lista’s macro-problems of vision and structure are the by-now familiar problems at the micro-level of the poem and individual line. Lista’s first and framing poem, “Mistletoe,” features Aeneas and the Sibyl as its high culture, the T-1000 as its low–so far so predictable, and the poems that come after don’t deviate from that strategy by invoking Orpheus, Eurydice, King Kong, Mickey Mouse, etc. But the poem employs a terminal capping procedure in which the poet rhymes out a pithy conclusion that’s oversold:
So [Aeneas] grips the bough. But the bough fights back.
Then like an ice cream truck, or knife sharpener,
All hell comes jingling from a tiny crack.
The deadheading perfect rhyme and oncoming train pentameter spoil the poem’s mix of myth and suburban imagery. Lista’s poems crack under the strain of the stress of their ends, a problem that recurs in the book. At the level of image patterning and theme (below the myth level, below the three conceits) are ghosts, eyes, and blindness. Any book-length work requires cohesiveness, and it’s here on which a book’s foundation is made. Lista takes great care with superstructure but pays too little attention to his foundation. His light sprinkling of ghosts and blindness peppered with a 1990s assortment of pop culture isn’t enough to make the work come alive; there isn’t enough elegant repetition. Maybe the non-concept of a concept blinded his editorial eye, preventing honest self-assessment. But once a concept becomes a non-concept, or a non-concept is conceptualized, or whichever non-thing we aren’t talking about here, I suppose one can have it all ways and argue that having actual ghosts and blindness in the image pattern suffices as concretization of the non-concept of a concept.
Furthermore, Lista’s too enamoured of fill-out-the-form iambs. A few examples that stick with screams:
“Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl/ Scream across the sky their only vowel.” [Fowl]
“Soundless into the long unbreaking scream,/ Inartfully blending into the green screen.” [Maid of the Mist]
If he’s not steamrolling the meter, as in the first example, then he’s cramming too much into a mouthful in example two. To make matters worse, his poems often devolve into programmatic perfect rhyme, like when in “Today’s Special” he rhymes “night” and “starlight”. What’s the difficulty level, triple conceit and myth layer aside, of a stanza like the following from “Mickey Mouse Watch”:
At six time bends his smaller arm
Out of its joint, but seems to do no harm,
Ascending backwards to time’s forward charm
As Mickey’s face registers no alarm.
This is not preternatural redemption of perfect rhyme on offer here, just an incredibly belaboured procedure replete with obvious puns that show every one of their grinding gears. Worst of all, clock-punching performances like the above are repeated. Consider “Lot’s Wife”:
When the cabbie showed up, and honked us down,
With strict instructions not to turn around
As the dead patted the trunk like wet leaves.
Then beside me came the exquisite sound
Of a hillock of salt dumped on the ground –
This is moon/June stuff, rhyme on autopilot. Perhaps the poem Lista belabours most is “Judgment Day,” a piece inspired by the film Terminator II. Lista weaves religious iconography and family biography into the narrative of this film and spends nineteen of twenty-two terza rima stanzas just with the movie. The first stanza doesn’t refer to the James Cameron film, nor does the fourth or final two stanzas, but the rest of the poem narrates the film action with a weak effort to link the movie to something larger. Clearly the nine-year-old Lista really enjoyed Terminator II, but the poem lingers too long on technology.
Lista is better with short, tight forms that can’t get away from him. Poems that carry beyond a page like “Superman” and “Radar” owe their lengths to boring rhyme filler, though even shorter pieces can sometimes be marred by a craven predictability (ie. “Super Mario Brothers 3” and its perfect rhymes of now/how, ghosts/hosts, bare/air, Italians/stallions). There are passable poems in the book, including “The Scarborough Bluffs,” “French Vanilla Ice,” and “Holy Cross.” There’s even a poem that’s almost great called “Tenebrae” and I expect this poem pulled up its bootstraps because it’s one dedicated to a “KF,” initials that must mean Kristin French, one of Bernardo’s victims. “Tenebrae” tries to memorialize a life and exists as the requiem of a little girl lost. The spirit of this poem is true, even if Lista oversells things at its end too.
Using big but brittle ideas and reaching for the end-of-poem big finish is part of the fabric of Lista’s big problem as a poet. All of this stuff no doubt seemed good to do at the time, but clever ideas don’t always make for good poetry on paper, no matter how much classic allusion makeup is applied. Unlike Bernardo and Homolka, aesthetics won’t lie. That’s why transgressive texts are so hard to write–norms police and protect the arts, too, and they exist as a challenge for great artists to transcend. The problem might ultimately be greater than the challenge inherent to transgression. The challenge might be inherent to Lista’s intertextual, and probably doomed, use of mega-myth. James Matthew Wilson writes,
“Sadly, the work of most of [Dante’s] modern heirs, which fragments and reduces Dante’s grand structures, suggests that we are still far from understanding poetry as something more than as species of ethics or ritual. We, the lamenting moderns who depend on Dante . . . to re-envision the daily horrors exploding in our streets, have yet fully to grasp poetry as the Tuscan, who knew much of suffering, certainly did.”[4]
Improving upon Dante as a template to explain us to ourselves is a tall order, and improving upon Dante in a context of emotionless psychopathology was probably impossible. Suffering was the subject of the great master.
[1] as of July 28, 2015, found here.
[2] Argue if he’s improved the lines, moved sideways with them, or ruined them; all three occur in my opinion. What’s more troubling is how close he stayed to them (for example, look at the beginning of Lista’s “Do. But Do.” and Robyn Sarah’s “The World Is Its Own Museum.”) That makes four possibilities that distract one from Lista’s poetry as poetry–a problem that seems to have carried into The Scarborough, but in a different form.
[3] Which is not to say that Canadian poets who write intelligible narrative with rhyme and meter aren’t conceptual writers. Hiram and Jenny by Richard Outram, anyone? Or Wayne Clifford’s four-book sonnet sequence? These texts are world-class, but it’s books that don’t write about Bernardo that get all the press . . .
[4] “Four Ways of Encountering Poetry and Religion,” James Matthew Wilson.
Signal | 68 pages | $16.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1550653885