Hot tip: Three on-trend books of that permanent thing, poetry
Rue
Melissa Bull
Anvil Press
104 pp; $18
Where the Words End and My Body Begins
Amber Dawn
Aresenal Pulp
94 pp; $15
Otter
Ben Ladouceur
Coach House Books
80 pp; $18
Every few months, it seems, the literati of the Internet have a collective flip-out. “Twerk was just added to the Oxford,” “’Selfie’ is now in Miriam-Webster!” and (most recently) “’Lolz’ is in the Scrabble Dictionary!” (For what it’s worth, apparently “twerk” was only added to the Oxford online.)
And while I use “obvs” in at least every third text message I send, I, for the most part agree that this is an absurd practice. These words are going to go out of trend and fall out of use quickly and don’t need this formal stamp of approval to run their course.
In poetry, however, I think this same concept works: taking the formal, well-crafted and widely accepted, and bringing in modern, and sometimes even questionable, material. You have your glosa poem of four ten-line stanzas, and in it there are SAD lamps and sex work. Or, a romantic ode where both lilac trees blossom and bottles of lube break. Rapid fire colloquialisms and right-this-minute references form a kind of rhetorical device, one that works for the debut poetry books of Amber Dawn, Ben Ladouceur and Melissa Bull.
Dawn’s Where the Words End and My Body Begins take the form of glosas, each working off of the words of a queer and/or feminist poet Dawn wanted to pay homage to. In her introduction she writes, “We are not an easy-answers bunch. We are a far cry from the reductive buzz of the dominant narrative,” and she proceeds to prove this true. Her work covers the territory of depression, survival, familial hell, addiction and recovery, mental health, gentrification, the sex industry, chosen families, lovesickness, longing and poverty. She writes about how negative experience can be a constant, and in that a comfort. She asks, in one poem, if we narrate our own life’s horrors if we are managing to make them more our own. In another, she wonders if we romanticize our worst of times (I do), if what we think of as our glory days really were.
In Bull’s Rue, the “lolz” are understated. There may not be the crudeness found in the other books, but her version of nostalgia is no less unexpected. For Bull, who’s poems are quite finely-tuned, it’s all in the details: sometimes descriptors of her early life with her mother, and sometimes cat puke. Bull isn’t afraid of her speaker not always being the good guy, of admitting that smart, confidant women don’t always do the right thing just because they can. In Bull’s poetry, discomforts are abundant, whether found in sex, judgments or tumours — the “that’s not how that’s supposed to go” factor is high. What is spoken (sometimes en Francais) is as acute as what is not. “We’re not that nervous./We say some things,” she writes, and we know how it is, don’t we? Hers is a Montreal of old men and punks loitering in the same squares, waitresses gifting compliments that mean more than they should, the anonymous kitchens of working class neighbourhoods; a Montreal where you’re not supposed to take anything for granted, but it’s hard not to. Bull makes it clear that there are little histories happening inside all the doors she passes, sometimes we hear all the details — and her analysis of them — other times we’re simply told that they are there.
In the case of Otter, Ladouceur makes it clear that he can out-poetry the most elite of poets, but also that this is not his goal. Again, sentimental, yes, but his are not your usual postcards home. Ladouceur is able to see poetry where some might not, in gay village twink nights and haphazard Parkdale apartments. There is no lack of sex or romance, subjects one might think of as pillars of poetry, but the shape these things take on is not in your commonplace candles and roses. “Black flakes fall from your stomach onto my back: a small autumn. That fresh tattoo, its scabs still departing” he writes in one poem; in the same one, “Toilet water outside the door, forming archipelagos along the uneven cement.” Language that could be attributed to mountains and streams instead embodies young queer desire, affection and insecurity. “I am a roommate: if I am home, I say so by closing the bedroom door/behind which we made a game of keeping the sodomy quiet in the all morning long” he writes. These same poems end with relatable worry; the former “Watch your step; leave me alone./By which I mean, when you leave me, please be unaccompanied.” The latter closes, “The bedroom did not always brim with such vacancy. First, someone loved you while exiting it.”
Ladouceur writes impressive poems, self-conscious ones that are willing to acknowledge that they are poems and sometimes mock themselves. He manages to balance having poems that are unafraid of being poems, with still having the people within them appear as people, and not poetic abstractions of. I have soft spots for informal language and objects appearing in formal poems, as well as text messages popping up in them—so was particularly thrilled (these occurrences are plenty in Otter).
Have these debut poetry books added to the dictionary that is contemporary Canadian poetry? I think so. Is the analogy fair, given my discontent with “amazeballs” in any conversation, never mind the Holy Grail of official English? Fortunately, fad words added to the Oxford online are ultimately ephemeral, where poetry (perhaps ironically) is not. Even so, the additions Amber Dawn, Bull and Ladouceur make are ripe for consumption, unique and now. Where I could do without most on-trend new dictionary words, these contributions are key.
Perhaps this is because poetry just may be the antithesis of trend, producing new ways of thinking about both the obvious and obscure, rather than reproducing inane yet confusing ways to speak about what is often very little. Where the new-to-the-dictionary words are often short forms, poetry has the capacity to both elongate and make concise an observation. What do you think? Or, rather, WDYT? (Which, yes, sadly, there is an entry for on Oxford dot com.)