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Current Issue: 50th Anniversary Interventions (#204)

Canadian Literature's Spring 2010 issue (CL#204), "50th Anniversary Interventions", looks back on Canadian Literature's 50th Anniversary Gala, and celebrates Canadian culture with papers about Duncan Campbell Scott, book policies, copyright, civil war poetry, and new Québecois literature.

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#169 (Summer 2001)
(Blais, Laurence, Birdsell, Munro, Jacob, Chen)

Editorial

Eva-Marie Kröller

Articles

Victor-Laurent Tremblay

Wendy Roy

  • Grasp the Sparrow's Tail: from "T'ai Chi Variations" (p. 58)

Lori Saint-Martin

Isla Duncan

  • "The profound poverty of knowledge": Sandra Birdsell's Narrative of Concealment (p. 85 - 101)
  • (LITERARY THEORY)

Klaus P. Stich

  • Letting Go with the Mind: Dionysus and Medusa in Alice Munro's "Meneseteung" (p. 106 - 125)

Poems

Michael deBeyer

  • Echolalia: The Separation Mists (p. 11)

Michael deBeyer

  • The Separation Mists (p. 12) Show/hide Poem

    • Before the actual passing of the train, there is a billowing wall
      of sleet that precedes it, visible against any vertical line. A
      curved pompadour rising above the forehead of the train.
      This wave represents a kind of thinking, the preliminary
      forecast of the passing. Similarly, mists part before the sound
      of tractor trailers, a pulse towards the body's movement
      before its decided separation. This phenomenon is indicative,
      not of a force of sound, but of a lateral gravity running
      through everything.

      We might consider this gravity only evident in specific cir¬
      cumstances, dependent on a body's size and speed, and these
      relative to climate. Still, while walking through mist, even we
      never actually make contact with it, to hold vapour in our
      hands, say. It is like an aspect of personal space, our pre¬
      conscious moving ahead of ourselves through air. This is why
      we can be surrounded by fog, but never actually immersed in
      it. If every body projected this relative sphere of self, we must
      rethink the Euclidian notion that transposes a dot over the
      straight and narrow; the point never able to fully participate
      in its own lineation. Translating this circumference as an
      extension of self that surrounds even the smallest particles
      further explains the impossibility of the static object, in addi¬
      tion to electro-magnetic repulsion.

      Personal space exhibited in this way suggests the possibility
      of a future forecast that each of us exudes, a kind of security
      blanket. Each step being partly known before it is taken by
      the prehensile and extra-sensitive apparatus responsible for
      the force of ourselves: a bodily active sub-conscious. By this
      thinking, the sidewalk actually rises to contact the heel in the
      space between. The texture of the surface is known before
      the touch. The heat before the sear. The separation mists
      could provide visual proof of the carriage of the soul.

Paddy McCallum

  • In the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin (p. 31)

Debbi Waters

  • Ashburnt (p. 32)

Sandy Shreve

  • Grasp the Sparrow's Tail: from "T'ai Chi Variations" (p. 58) Show/hide Poem

    • You want to fly with your feet
      anchored to the ground, like

      bamboo in the wind

      where sparrows congregate,
      impatient,
      they do not wait
      long for another turn at the feeder,
      are quick to flap chickadees
      away from their seeds.

      More like demons
      than souls released from the bondage
      of our bodies, these birds
      flick their little tails,
      insolent.

      You happily snatch one
      down from its ecstasy in sky

      and as you pull it back to live
      on this earth again,
      its heart turns to a terror
      your fingers cannot bear to hold.

      When you let go,
      your feathered hands soar.

       

       

      *Reprinted with permission from Suddenly, So Much by Sandy Shreve (Exile Editions, 2005)

Debbi Waters

  • Miles Davis' Horn (p. 59)

K. I. Press

  • You have a lot on your mind: for Angel (p. 84) Show/hide Poem

    • the borg queen, the houseboys, the internet lovers cybering away till their wrists are sore and contact lenses brittle as their eyes. each time you phone me you sigh and admit you're a tart again. but you deserve it, after all, your career can't pull him out west on a kitestring. but his long sheaves of chest hair. you miss them, used to harvest, grind, mix, knead, and bake them. would watch impatiently for a new crop. you meet your lovers

      in vampire rooms, to make sure they can't distinguish between fantasy and reality, and wear black eyeliner, and possibly nailpolish. do you feel it, somedays, the feeling you might be starting to become spontaneous? forgetting the rules. never call first. never leave your pills in plain view. never buy a whole watermelon for yourself. never tell your mother.

      let's play a game. let's learn something new. for instance. what would you do with a blackbelt in karate? I tell you. I'd let myself go, wear thick glasses, dress in pink sweat pants and slouch socks from 1985. and we'd fool them all, wouldn't we. 

M. Travis Lane

  • The View from Under the Bookcase (p. 102 - 105) Show/hide Poem

    • 1. The king of poetry has died.

      The king of poetry has died;
      his daughter will decide
      what laureate reigns after him
      (whoever verses her riddle right).

      Among Canadian candidates our Phoeb,
      lately come up from the veritimes
      with us, his rural retinue
      transformed by grant'ma's magic wand:
      domestic vermin, sheep, geese, pigs,
      chickens in glad rags—and his Dad's
      old pickup playing a Cadillac.

      Each afternoon we're all in form,
      disguised so donkeys look like dons
      and bureaucrats half-assed,
      rodents and rustics radiant.
      Phoeb has a ball.

      I, most long-toothed of all the rats,
      am woman til midnight. Then the rest
      tout-de-suite back to the pet-motel.
      But I stick around
      (the view from under the bookcase isn't bad),
      I use these moments to compose
      a kind of requiem for Phoeb,
      although right now he seems just fine.

      Dear Phoeb, our mini-Hamlet, sow's heir, writes
      his poems on tiny post-it notes
      which he re-orders every night
      and snips up ever tinier.
      Stirring his stew of consonants,
      he takes pot luck.

      My poetry is different.
      I need the sentence to emerge,
      dragging its long narrative—
      (but Time, who shortens every tail,
      stalks me and Phoeb alike.
      My marks along the wainscot fade;
      the grant won't last.)

      2. Deus ex machina

      The prince of disassembly, Phoeb.
      His father's scrapyard—body parts,
      hub caps, knee caps, unlicenses,
      machines dismade, shafts, shards, and screws—
      is briar patch for br'er Phoebus where
      inception and perception can not meet
      in the unpicking of a text.

      Phoeb makes a desert, the desired
      (for Dad's desertion consulate) effect.
      He flipflops words and alphabets
      in palindromic particles or petty cash
      (small change). Rupture as rapture—
      and doesn't he
      ramble?
      (when
      didn't he?)

      Sometimes he almost makes some sense
      with his eclectic mini-mots,
      yet, listening, I want to cry.
      The courtiers see him as a priest
      who makes the world with its loose scrap
      communicant—(not that he thinks
      it holy or a whole—)
      a kind of lyric liar, or
      a mirror of the glass shard in their hearts
      (truth being, as they know it, out to lunch).

      3. The riddle is: what does the princess want?

      She wants her will, this daughter of the king.
      But no one expected her to rule;
      her will is want. She wants avowal, narrative.
      Yet Phoeb, who only hears the vowel,
      can charm her with his master bits,
      the moving fracas of decay
      he thinks is life.

      I, too, feel woman's tenderness
      for his long, sloping shoulders, sagging gut,
      his tenor voice that seems so sad;
      in the refracted light of dusk
      he seems to shine.
      But he is not safe, my Phoeb, my prince,
      my snapper-up of trifles, semi-breve.
      The court grows tired of sortilege.
      Once crowned he reigns
      like a month of April, a fool moon,
      and sings as if to wake the world.

      But dream time ends. The princess sets
      the riddle she must always ask
      from poetry, her body's need:
      LOVE.
      Some things want faith. But Phoeb,
      who scrambles all things consonant,
      erodently says "vole."
      Encrypted is not clear intent.
      His dissolution failed the test.
      We rats turned tail and scuttled from the hall.

      4. And afterwards?

      Phoeb's bob-tailed bits
      like dust in moon-beams recombine
      into a thousand other things,
      living a sort of semi-life, as he does,
      in the narratives
      of time, and change, and change of mind.

      The rest of us left the palace for
      the ports of rapture, monuments
      to transit, concourse then discourse.
      The jets loom down. Below the baggage carousels
      we lurk, making our foodstall forays early dawn,
      and live on crumbs and ketchup packs
      and the occasional paperback
      in faith, sometime, our flight will come
      (as yet unnumbered and uncalled).

      Back on the farm my sisters hide
      uncourted and unheard of, and
      unangeled, but
      their poetry
      like the low lichens of the earth,
      lovely, endangered, larcenous,
      resists, maintains.

Books in Review

Writing 2K (p. 126 - 127)

by John Orange

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. On the Threshold by T. Anne Archer et al. (Beach Holme Publishing)
  2. Turn of the Story by Heidi Harms and Joan Thomas (House of Anansi Press)

Lecture dans les marges (p. 127 - 129)

by Lucie Lequin

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Érudition et passion dans les lectures intimes by Manon Brunei (Nota Bene)
  2. Contre-voix. Essais de critique au féminin by Lori Saint-Martin (Nuit Blanche Editeur)

Celebrating Spoken Word (p. 129 - 131)

by Susan Ellis

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Poetry Nation by Regie Cabico and Todd Swift (Véhicule Press)
  2. The Sweet Taste of Lightning by Sheri-D Wilson (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Anthologizing a Woman's Life (p. 131 - 132)

by Sarah King

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women by Denise Chong (Viking Press)

Memories of Mothers (p. 132 - 134)

by Mark Cohen

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Miss You Like Crazy by Eliza Clark (HarperCollins)
  2. Bite the Stars by Eliza Clark (HarperCollins)

Canadian Lives (p. 134 - 136)

by Janice Fiamengo

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Dictionary of Canadian Biography by Ramsay Cook and Jean Hamelin (University of Toronto Press)

The Art of Artifice (p. 136 - 138)

by Andrew Lesk

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Delirium by Douglas Cooper (Random House)
  2. Beneath that Starry Place by Terry Jordan (HarperCollins)
  3. Angel Falls by Tim Wynveen (Key Porter Books)

A Shout Out to Marsh (p. 138 - 140)

by E. Hamilton

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Marshall McLuhan by Terence W. Gordon (Stoddart Press)
  2. Marshall McLuhan by Philip Marchand (Vintage Canada)

Rereading Bethune (p. 140 - 141)

by Larry McDonald

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Politics of Passion by Larry Hannant (University of Toronto Press)

From Colony to Nation? Canada Revised (p. 141 - 144)

by Andrea Cabajsky

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Worrying the Nation by Jonathan Kertzer (University of Toronto Press)
  2. Practising Femininity by Misao Dean (University of Toronto Press)
  3. Imperial Canada by Colin M. Coates (University of Edinburgh Centre of Canadian Studies)

Nation/Transnation (p. 144 - 147)

by Guy Beauregard

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Americas of Asian American Literature by Rachel C. Lee (Princeton University Press)
  2. Scandalous Bodies by Smaro Kamboureli (Oxford University Press)

Who Were Those Masked Men? (p. 147 - 149)

by Dermot McCarthy

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Milton Acorn by Richard Lemm (Carleton University Press)
  2. Irving Layton by Francis Mansbridge (ECW Press)

Visit-Stay (p. 149 - 150)

by Gili Bethlehem

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Sulha by Malka Marom (Key Porter Books)

Magic in Narrative (p. 150 - 152)

by Bryan N. S. Gooch

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. An Evening with W.O> Mitchell by Barbara Mitchell and Ormond Mitchell (McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)
  2. Magic Lies by David Latham and Sheila Latham (University of Toronto Press)

The Questions Posed to Life by Death, A Canon for Three Voices (p. 152 - 154)

by Susan Knutson

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Things that Keep and Do Not Change by Susan Musgrave (McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)
  2. What the Living Won't Let Go by Lorna Crozier (McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)
  3. Kaddish for My Father by Libby Scheier (ECW Press)

Wounded Narratives (p. 154 - 157)

by Méira Cook

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Fresh wounds by Donald L. Niewyk (University of North Carolina Press)
  2. Shattered Subjects by Suzette A. Henke (St. Martin's Press)

Re-Inventing the Real (p. 157 - 159)

by Laurie Kruk

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. A Fine Daughter by Catherine Simmons Niven (Red Deer Press)
  2. The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World by Natalee Caple (House of Anansi Press)
  3. We Could Stay Here All Night by Debbie Howlett (Beach Holme Publishing)
  4. The Tracey Fragments by Maureen Medved (House of Anansi Press)

On Life, Love and Cats (p. 159 - 161)

by Heather Sanderson

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. White Madness by Alden Nowlan and Robert Gibbs (Oberon Press)
  2. Selected Poems by Alden Nowlan, Patrick Lane, and Lorna Lane (House of Anansi Press)

Nations and Their Narrations (p. 161 - 163)

by Titi Adepitan

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Once Upon a Kingdom by Isidore Okpewho (Indiana University Press)

The Yellow Peril' Today (p. 163 - 166)

by Maria Noëlle Ng

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas by Lynn Pan (Harvard University Press)
  2. Space of Their Own by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (University of Minnesota Press)
  3. China Chic by John S. Major and Valerie Steele (Yale University Press)

Culturally Bound Illness (p. 167 - 169)

by Anna Cooper

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Gout by Roy Porter (Yale University Press)
  2. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David B. Morris (University of California Press)
  3. Wishbone Dance by Glen Downie (Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd)

Educating Readers (p. 172 - 175)

by Shelley King

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Schools of Sympathy by Nancy Roberts (McGill-Queen's University Press)
  2. Scarlet Letters by Lee Thompson Briscoe (ECW Press)

Various Fictions (p. 175 - 178)

by Norman Ravvin

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. My Paris by Gail Scott (Mercury Press)
  2. The World Beaters by Ed Kleiman (Thistledown Press)
  3. Rembrandt's Model by Yeshim Ternar (Véhicule Press)

Renovated realism (p. 178 - 181)

by Brett Josef Grubisic

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Young Men by Russell Smith (Doubleday Canada Limited)
  2. All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuszi Gartner (Key Porter Books)
  3. Sex is Red by Bill Gaston (Cormorant Books)
  4. The Death of the Moon by Brian Panhuyzen (Cormorant Books)

Long-Lost Worlds (p. 181 - 182)

by Dermot McCarthy

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Collected Poems of Raymond Souster by Raymond Souster (Oberon Press)
  2. No Sad Songs Wanted Here by Raymond Souster (Oberon Press)
  3. Close to Home by Raymond Souster (Oberon Press)

A Work of Devotion (p. 182 - 184)

by Joseph Jones

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. A Bibliography of Stephen Leacock by Carl Spadoni (ECW Press)

Professor E-merit-us (p. 184 - 185)

by Ruth Panofsy

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Chapters in a Lucky Life by Clara Thomas (Borealis Press)

Flights of Verse (p. 185 - 187)

by Ian Rae

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Bolder Flights by Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson (University of Ottawa Press)
  2. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (Knopf Canada)

Fooling Around At Last (p. 187 - 188)

by Susan Ellis

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Colours of the Forest by Tom Wayman (Harbour Publishing)


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