Book Reviews

What Poetry Does

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (Author)
Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. Mansfield
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Rita Wong (Author)
Forage. Nightwood Editions
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Rob Winger (Author)
Muybridge's Horse. Nightwood Editions
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Reviewed by Aaron Giovannone

The three books reviewed below attest to the diversity of writing by contemporary poets and their divergent beliefs about the utility of their work. In Muybridge’s Horse, Rob Winger mixes lyric and narrative to trouble the real and imagined history of the famous nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. In Forage, Rita Wong’s acute political consciousness fuels relentless poetic experimentation. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, by contrast, puts poetry aside altogether for a foray into the political arena in Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City.

In his new book, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco reaches out to a bigger (or at least a different) community of readers than he does as a poet. Momentarily eschewing stanzas for the manifesto—a form that mixes creative and expository writing—the poet laureate of Toronto has taken on the voice of a guru in Urban Studies. His book, in fact, is blurbed by a dozen or so academics, authors, and administrators in that field.

At its best, Municipal Mind displays the focused rhetorical power of Di Cicco’s public speaking. He turns an elegant phrase critiquing government’s tendency to restrict creativity: “Every public virtue must leave private room to wonder” and when problematizing the legislated cultural event: “Showcase is the silhouette of creative soul.” Overall, however, Municipal Mind rarely exploits metaphor, imagery, or the rhythmic phrasing available in creative writing. As a result, we tend to read these pieces for their expository content.

Throughout these manifestos, Di Cicco elaborates his thesis that “[e]very citizen should self-identify as an artist, with the same moral commitment to ideals, before we can have any credible allegiance to our environment.” As Di Cicco’s phrasing already suggests, this artist-citizen is the self-determining monad of mystical humanism, a sovereign entity ideally behaving according to an ethic of “welcome and response” to its fellow citizens. The result of this philosophy, however, is that citizens are only implicated in their society when they choose to be. In the book’s final chapters, a discourse on “mercy and compassion” uses religion and spirituality to establish an innate connection between these disparate citizens, a move that finally ballasts the book’s argument with the heavy baggage of theistic universalism.

By contrast, Rita Wong’s Forage relies on an array of poetic resources to make a political statement. This book is a dynamic mixture of styles—ranging from the lyric to the list to the prose poem—addressing a litany of public and personal injustices. Wong jumps from topic to topic, from aesthetic to aesthetic, targeting by turns genetic engineering, Native American place names, Chinese remedies, laundry toxins, body toxins, discarded computer toxins, oil, smog, weaponry, endangered species, and much more. This diverse collection coheres because of the author’s voice, which is emboldened by a sense of sheer affront and the need to find “ground to push against, red earth, / bloody earth, stolen earth.”

Wong’s success in Forage lies largely in her close attention to the material composition of objects, linguistic and otherwise. In a poem titled “fluorine,” for example, Wong’s chemical analysis of everyday items activates latent relationships of cause and effect,  and therefore ethical responsibility:

arsenic in calculators mercury in felt
hats, mad as poisoned hatter
pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane
acts assume poison unless otherwise
informed crowded alloys detect no
health damage until generations later I
brush my teeth with nuclear intensity
the cavities I avoid destined for others

In other poems, Wong revels in the material of language through intense punning. In “canola queasy,” for example, the ‘stock market’ becomes the “stuck market” then the “stacked market”; in “domestic operations,” the ‘war on terror’ becomes “the wart on error” then “the war-torn era.” Wong alters the phonic and graphic material of words and phrases to undermine their usual signification and the ideologies informing them.

Unlike the first two books reviewed here, Rob Winger’s Muybridge’s Horse, winner of a CBC Literary Award, is not explicitly political. It is, rather, a poetic retelling of the life and work of Eadweard Muybridge whose famous photographs of a galloping horse in 1872 led the way for the invention of the motion picture.

Muybridge’s Horse straddles the line between narrative and lyric, using historical personages and their imagined subjectivities as a muse. In the first of three sections, Winger poeticizes with vivid and arresting results: “the second in walking when both feet are airborne / the time between target and gunshot / water in your throat / the space of decline when a masseuse’s thumb slips from a knotted muscle.” Occasionally Winger’s metaphors describing characters in photographic vocabulary seem too deliberate, but overall, this history told through poetic fragments becomes an intriguing literary analogue of the “moving picture.”

The book’s second section consists mostly of ekphrastic narrative pieces, in which photos taken by Muybridge during a Guatemalan sojourn are re-imagined in picturesque prose. In the third section, however, Winger often refuses to imaginatively invest himself in Muybridge’s photos, which have become increasingly pornographic as Muybridge himself has gone into a decline. Instead, Winger reproduces only the captions of these photos: “Carrying a vase and placing it on a table. Females. (NUDE).” This movement away from narrative towards a “found” aesthetic endows the work with a sense of documentary objectivity not as strongly present in the rest of the book.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #199 (Winter 2008), Asian Canadian Studies. (pg. 221 - 223)

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