Don McKay’s furry (not feathered) friends
While we’re on the subject of Don McKay, I would be doing a disservice not to post some of his poetry. McKay is known for his bird poems (and potentially responsible for elevating birds to cliche status in literary magazine submissions). If you’ve read any of his poetry, you have probably seen at least a few of them.
I’m not going to post a bird poem. Instead, I will follow the lead of someone I met recently who loved McKay’s poems about dogs. I find this fitting since I met first met Don McKay at a professor’s house, tirelessly throwing a spittle-soggy rubber ball for said professor’s terrier. Perhaps “good poetry” isn’t supposed to make you go “Awwww,” but this good poem certainly has that effect on me.
LUKE & CO
1.
Shriek of brakes spiked
with your spirit splits the evening suddenly
this is it everything leaks we draw heavy
outlines trying to keep stone stone
boot boot shovel shovel
shovel this raw mouth into the earth
and feed you to the meadow.
2.
Each time he settled on his blue-black sofa Luke
went out, invisible except for small white patches
on his chest, left forepaw, and the tiny paintbrush
tufts on his tail and prick-sack, winking when he
wagged or recomposed his curl:
milkweed
growing on this wild unspecial
patch of ground
let your silk slip
gently to the wind.
3.
A dog on his sofa, a dog
underground, a committee of dogs which
circulates beyond the bounds of decency
sniffing crotches
raiding garbage
stealing from the butcher
begging from the banker
befriending nasty Mrs. Kuhn, convincing folk
that every act is sexual and droll.
Raggedly
they range the meadow,
alternate hosts for all our seminal ideas
(soft sell, the revolving
door, the interminable
joke) tucked in snug cocoons behind their wise
unknowing eyes:
underground
they spread contagiously, freelancing dreamlife to
dreamlife through networks of long rambling after-
dinner anecdotes Mr. Glover had an old blind
terrier could fetch a ball by listening to it hit
and roll, I don’t know, could be he smelt it in
the air sure well Luke followed his nose the
way Ezekiel followed God, he’d vacuum up your
trail like you had fishline paying out your arse
you’d double back it didn’t matter he would find
you up a tree thing is, like they only partly
live in this dimension since they smell and hear
things that do not exist for us so on their level
it’s like synesthesia is common sense well, you
know Alice Dragland had such ears folks said her
mother was part fruit bat she would practise
flying when the family was asleep and when she
swam (for miles) behind the boat she mostly sailed
and then of course there’s breakthroughs
as when Luke
discovered down-filled pillows and extrapolated,
grazing the surface of soft
improbable objects with exquisite
fish-bites, chien stupide, chien
brillant, trying to tease feathers
from the cat the sofa and at least one
English professor of each rank and gender,
chien comme une tasse de la nuit, he wouldn’t
let himself become embossed with discipline
but played it like melody
(Perdido Blues) from which he improvised in long
irregular loops
exits
entries. Letting him out in out to chase a
car bike jogger snowplow (caught, tossed in an
otter’s arc of snow) rabbit motorcycle train the wind
whose speed
was with him even in repose a space
left in his doggieness for metamorphosis and style
where once
right here in this kitchen, Luke ate
three-fifths of Hemingway’s For Whom
the Bell Tolls, fell asleep on his sofa
wrapped in the perfect fur sleeping bag of himself.
(from Camber, p. 100-04)
Wilderness
Strolling the Montreal streets today, my encounters were all with human beings in sleek coats and boots, and perhaps a few cold pigeons. Not much wildlife around these parts, and I kind of miss the animals I grew up with in the country–our pet cats, of course, but also the raccoons in the yard, the rabbits in the orchard, the snakes in the greenhouse, and the various species of birds in and around the pine tree.
Heck, some days I miss the bats that got and subsequently resided in my brothers’ closet, well over 60 of them–Dad and I stood out on the porch one night and counted as they flew out until we were too tired to count anymore, and they just kept coming. Some days I miss the squirrel that snuck into Dad’s office and dodged, bouncing, every attempt to chase it out with a broom. Recalling our visit to Florida and the tourist trap where we’d watched gators be made to jump for chickens suspended above them on a stick, Dad dubbed it “The Squirrel Jumparoo Show.” I don’t miss the skunk that got into the basement and had to be lured out with a trail of dry cat food, its way out blocked off by bales of peat moss, my mom crouching behind them in fear and occasionally popping her head up to check if it was gone yet. But I do recall that day with fond amusement.
It is easy to forget that we are animals, especially when we find ourselves trudging through malls and up streets that like to pretend fauna and flora don’t exist. It is easy to keep forgetting when we seek our “back-to-nature” downtime in botanical gardens that cheerily mingle plants from disparate continents as if they coexist in some natural habitat, somewhere. It is easy to forget when we’re theorizing the world. But animals we are.
I wish I could say that the “authentic encounters with the wilderness” in my life have reminded me of this. I wish I could put on my Wordsworth face and claim that they opened floodgates of perception. They didn’t. What they did was cause me to pause for a little while, to be reminded that “MY places” are not “human territory”.
If our ways of categorizing, of thinking “myself” separate from “other”, of dwelling on the space rather than the proximity and overlap between these points of reference, is what keeps our consciousness fenced off from experiencing wilderness (and it is surely not the only thing), then what are we missing? What is “wilderness” anyway? Don McKay, a contemporary and remarkable Canadian nature poet, offers a definition that (in my opinion) says more about what wilderness is not than about what it is. Perhaps that is the best that can be offered, since it is a trick of language, itself a medium more of describing than existing, that “being” is impossible to articulate.
McKay:
By “wilderness” I want to mean, not just a set of endangered spaces, but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations. That tools retain a vestige of wilderness is especially evident when we think of their existence in time and eventual graduation from utility: breakdown. To what degree do we own our houses, hammers, dogs? Beyond that line lies wilderness. We probably experience its presence most often in the negative as dry rot in the basement, a splintered handle, or shit on the carpet. But there is also the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism. The coat hanger aasks a question; the armchair is suddenly crouched: in such defamiliarizations, often arranged by art, we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy–its rawness, its duende, its alien being. (Don McKay, Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness, p. 21)
Clement Greenberg: Private and Public Art
On my bookshelf, as of yet unfinished, is a collection of Late Writings by the instrumental Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg. His wonderfully accessible prose lays out a series of arguments, analyses and questions that I find as challenging as they are illuminating. One of Greenburg’s principal arguments is for an objective standard of taste; I tend to fall on either side of the fence for this one depending on which day you ask. What about the subjective associations and reactions that a piece of art, or even a plain object such as a water jug, can move in individuals?
Greenberg does not overlook the question of subjectivity, offering instead a lucid interpretation:
…it has become clearer, too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and the aesthetic don’t just overlap, they coincide (as Croce suspected, but didn’t conclude). The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing–an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realized or realizable everywhere, even if for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, “raw,” and unformalized (which doesn’t mean “formless,” of which there is no such thing). And because this art can and does feed on anything within the realm of conceivability, it is virtually omnipresent among human beings.
This “raw,” ubiquitous art doesn’t as a rule move anybody more than minimally on the aesthetic level, however much it might do so on the level of consolation or therapy or even of the “sublime.” It’s literally and truly minimal art. And it’s able to remain that because in its usual privacy it is sheltered from the pressure of expectations and demands. Art starts from expectation and satisfaction, but only under the pressure of heightened expectation–expectation as schooled and heightened by sufficient aesthetic experience–does art lift itself out of its “raw” state, make itself communicable, and become what society considers to be art proper, public art.
Duchamp’s “theoretical” feat was to show that “raw” art could be formalized, made public, simply by setting it in a formalized art situation, and without trying to satisfy expectations–at least not in principle. Since Duchamp this formalizing of “raw” art by fiat has become a stereotype of avant-gardist practice, with the claim being made, always, that new areas of nonart are being won for art thereby. All this has actually amounted to, however, is that public attention is called to something that was art to begin with, and banal as that, and which is made no more intrinsically interesting by being put into a recognized art context. (“Counter-Avant-Garde,” Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, p. 13-4)
Welcome to my corner of the blogosphere
Matrix (http://matrixmagazine.org/) editrix Melanie here. Introducing Symbiotic Letters, a blog of literature, arts, theories, thoughts, Montreal, anecdotes, and various tasty tidbits.
Pull up a cozy chair, pour yourself a cup of tea, and enjoy.
