The Poets and the Occupists, part 2

The old Pulp Press office on the 3rd floor, 440 W Pender

(Part Two of an essay writ­ten for Geist)

Who were these poets who had appeared in such numbers? At a glance: women and men in equal numbers; youngish and slightly older, new poets and old poets; lyric poets, formal­ists, tradi­tion­al­ists, avant-​gardists, nature poets, and perhaps even land­scape poets and at least one geolog­i­cal poet. Those of us who are not poets (it seemed to me that we all resem­bled poets) wondered what it would be like to be a single poet among so many others.

The book tables in the foyers were strewn with poetry titles; just to see so many pris­tine volumes await­ing their first owners was an unex­pected thrill. Poets and non-​poets strolled in the hall­way, brows­ing through the books, confer­ring in twos and threes: every­one seemed to be surprised or delighted, at the very least to be on good if not best behav­iour; some seemed bemused by some perceived absur­dity. I could discern there to be no typi­cal poet or arche­typ­i­cal figure who could stand for all, a fact that was confirmed for me by A Complete Ency­clo­pe­dia of Differ­ent Types of People by Gabe Fore­man, a copy of which I picked up at the book table, and in which there is no Poet-​type to be found, although poets no doubt can be found within the types listed in its pages, among the wool­gath­er­ers, under­dogs, sweet­hearts, snoops, piano tuners, house-​sitters and adul­ter­ers among the lovesick, inno­cent bystanders, couch pota­toes, control freaks, door­mats, day traders, eulo­gists, frequent flyers, history buffs, late bloomers, opti­mists, optometrists, etc., etc.

Of the liter­ary disci­plines, poetry is the most econom­i­cal; it requires the least space, the fewest pages, the short­est dura­tion; it pays the lowest rates. Poetry lacks the focussed atten­tion of a large public; it is forever seek­ing an audi­ence with ears to hear; its prac­ti­tion­ers are dedi­cated to clar­ity rather than mean­ing, and the strug­gle for clar­ity is itself trou­bling and uncom­fort­able, and can lead into the arcane, the complex and the weird. The poets invited to speak on the panels were new enough to the art or craft to have had their first books published after 1990; older poets gave keynote read­ings; over the four days dozens of sonnets were read aloud, several rants, poems of love and loss and geol­ogy; one poet, a Cana­dian from Brook­lyn, plucked a thumb piano as he read aloud, a response (thumbs up or thumbs down?), he implied, to the avant-​gardists and their arcane atten­tions to constraints and controls, tech­nolo­gies of erasure, gram­mar, syntax, genet­ics, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. A poet from Montreal proposed a tacti­cal rather than a proce­dural approach to achiev­ing clar­ity: that being simply to track every moment of melan­choly sadness. The poli­tics of the family was not much in evidence until a poet from Commer­cial Drive observed that so many present were parents as well as poets, and that for them the task of poetry was informed, surrounded, blocked, circum­scribed, by the task of parent­ing, the uncom­fort­able, diffi­cult gerund derived from the Latin, to bring forth. Some­one in the audi­ence proposed that poetry is a dialogue with the dead. I love this ques­tion, said one of the panelists. The border between yes and no is porous, observed another poet in another context (the context of poetry implies all contexts); the same poet spoke as well of my dear, diffi­cult, departed ones.

Poetry is inher­ently of the moment—the moment of compo­si­tion, of memory, of speak­ing aloud; the moment extends far from the present instant, from the poet’s desk, this keyboard, this podium, this lectern. A poem yearns for space in which to be uttered, in which to be received. At the Poetry Confer­ence such a place was staked out in these halls once intended for shop­pers and bankers, all of this, as we learned, on unceded land, land that remains in a profound way unowned. Poetry within itself is also contested: genre wars are part of the strug­gle for clar­ity; exca­va­tion and discov­ery are applied to the body of poetry, as well as to one’s expe­ri­ence of the world, and to conti­nents and subcon­ti­nents. A poet who applied an eraser to a sonnet by Shake­speare came up with noth­ing /​is more /​beau­ti­ful. On intro­duc­ing it, he said, this one is for Wall Street, and thereby reas­signed it to a moment in hand.

On the evening of the third day I walked over to the art gallery and observed the Occu­pists in the plaza using the wind-​it-​up signal in their general assem­bly; the human micro­phone was in evidence as well, and slow ripples of speech moved through the crowd. A reper­toire of hand signals had been drawn on a sheet of card­board, indi­cat­ing consen­sus, disagree­ment, point of process, repeat, block, clar­ify, but the wind-​it-​up sign was not there. Among the tents and the loiter­ing police offi­cers were signs of occu­pa­tion exhort­ing passersby to occupy their minds and hearts, to have hope, to $top corpo­rate power, to wake up and smell the oppres­sion, and citing, among other things, the contested status of unceded Coast Salish lands. The art gallery, with its ionic columns and vast central dome, is another recyled venue: it had orig­i­nally housed the Vancou­ver Cour­t­house and served as a point of public display for visit­ing kings and queens; after its conver­sion (when the city began post-​modernizing itself in the 1980s), it became a contem­po­rary site of protest and demon­stra­tion; it retains on its exte­rior stair­case a pair of enor­mous African lions carved en couchant from Nelson Island gran­ite and whose stern, sight­less gaze, fixed on the limit­less domain of Empire, disre­gards equally the demon­stra­tors, the police, the passersby and the passage of history.

(to be contin­ued)