The modern viewer was the new boss: no more uncomfortable seats, unwanted audience participation, travelling inconvenience and expense, and (short of leaving the premises) lack of options during the film. Investment, in the deeper sense of the word, was tenuous. Parallels can be drawn with opera, sporting events, and cooking lessons.

Another association parallel can be made with literary readings at book launches, festivals, regional promotions, and ongoing venue series. The crystallizing idea of a literary event as truncated amusement – whether capriccio, metalinguistics, or willed hypergolic category mistake – has become a self-fulfilling intellectual accelerant. Like the info-beset VHS purchaser (now a key-clicker on Netflix, or downloader of nebulous legality), the audience may sign up to be haunted by supraliminal wonder, but, if event orchestration is any indicator, may also attend out of half-baked desire or (reversing Fellini’s contrasts here) social communion.

The poet, short story writer, or novelist now intervenes. “Some of this may be true, but I can’t compete with the fireworks of hockey playoffs, rock concerts, movies, TV, and the Internet.” Quite right, though you can compete with other poets, short story writers, and novelists. But the fatalistic shrug, this time from the audience, persists. “Artists who read from their own work are boring.” At times, yes. But does the fault lie with the work or with the reader?

Let’s investigate the reader’s complaint first. Most are aware of the familiar opposition: plugged-in, overloaded basement-brow Goliath versus page-turning, crafty Luddite David. Most also know who gets voted off the island these days. The outcome doesn’t resemble the Biblical dust-up. It’s the Fellini lament multiplied. We want the pre-digested, but now we want it cheap (or free), without delay, and in micro bites (or bite). But literary readers/authors aren’t competing with optically challenged philistines mistaking the Art Bar for the Dart Bar. Once the clean-cuticle bank dividend checkers conclude that the place is devoid of darts and loud rock, therefrom and therefore promptly departing, the reader is still confronted by the only audience that has ever mattered – those who have at least a passing interest in the highlighted genre.

Those convened on both sides of the microphone frequently bemoan the large number of vacant seats at literary events, the readers (obviously) the most disheartened. Michael Carbert, in an otherwise perceptive September 2008 Maisonneuve essay in September of 2008 for Maisonneuve, offered prescriptions to boost the roll call audience from thirteen to thirty. But everyone knows that most readings, outside of the yearly mega-events with a hundred participating readers or the few readings featuring name brand stars in (usually) well-established festivals, garner few attendees and even fewer neophytes. The focus should always be on quality over quantity, yet the latter is increasingly targeted. Hence the proliferation of gimcrack industries like the (now) international Literary Death Match, the organizational fribblers encouraging similarly produced spinoffs in (to list only two of many) the Vancouver Writers’ Series and the Guelph Spoken Word.

The caffeinated inanity of Literary Death Match enforces a seven minute time limit per actor (sorry, author). If the unfortunate reader actually dares a transformational eight minutes, he or she is body-puckered by a nerf dart. (Perhaps our hypothetic, optically challenged philistine would sign on for that.) The Vancouver Writers’ Series readers were are manacled by a six minute count, and the authors in the Guelph Spoken Word (admittedly more influenced by the Slam line) have to make do with three minutes. Next up: voting on a lone yelp.

The more common time constraints seem to hover around the fifteen minutes mark. That this is standard only emphasizes the conforming timidity of organizers in capitulating to a supposedly fidgety audience. I’ve never been able to understand this attitude. We’re repeatedly told by current practitioners that to go beyond a quarter-hour is to somehow invoke a Dantean sentence of purgatory, if not hell. Lynn Coady sets the familiar tone well: no imposing podium, softish lighting, comfortable seating, and most importantly, easily accessible alcohol and fifteen minutes of fortune if not fame. The sad part about Coady’s ideal literary reading? She’s right. But only if the reader is inept. And in that case, why show up at all? No, it falls on authors to demand (with exceptions stemming from various practical scenarios) lengthier reading periods. The aim of every reading (at least from where I balance on my wobbly plastic seat) should be wonder, if not transcendence, otherwise what the hell’s the poet or novelist really doing up there? Solidifying a career? If the reader cares to take the time to enunciate, project, pace (vocally), change dynamics, create effects with pitch and tone, use pauses wisely, engage with genuine gestures, and, most important, slow down, (along with reading from a worthy piece in the first place, of course), then the audience members who aren’t there just to socialize between and after sets have a chance at a transformative experience in a single, extended reading.

Now it’s time to flip the mirror. What about that (often true) whine, “the readers are boring”? Poets, novelists, and short story writers don’t get enough credit for their vocal capabilities. The failures outlined in the last paragraph are obvious to any audience member who’s attended more than a few readings, but many do a decent, if not exquisite, job in letting the glory of their creations do the work for them. After all, the author more than most, knows what sonic effect she wants to strike when stressing delayed consonantal twins, for example. Similarly, the tone a listener may have thought ironic upon first acquaintance with the page may turn out to be genuine when hearing the poet read the now dramatically altered passage. But the most important quality the audience member needs to bring to a reading is attention.

Awareness and attention. Everyone agrees on their importance, but how many pull a Todd Zuniga (founder of that Literary Death Match) and text a buddy after a desert of jokes at minute three, then awake to the proceedings at minute five when catching a multiple dessert of scatalogical clichés? And less obviously, how many intellectualize the small epiphanies, snapshot the deep images, and turn up the internal chatter, thereby drowning many subtle aural surprises line to line?

There’s no need to assign romance, nobility, or charm to the rhetorical effusions of mid-eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards competitors, nor to their stoically receptive parishioners under stark joists trying to ward off chilblains on ass-punishing pews. There’s also no need to follow the pendulum to the opposite and extreme arc, though that’s where the arrow is currently frozen. We live in distaste, if not terror, of being bored, and want our epiphanies paradoxically pre-ordered and familiar. We also want to like and admire the author, as if the reading is on a horizontal plane of easy reciprocity. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of performing, largely, for a coterie of sympathetic fellow pracitioners, made even more clubby by regional repetition. There are ways of avoiding the churchly mutuality, though: organizing events at non-traditional milieus (halls over libraries; parks over pubs) and in alien quarters (while on holidays, overseas). This is still market tweaking, however.

A poem on the page is not the same as a musical score. The squiggly type of the former can be voiced by a lone reader effectively; the latter usually needs a professional with ready instrument, if not a coordinated assembly and skilled direction. But to voice a poem, short story, or novel extract with a view to “entertain,” or to “enlarge” the words, perverts the original, just as altering the stage directions of a play or the staff markings of a sonata effectively contravenes the composer’s wishes, and usually makes a farce and travesty of the performance. Samuel Beckett and Dmitri Shostakovich weren’t shy regarding their crass interpreters. The playwright took some of them to court; the composer received LPs of his own work, then turned them into coasters. Wanting the author to perform her or his work in the spirit in which it was written, then, is likely going to mean a lot of unsensational voicing. This is a problem if one is only happy with tone-knockoffs of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or “Howl.”

It’s not only OK-okay, but inevitable and historically par for the course that the receiver of art must often work to plumb a few depths – hidden metaphor, traded phrase-making, image hierarchy, voice tone, allusion, meta-punning, lyrical subtlety, narrative reverie – and that he or she must have the patience, good will, and love for literature to maintain energy and focus during the inevitable dull patches, wrong turns, and misunderstandings. Why? How else know when the tide has turned, and out of nowhere enters the startling phrase, the contextual epigram, the emotional shift? In sublime art, the author sometimes has such confidence in his own procedure that he purposely injects tedious prose into the fabric just to tease out a tear in order to make the contrast more amazing and worthy. Yes, authors at times botch their own works by ineffective presence and voice projection. Yes, at other times the acoustics and ambiance of the specific site are unredeemable. More often, though, patrons are guilty of receiving the words out of benign sociability or a “greatest hits” wishthe problem is really the audience’s, and their expectation to be both entertained and enlightened, when these are not always the same thing. It’s often easy to blame organizers, but it seems the argument here, again, hinges on comfort levels, both physical and literary.

It’s interesting that the six-to-fifteen minute monitors don’t have much of a problem with extended post-reading Q-and-A sessions, interminable pre-reading poetic statements, or lengthy set-ups to each individual poem. This reinforces another dynamic: the fact that we’re here to learn about the poet’s processes. The poems? Not so much. Unless and until the CanLit readership – other authors, those authors’ friends, lifestyle commentators, biographers, students pressed by profs who are friends of the author, and the occasional book lover mildly curious about the event – approaches readings with intense focus on the poems, stories, and novel passages being read, we’d at times be better off to attend these events by scrapping the usual event itinerary. Hang out, talk shop, buy or swap books, and drink.

That view – the total vocal white-out (pardon the anachronistic typewriter term) – certainly has antecedent traction in other artistic worlds. Robert Schumann, donning his critic’s hat in 1838, opined that an unspectacular contemporary’s latest quartet was “for the entertainment of good dilettantes who are kept fully occupied by things that an expert artist can grasp with one glance at the page, a quartet to be heard by bright candlelight and in the company of beautiful women; whereas true Beethovenians lock the doors, savoring and reveling in every single measure [of the late quartets].” Like many provocative statements, this is true, but it also has its limitations. His comments were prescient and against the grain. But poetry and prose, no less than the Great Fugue, needs an audience, a live interpretation, to introduce or revivify a silent page read or cloistered CD play.

Fellini thought technology knocked him out. He was wise to be concerned, but he was wrong. So was Marshall McLuhan. People still line up at movie houses, and others still attend hour-long poetry readings performed by a single author. The medium only changes the message in that it amplifies defects already entrenched in reader and listener. That kind of awareness is invaluable. Sometimes progress is a boon.

The Door
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart, 2007
120 pages, $18.00

The usual modus operandi, one she herself has gone to great lengths to encourage, for exploring Margaret Atwood’s poetry is thematic. Rather than follow in the murky prints of the clan and add footnotes on the individual as victim in an indifferent, even hostile, natural and political macrocosm, on familial disaffection, on the past as sepulchral and inviolable law, on creation as futile reactivity, I’ll instead fondle the poems in The Door from an aesthetic perspective.

The Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.

The book’s opener, “Gasoline,” uses the spilled substance as a metaphor for attractive danger. “Was this my best toy, then?” And later: “I knew that it was poison, / its beauty an illusion.” Atwood is at her best with extended metaphors and witty dramatic turns, and “Gasoline” incorporates its effects organically, with resonance. “As if I could. / That’s how gods lived: as if.” The first line expresses the narrator’s limitations; the next one posits a fictional alternative. But even here, “lived” is in the past tense, though the last “as if” refers to “as if anything was possible,” not the narrator’s resigned “as if I could transcend hardship.” This is a curious passage, an important one in Atwood’s unfolding canon. It amplifies the ambiguity the narrator expresses in many of her earlier poems, going as far back as 1971’s “They Are Hostile Nations” from Power Politics, in which the ambiguities jostling between hope and resignation are unresolved.

“Europe On $5 A Day” is a mess. Terse banalities reign: “I can feel this place”; “The city’s old / but new to me”; “I walk along, / looking at everything equally.” It cocoons into the straitjacket of its subject matter. Here it may be appropriate to anticipate a response to this last charge of flatness and torpidity, the response being that dullness in this case is a strategy used to link form and content, thereby giving greater force and authenticity to both. I don’t buy it. Disinterested linguistic structuring puts readers to sleep. One can hardly be stimulated enough to explore, in depth, nuances and layers of meaning when there is little or no nuance and layering of sound, syntax, and feeling. To be quicker: music is necessary to evoke depth, and in an effective poem the two are fused and their conditional apogees disappear.

With the next poem, “Year of the Hen,” the heart sinks. It’s the “uh oh” moment, the first indication that the rest of The Door may resemble “Europe On $5 A Day” rather than “Gasoline.” “Year of the Hen” takes the list poem to new lows. A catalogue should at least be entertaining, various, sonically stimulating. The language in “Hen” is relentlessly depressing:

This is the year of sorting,
of throwing out, of giving back,
of sifting through the heaps, the piles,
the drifts, the dunes, the sediments,

or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks,
the closets, boxes, corners . . . .

Less poetically? What’s the difference between a “heap” and a “pile”? It’s lazy writing. And the inevitable happens. When a writer paints herself into a corner with an accumulation of undifferentiated grey, there’s a mild physiological panic to make room for oneself by an unconvincing leap of emotion, ending (as here) in bathos: “and fingered for their beauty, / and pocketed, space-time crystals / lifted from once indelible days.”

Elegies dominate the rest of the first section, one for the narrator’s father, one for her mother, three for the cat. And it’s the cat that receives the most connective grief, though, with the exception of some fine appellative fondness (“sly fur-faced idol” in “Blackie In Antarctica”), any sentiment in “Mourning For Cats” collapses into inane rhetorical questioning, no fewer than eight consecutive head-spinners (“Why such deep mourning?”) in the closing twenty-three lines.

“Heart” is a preemptive defense of the writer from his or her critics: sensitive heart-spilling artist being silenced by “instant gourmet[s].” The opposite is the reality, of course. There is a paucity of responsible criticism of contemporary Canadian poets and poetry. Many of those poets take this as implied, if not overt, consent for their efforts. The further irony to “Heart” is that its narrator’s commiseration with mawkish revelation is surprising in a poet who registers continuous flatlines on the electrocardiogram index. And there is a third irony: a conspicuous disparity between the harsh diction (twisting, shucking, coughing, broken, racket, guts, deep-red clot, coarse, wound) and the emotional tenor of the poem. It’s analogous to a vivisectionist decrying destruction. Organs from virile bodies must be excised to feed the possibility of life in “victims,” a reverse of the poems’s last-word claim of “heartless,” with its predatory accusation. (Contrast this poem with Atwood’s remarkable “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart” from 1978’s Two-Headed Poems, where the images are crisp, the assonance apt and purposeful, and the narrator’s ambivalence affecting.)

Ironies proliferate. There is something disagreeable about draping clichés like dull tinsel on a Boxing Day tree when defending the dedication of poets. “She never thought she could do this. / Not her.” . . . “Like the sun through mist.” . . . “Are they dead, or what?” . . . “surely there is still / a job to be done by us, at least.” These latter bon mots are taken at random from the rest of section II.

The middle, and longest, political section continues with infuriating questions: “Is it our fault?” . . . “Or does it?” “What if it does” . . . “Who let it out?” . . . “Why were we so careless,” all from “The Weather.” Is it a searching, honest open-endedness? Coy maneuvering, as in covering all bases? A posturing sublimity? See how adding a squiggly mark after a sentence can make one think? (As in, “how did this pass the publisher’s first screening?”)

“War Photo” is a lovely possibility for an arresting conceit, but the images are cancelled at the outset by the egregious description “very beautiful” for the dancer / dead woman. Repetition takes over as if to transfer feeling by insistent statement rather than imagistic surprise, phrasal lilt, or sonic suggestiveness: “dancing there on the ground,” “dead beautiful woman,” “it’s this beautiful woman.”

Atwood’s political attitudes are cheap scaffolding where thin, broad brushstrokes bleed off plank-pages with the first scrutinizing rainstorm. Dead language abounds. “Nobody cares who wins wars.” “Of course it’s better to win/than not. Who wouldn’t prefer it?” from “Nobody Cares Who Wins”; “They speak words, I think / They testify. / They name names” from “They Give Evidence”; “Even if you had remained alive, / we would never have spoken”; “Now though it seems I am asking / and you are answering” from “War Photo 2.” Political poems, especially, need attention to lyric sinuousness and organic shaping, lest they slide into propagandistic prose and ideological proselytizing. Bald messages belong in an op-ed daily, not in a poem.

“Another Visit to the Oracle” from Section IV is simply embarrassing in its mishmash of cryptic circularity, hermetic inconsequence, colloquial asides, and stray soliloquizing. The addressee is unknown though not important anyway since the “prophetess” narrator is a transparent excuse for one more installment in unengaged Survivalist declaration. Quoting is superfluous, but the final two lines are worth pondering for their terse philosophical applicability: “I tell dark stories / before and after they come true.”

On that fatalistic note, let’s knock on the volume’s closer. I detailed a bit the book’s first effort, “Gasoline,” as opening the door to the possibility of renewal or spiritual transformation. The same struggle, albeit with more energy and conviction, is available in Atwood’s 1971 “Hesitations Outside The Door” in which “The right lies would at least/be keys, they would open the door. // The door is closed.” And several sections later: “. . . there are no doors, / get out while it is / open, while you still can.” The usual artlessness prevails: haphazard line breaks, skinny diction, clumsy images (“shining blood”), numbing abstractions (“the false / bodies, this love / which does not fit you”), narrative separation, relentless repetition of metaphor (I’d love to have a loonie for every “rock/stone/boulder” appearance), and relationship struggles lacking idiosyncrasy – but at least something approximating engagement, if not passion, occurs in “The Door’s” “first draft.” Last year’s effort, despite its unhinged swinging, shuts – no, entombs – the protagonist in a kind of secular Calvinist futility. What can one say about the offensive reduction of an actual life in which, “you buy a purse, / the dance is nice / . . . you wash the dishes, / you love your children, / you read a book . . . The dog has died. / This has happened before / You got another”? The final, “The door swings closed” is not only anti-climactic but an obvious redundancy, devoid of tension because the lack of juice, the lack of verbal play, in the poem mirrors Atwood’s simplistic idea-phantom of wife and mother. The poem’s ersatz profundity is offensive not only in its reductionism, but because it uses an assumed particularity as a vide supra for universal extrapolation. (One may wish to read John Hersey’s novel The Walnut Door as a lively corrective for what an engaged author can do with this overworked, plain metaphor.)

Margaret Atwood’s poetic world is an uninviting one. I don’t merely mean the fictive psychogeography, but more the silty conduit with the reader. Her writing represents only one of the six primary tastes: astringency. Conspicuous by emotional absence are connections of sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and pungent, and more enjoyably, the resulting delicious intermingling.

Orphic Politics
Tim Lilburn
McClelland & Stewart, 2008
86 pages, $17.99

Orphic” is loaded with associations: it stands for a mystic sense, but of course derives its essence from the mythic figure of Orpheus. Aside from the relational ties to music, Dionysus, the arts, agriculture, and rapidity, the unavoidable dominant link is to the continually influential story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Even though the allusive density of Orphic Politics is daunting, I believe it’s rewarding (with direct ties to Orpheus’s descent, ascent, death, and ambiguous transformation) throughout the text to focus on the singular titularity because of allegorical propinquity as well as spiritual yearning.

Lilburn is not concerned with jotting down offhand verse of banal diurnal anecdote. In non-dual spirituality, there are the relative and absolute worlds, though (paradoxically) each can join with, and dissolve into, the other. But language is a logical construct. We can only converse in a relative sense. The idea or description or presentation, no matter how artfully transmitted, is not itself enlightenment. Lilburn’s spiritual antecedents were likewise concerned with the higher plane, but they knew the limits of words when it came to “falling/into knowing’s body” (“Theurgy II”). Lilburn, throughout his poetic career, has presented his terms (Names Of God), celebrated his epiphanies (Tourist To Ecstasy), wrestled with reconciling his visions to supreme consciousness (To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, Kill-Site), and amplified a change in that latter volume towards a frenetic, even desperate, attempt at union (Orphic Politics).

I realize the last charge may seem hyperbolic (though not as hyperbolic as the tone of Orphic Politics), but let’s investigate. Here, in its entirety, is “A Surgery Against Angelism”:

Set a fat layer of fire grazing into the chest of engine heat, breast-
stroking against motion perfuming from the sickness of volt swollen
inhalations. Let this heat
sag to a half-eaten meal not its own; let it eat rods,
iron shavings, green stones, dead yarrow, words headfirst
from a rock overhang in the upper right, a skeleton of a seal; let it learn
to heave-hiss through its mouth the complete psalmic blade.
Five pound fire gravities against hurtling’s musk.
In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor;
whipped light-heads cough in blows’ trampoline, and choir above
their husks, they lurch into a blurred but, yes, readable circle, moving,
yes, the gear that jacks the cranial dome.
You go into the fish’s mouth which is the body of a cousin
at the volcano’s wedding.
We come out of the upper colon tunnel onto the ledge, sweet-looking
antlers to smoke from the cloud deer. We’ve built a shack
out of this numbnutsness,
we’ve hidden in this long grass. A stick will cure us.
Your eyes in the fish’s gut are moved like a wand around the dark.
The knife snugs down through skin. And this is politics.

Lilburn varies little the length of lines throughout his oeuvre, but especially so in Orphic Politics. The Whitmanesque effusions in Tourist To Ecstasy suit the long, rolling units, as do the occasional galloping enjambments in From The Great Above She Opened Her Ear To The Great Below. Though “A Surgery Against Angelism” is studded with emphatic stresses, the tone is searching and the physical resources compromised, a far cry from, say, Isaiah’s long confident declarations. I found myself consistently and naturally pausing at the medial foot, and this gave some energy to the back-end line which not only ran out of steam when subsequently reading the poem aloud, but which then also bogged the lines down in confused referents – always a challenge, at the best of times, with Lilburn’s work. Varied line indentations are arbitrary and rife in many contemporary free-versifiers, but I enjoyed Lilburn’s use of the severe indent as seen here in lines three and fifteen. The uncomfortable pause before “inhalations” creates an effective mimesis with the narrator, and the suspense before “at the volcano’s wedding” also works to set up the image’s surprise.

Speaking of surprises, what can we make of the imagistic leaping, in this poem and elsewhere? Starting with To The River, Lilburn’s narrative persona has, with few exceptions, been an ephemeral, hermetic (and Hermetic) presence, without history, idiosyncrasy, or emotional subjectivity. (The latter charge is somewhat ameliorated in Orphic Politics; more on that later). I can appreciate the daring metaphorical tags, and after many brow-scrunchers there is the successfully strong, “In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor.” But the exception doesn’t negate the inaccessibility of long swatches of drifting animal/outback symbolism which, at least to this reader, confounds (and perhaps derides) any poetic equivalent to a musical ordering and understanding. Only a churl would cavil about a passage such as, “missiled hissing from the river through thinnest ice,/ runelling mud and spur” from “Fr. Paul Le Jeune. S.J., In The Forest,” but the approach shouldn’t be to obviate meaning altogether, a temptation influenced by Lilburn’s suggestion (in an interview) that the reader “just trust the poet and let yourself go.” No. Trust has to be earned. If I trusted any versifier who hurriedly stapled together their summa opus by being a blank container for every unfiltered rumination, I’d have Cerberus biting my brainpan a minute after Orpheus had fled the flood (temporarily) with Eurydice.

The wayward and scattershot imagery (“weather-drum, salmon-beaked,/Neanderthal forehead of weather” from “Politics”), the private mythopoeia from “He Holds” (“We’re talking the Epiphany of the Imam,/more or less, amigo, or Parousia in backflip.”), the glancing allusive intrusions (“John Stuart Mill/power-take-offs into his sideburn whorls, Gerard Manley Hopkins/Titans from a chair” from “Politics”), the narrative pinballing restlessness (“skid on your ass down the mudded incline to the pulse of cosmology/wobbling off the wall, poulticed by burning fish” from “Getting Ready”), all produce an insuperable fault in Lilburn’s work from To The River forward: obscurity.

Philip Larkin, speaking of his own contemporaries, decried “an obscurity unlike previous types in being deliberate and unnecessary”; the Advaita Vedanta adept Jean Klein criticized the two extremes of artistic procedure: giving away the game, on one hand, or completing all the work for the reader/viewer, the latter then becoming nauseated with its sweetness, and on the other hand, withholding all cards through malice, ineptness, or unreasonable challenge. Here’s an excerpt from “If Metaphor Is Theurgy, It Must Form”:

“the eggwhites castle of Aristoteleanism, which, un-
crossing its arms, monstrances itself as a reed boat smoothing through
crow-smoke and palms barging the loudly oiled, drive-in-movie-screen
forehead of Christianity
on a red leather Hausa cushion”

I try. But I simply can’t negotiate my way through this with any clarity. There is no transmission.

Unlike Ralph Gustafson, another densely allusive poet who used historical, musical, literary, and spiritual figures in philosophical juxtaposition with in-the-moment natural observation, but coloured those figures in human dimensions, with great sympathy, Lilburn trots out Plato and crew as disembodied treatises, suffocating with theory any link to Lilburn’s experiences. Why the numerous, various, and lengthy epigraphs? Is it simply to browbeat the reader with a muscled erudition? A deflection from a perceived inability to clear the high-jump bar without steroid shots from the canon? Whatever the reason, it was annoying to sit through (for instance) two Phil 204 lectures from Plato’s Phaedrus, and then to read only four Lilburn poems linked to the first, and three to the next.

And what of those seven poems? It is a grand irony that Lilburn, even with personal subject matter, cannot cut away the grandiose – “Ten yards of mineral hair fall inside the cruciform hummingbird” (from “Meeting The Angel, Tasting What It Sees”) – to reveal a clarity, a vulnerability, a recognition that one would like to receive what he is giving, when the story has Socrates showing up and changing the mind of Phaedrus in an impassioned support for the superiority of a lover’s worth for the beloved over any and all non-lovers/friends.

And this leads into the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The comparison of the latter myth with the Phaedra discourse is illuminating. Orpheus didn’t descend in a painful psychic katabasis because of mysterious illness, but through an impassioned choice to be reunited with his great Love. The narrative skein in Orphic Politics is diffuse, and the obscurity (at least partly) attempts to deny the fact that a self-contained, withdrawing illness is a poor precursor for elevating the experience into audacious confrontation with the gods of the underworld for personal salvation instead of union with the Beloved. Lilburn’s version of the Beloved is nebulous, all-encompassing, and sexuality, throughout his oeuvre, is narrator-merged with animals and nature, which is anathema to the idiosyncratic and specific qualities of an individual human, and which is given power in the Orpheus myth. Remember, even after Eurydice died the second and final time (Orpheus was so peculiarly enraptured, he risked a second descent), the lyrist rejected the advances of the Thracian maidens. Lilburn’s allegory is inapt for the same reason as his eroto-enlightenment urges are misinformed. “Nothing infinite but in finite things,” said Huang Po, said Pythagoras. In the negating-the-name Christian approach that Lilburn favours, just as in the non-dual approach of Advaita, the emptiness of Zen, the unnamable Tao, and the “shall not” deductions (not prescriptions, as universally mistranslated) of Moses, all esoteric spiritual traditions affirm an absolute reality which language cannot explicate or enter. But there is also a relative world, one which can be all the more affecting and joyfully celebrated (while hinting of enlightenment) when accepted without the overreach, as in this exhortation from Lilburn’s “Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World” from Tourist To Ecstasy: “Come mumblers after quarters, with your newspaper shoe shuffles from the high-heeled, well-healed, Dior-cheekboned streets.”

I realize this essay has drifted on occasion towards a concern with the ineffable (though not with the obsessional repetition of Lilburn‘s work), but when I read and experience these words from earlier Lilburn I enter a piece of heaven unknown before, and from which a confused katabatic drop of, “on a flake of dead skin, the Vita coetanea of R. Lull, in barn swallow” (“The Gift Of Europe”) had me wallowing.

An addendum of sorts: I liked Orphic Politics more than the To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, and Kill-Site series since the personal element (illness, in this circumstance) emerged, anchoring somewhat the Hermetic frenzy and giving it a more (at times) understandable and arresting metaphorical interplay. On that note, here are the powerful closing lines from “Orphic Hymn”:

The dogwood tree blooms in the full window a rising whine.
The temperature of this nuzzles in like sediment that’s already stone.
A knife waits, girlish, down the hill, flipping over, over, small
fish flash at the bottom of that boat, convinced, the knife, crossing
and uncrossing its legs.

I hope Lilburn continues, in his next volume, to touch and contextualize the universal with the personal, the absolute with the relative. For all the long-breathed imagistic pyrotechnics, sensory imprimaturs were fleeting and have evaporated (save for the above poem, and scattered lines from a few others), philosophical insight was poorly integrated or inappropriate, and form shattered into hit-and-miss shards of beautiful broken coloured glass.