Taking the Measure
A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove
John Newlove (ed. Robert MacTavish)
Chaudiere Books, 2008
251 pages, $22.00
In 1986 I was editor of Prism International and wrote to John Newlove asking for poems. I received, promptly, a typewritten letter to this effect: “I am astonished at your lack of wit. Some time ago a former editor of your magazine wrote to me requesting poems. I complied. The poems were swiftly rejected. I am much too smart to fall for the same dumb trick twice. Sincerely, John Newlove.”
Prickly, I thought. Paranoid.
I can’t remember if I replied or not. I had wanted those Newlove poems badly, and felt undeservedly stung. But I treasure his letter.
I never met him. I read John Metcalf’s Kicking Against the Pricks and laughed at the priceless vision of Newlove’s shaking hands entering, disastrously, a display case of fragile antiques in Montreal. Then I read The Fat Man, cover to cover, and quickly became infatuated with his controlled fulminations, his careful rhetoric. “I see now we all make the world what we want / Our disappointment lies in the world as it is.” That’s fantastic, I thought, how the hell does he do that?
I hitchhiked the prairie too, exhausted by the space and rude baked earth, the distance to the horizon, “seeking some almost seen / god or food or earth or word.” His poems conditioned what I saw, a voice-over. Eating lunch beside the viscous cesspool at Dominion Armature Works in Winnipeg, listening to frogs, I heard, “The shapes of death hang upside down / Grey music.” In North Winnipeg one always encountered weary, sour-smelling men who wore clothes made just after WWII, the type of man who “just can’t any more, that’s all.” I stood at Portage and Main, the city’s then-decaying core, and heard the wind mount and shriek, in “the cold soul of cities / blown empty by commerce / and desiring commerce / to fill up the emptiness.”
A Long Continual Argument is probably the best summation of John Newlove’s inimitable poems that we are likely to get, and I have no quibble with the selection, which includes poems from all of Newlove’s books. I can think of no memorable Newlove poem that is excluded, and this edition includes several important longer poems, even the extensive and latterly “Progress.”
I say inimitable poems because I can think of no obvious imitators, and Newlove’s distinctive technique is immediately recognizable; it consists early of a highly conscious doubling of near homophonic words, and the savoring of slight changes in phrasing, in order to wring out their ambiguities, creating the illusion of participation in a painstaking fabrication. I see a man walking backwards, carefully, down a ladder. Newlove perfects this meticulous shift in attention between maker, made and machination in the early poems. It is a seduction, not the post-modern concern with parody or reflection; it is a rare and unavoidable intimacy with words and their implications. His subjects are fear and wonder, isolation and civilization, cruelty and pity, a self-dramatizing viciousness, and the capriciousness of history.
Examples of this folding and refolding of Newlove’s inner folio of diction are not hard to find: “one compiles masses, massifs”; “it is little, but it is little enough”; “moments, not monuments”; “stopping vision visibly”; “Contemporaneous/ Contempt.” In spare but wholly considered sentences real feeling is extricated by means of the intricacies of English sound and sense; the words and their relation do the talking. There is not just what we now call “point of view,” the vocabulary of an actor in a lyric play; there is a mind in a tug of war with language itself, and this importantly affects Newlove’s tone, and gives us pause: a deeper layer of rumination, the cold beneath the frazzle of the river.
Repetition with variation is one of Newlove’s primary tools: it can be argumentative, as in “beauty’s what makes / the adrenalin run” and “And one beauty cancels another,” both deployed twice in “The Double Headed Snake,” where it defiantly defines the terms of a lyric about place; it can be annunciatory, a running motif, as in “Ride off Any Horizon” in which “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may” joins and delineates a series of reflections – personal, geographic and historical – that he wants the reader to experience both separately and simultaneously, the better to appreciate their indivisibility.
This is not empty artifice; Newlove can take a conceit and turn it on his lathe, changing its shape and reference, until it becomes a lethal instrument, sharp enough to pierce through metaphorical fields. In “Crazy Riel” it is “noise,” constructed through politics, which becomes “the noise your dying makes,” and is subsequently and graphically transformed through a brilliant depiction of mortal natural things, “the noise / the fish makes caught in the jaw”; “Metal throats / The images of death hang upside-down,” to a powerful finale about the ambiguous throes of history:
So that as a man slips
he might as easily slide
into being a saint as destroyer.
In his ears the noise magnifies.
He forgets men.
Over time, Newlove refined his writing to the point that it became eerily lapidary and terse. A disciplined rhetorical skill brought him to the point where when he wanted to expand, to soar to empyrean perspectives, there were few notes he had to strain to attain, and he often delivered passages of great encompassment and aphoristic beauty. In “The Green Plain,” this passage is especially memorable for its precision – the cramping enjambements and restrictive commas give way to the long lines with additive “and”s – reproducing exactly its historical refocusing, microscope to telescope:
Is civilization
only lack of room, only
an ant-heap at last?—the strutting cities
of the East, battered gold,
the crammed walls of India,
humanity swarming, indistinguishable
from the earth?
Even the nomads roaming the green plain, for them
at last no land was ever enough.
Spreading—but now we can go anywhere
and we are afraid
and talk of small farms instead of the stars
and all the places we go
space is distorted.
Much is made of Newlove’s disgust with the world and humans, “pitiful and pleasing in their disease of life,” but I wish to register a dissenting opinion. Newlove cared enough to document our typical misery; loneliness, sexual longing and hopelessness, failure. Consider the catalogue of losers in “The Public Library” and then consider how its last line masterfully balances the comic mockery with a single stroke, connecting the persona of the poet with his specimens. “But of them / I will not speak for I do not know.”
I think of Orhan Pamuk’s comment on Nabokov’s prose: that the price of beauty is cruelty; perhaps in Newlove’s poetry, the price of compassion is disgust. Revulsion is the key note in Newlove’s anatomy of the same theme in a later poem, “Company,” and he spares us no misery in presenting his male specimen of bedraggled hopelessness, impaling our tolerance again and again with that laboratory-lighting “It,” but the poem does summon our pity with its bald, merciless repetitions and correct judgments about the etiquette of nausea. It makes us fully inhabit this wretch’s distance from humanity:
In the nape of its neck it feels
that it knows all about people;
what they think or expect:
but they know all about it. They are willing
to enjoy their disgust, to be amused,
so long as the price is not too high.
When the price is too high
they will cease to be amused.
Then it will not have company.
It will have to go somewhere else.
Ihad hoped for a more gorgeous monument to John Newlove. The book design is plain, not a ligature to be found, without even bolding for the titles. A remarkable photograph of the young Newlove facing down his senior on the cover. It only took a reviewer’s normal handling to crack the spine and spring a signature.
Editor Robert McTavish’s introduction is affectionate and intelligent, and makes accurate literary judgments. This précis of Newlove’s early life says the essential admirably well:
Born in 1938, a child in Saskatchewan moves hamlet to hamlet with his schoolteacher mother. Later, his lawyer father back on the wagon, his parents reunited, an intelligent, bored teen drinks to alleviate boredom and insecurity in his small prairie town. A penniless hitchhiker is adrift on the highway, or lost in a book in the public library. A poet writes, a young family and the spectre of absent money about him. The ebb and flow of depression and alchoholism. The poems keep coming.
By contrast, Jeff Derksen’s afterword is wordy and overly academic. Derksen is a poet but appears here in professorial robe, writing sentences as flabby and near meaninglessness as this:
The first continual argument I have in mind is the project of contemporary Canadian literature imagined as a formation integral to historically grounded, and contested, national identities and a larger national sense of self, a sort of national structures of feelings (to rescale Raymond Williams’ term up to the national) correlated through literature.
This is the old saw of Canada’s identity crisis in cap and gown, a concept we will be worrying solipsistically away at while the Yankee tanks roll over the border. He spends four pages trying to situate the poetry within these concepts of historical period, and then abandons it – thankfully – to discuss Sianne Nagai’s idea of the literary affect of obstructed agency, which makes somewhat more sense. I can’t make up my mind whether this afterword displays an appropriate skepticism towards academic labels, while courting them, or is just a waste of paper.
One can infer something about Newlove’s Canada from close attention to the poems, with the important, and huge, qualification that a poet’s world need not correspond to the world she lives in. It is a large space, miles to go between fires, prairie and settlement, notably Vancouver, peopled by hitchhikers, drunks, derelicts in public libraries, broken men who eat a lot of macaroni, Indians, fateful men for whom to be in the way is enough and for whom to be innocent is not enough, sailors who burn their brides with cigarettes, unappreciated fat men getting soaked in the rain, animals shivering off the road, harbours, farms and phantasmal cities, pines and pines and pines, stalwart – yet undercut – romantic notions of the first explorers, and so on. Let the post-colonialists make of that what they will.
In the poems there are only rare explicit references to politics and current events. There is only spare literary allusion, no epigraphs, dedications and no homages to poetic mentors. These tics which we have come to expect in contemporary poetry collections are not there; either Newlove did not see them as important, or they simply didn’t fit the pattern he was forming. Women figure in the poems over and over as participants in a violent drama about the difficulty of relation, the poet’s dual inability to love and to forsake the need for love. One forms an opinion that Newlove at the outset was a lonely writer, in a struggle to articulate his own fastidious pains, or that he enjoyed the fatally miserable for its own sake, a sort of flamboyant Stoic. As he progresses, Newlove is concerned with no less a theme than the vanity of the human mind, as sore a subject that ever caused a quill to quiver.
Newlove had a nimble and sure sense of line, of his meaning parsed and constantly transforming across line and stanza breaks; I often cast my eyes backwards in the poems to appreciate how far we have come from seed to flower in a few lines, and how the implications of a few, plain words have been exploited. A good example is “The Cave,” one of my favourite Newlove poems.
The voice in the poem rises above the Earth with a self-instruction (“No ideas trap you”) and with a few good words (“diamond,” “coffin,” “space,” “the girl,” “children”) and we are set to discover what cumulative force his verse can muster in a few stanzas, beautifully evoking the terror and beauty of the human imagination and its sidereal setting. There is also, I think, a brief nod to John Donne’s “The Relic” inlaid here. Each stanza emerges with its meshing watchwork tropes already implied by the previous. All poets should study “The Cave” to learn what can solely and wholly be made from simple words and careful phrasing. How suspended in a tiny enormity the final two stanzas are! With a few resonant words, mortality joins infinity in linked images, and the whole cannot be taken apart; its verbal density furnishes us an eerie, distant cradle of grace:
The diamonds shine in wormy rings
on fingers, in coffins of unobstructed space.
The flesh circles the bone in strips
in the coffin as the ring circled flesh.
The two-carat sun hangs loosely,
just restraining the Earth. Beyond the planets,
beyond the dark coffin, beyond the ring of stars,
your bed is in the shining, tree-lit cave.
Newlove is not a poet of lush sonic effects; his poems do not reek of consonantal and assonantal perfume. He does not typically try to bowl one over with his musicality, though there is music. (Jennica Harper once remarked that Newlove was one of those poets she preferred, because he “put it plain.” I know what she means.) He does not deal in the architecture of controlling metaphors. He does not trade in fads or received ideas. Although he is writing in a period of extreme literary self-consciousness and almost daffy pushing of poetry’s limits, he eschews for a long time the wandering margin, the catalogue or list poem – the latterly “Poem with Ravens” is an exception – and all concrete effects. When he uses a simile it is apt but not clever; the poems push forward and only rarely linger in writerly self-satisfaction (“D’un blanc pur, like – like cigarette paper!”). Sense does not give way to sound.
Newlove stays almost wholly within the first person persona, throughout his career. He does not impersonate hockey players, politicians, animals; he writes himself for his own sake only. He does not write verse-essays; he can write verse epics, troves of pessimistic stelae, a good example of which is “Notes from Among the Wars.” Though he is certainly crafty, he seems little interested in experiment, confining himself to the timeless arena of sentence, line and stanza. He likes to clip his lines towards the tetrameter, though there are many internal stops and pauses giving the music of the lines an edgy, terse feel. You cannot find a regular pattern, but you do find hard knots of stressed monosyllables that march to their master’s bark. “And when I wish / the cars would kill me as they drive on by / they have some place to go.”
In the early poems, couplets and generally shorter stanzas figure, but they do not elide or leap like imagistic ghazals, so much as measure an argument, “a tired and halting song.” “The Singing Head” coheres through artful echoes: “muddled in a ditch . . . . muddy ditch”; “to raise its breathless voice . . . . to praise/the grass.” There are a couple of forays (“Public Library,” “The Engine and the Sea”) into a longer, sweeping, quasi-Whitmanesque line, a mode wherein he can batter you with appositive swaggering description. It’s a mode I wish he had done more with.
He fashioned a tough, sophisticated voice, aware of its mordant deals with the truth, and turned that technique on history, and on human failing; became more prolix and sweeping; there is a middle period of meditation from an almost anthropological stance on civilization in the midst of human nastiness; and then, later, he became less interested in chaste form and more in discursive roaming around in memory, challenging the reader to connect the dots. “I made these voices / the arrangement is all,” he says in “White Philharmonic Novels,” an ambitious attempt to deconstruct his own poetic narrative, and out of respect one doesn’t disagree too loudly, but I hear the tones of the resigned maker, like Pound declaiming “I cannot make it cohere.” Except Newlove tells us with a certain humble depreciation, “The message is there is no message.”
One has to go back, again and again, to poems like “Company,” “In the Crammed World,” “Notes from and among the Wars” to experience his full power, undiluted by a rambling discursiveness.
Blue and green commingling, the muscley sea
sliding through the mind, a notion of deeper rivers
than those that run over the earth, among the stars
currents in the bright mixture pulsing, something
that might be there to save us as it seems
we cannot save ourselves or do not want to . . .
And yet – Newlove seems to me obsessed to a remarkable degree with the implications of what he has written. You can see this fidgeting second take in individual poems; you can see it over four decades.
In the last couple of books he summons previous themes, occasionally coming up with a poem like “Driving” where the fear of engulfment inherent in moving through the land, brilliantly evoked decades before in “Big Bend Highway,” is quietly reconsidered.
This land waits. It watches. How beautifully desolate
our country is, out of the smug cities,
and how it fits a human. You say you drove.
It doesn’t matter to me.
All I can see is the silent cold car gliding,
walled in, your face smooth, your mind empty,
cold foot on the pedal, cold hands on the wheel.
At the end, the poems become more cryptic, gnomic, some as brief as epitaphs. Already used phrases and words reappear: “like an eel on a spear / never to be known”; “the world makes us what we want.” “An argument winding down,” as MacTavish puts it, and I agree.
In 1988 Barry McKinnon gave me three Newlove broadsheets, printed in magenta and mauve, the enclosing folder now burred at the edges from handling. One of the poems became my antidote to lyric sentimentality: “Concerning Stars, Flowers, Love Etc.”:
. . . and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don’t know where. They say,
I don’t want to be sad. Help me not to know.
I always remembered that.
I got a ride outside Brandon from a salesman, and he asked me where I was from. “Winnipeg.” “A Manitoban,” he said, “Ha! I’ve hired and fired a hundred Manitobans!” We continued some ways in contemptuous silence. He dropped me off near Portage La Prairie and I kept walking, wishing him a lingering death in a public library. There was roadkill on the shoulder. I looked at it, and looked again, and the “sunlight brilliant image” flooded me, from Newlove’s “The Well Travelled Roadway”:
It was beautiful on the well-travelled roadway
with its dead black lips: God help me,
I did not even know what it was.
I had been walking into the city then,
early, with my own name in mind.
I hope that many readers will buy this book, and get as fired up about John Newlove’s work as I did when I first encountered it. Let the measure fall where it may.
Tags: Issue 76, John Newlove, Robert MacTavish
I agree, mostly, but think you’re a little harsh about Jeff Derkson’s essay, one of very few in the last few decades, when Newlove has, because he wasn’t publishing a new book every year or so, kind of ‘disappeared’ from CanCrit. Derkson takes Newlove’s work seriously, albeit from a highly ‘theoretical’ stance, & clearly recognizes the importance of the work.
There’s certainly an ‘I’ throughout, but I’d be very careful about saying it’s a fully lyrically autobiographical one; so carefully constructed from poem to poem.