Poetry Bookclub 4

[quasimodo1]

Regarding the collections and their prices. Amazon is asking 19.95 for Volume 3 of ALWAYS NOW... / b&N's price for the same collection is approx 10.00. Amazon's price for CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT IS 7.20 / b&n's price is 13.50 for members...15.00 otherwise. There are some used books available for alot less. Since there are three volumes of ALWAYS NOW, volume three is the most available and most recent.

[quasimodo1]

Margaret Avison: Power, Knowledge and the Language of Poetry
by J.M. Kertzer


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Margaret Avison’s poetry is prompted and sustained by a sense of power to which the poems themselves give access.

They dramatize her efforts to contact the sources of that power and to gain the knowledge it permits, a contact that

is discouraged by the cynical frame of mind of modern man and so must be won through poetic effort, a knowledge that

is inhibited by his misplaced faith in reason. This power is the fundamental energy of being, a vitality displayed

by the natural world which her poems examine and celebrate; it is the energy of human apprehension and understanding,

granted by the combined forces of reason and imagination, or the rational imagination; and it is the transforming

energy of Christian faith. Recognition of, contact with and assent to these powers provide what Avison has called “a

truly inner knowing”1: an accurate and profound perception of the world and oneself, of the flesh and the spirit, of

the relation between nature, man and God. Power is knowledge, knowledge is power, and for the poet, both are

sustained by language. The creative word — which, at different points in her career, Avison expresses as the Greek

logos, a magical spell or invocation, a prayer, Christ as The Word — generates the power and conveys the wisdom that

the poet seeks. Poetic language is itself a means of power and knowledge." {excerpt from a longer and excellent

essay on Margaret Avison} --- http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpo...04/kertzer.htm

[quasimodo1]

Before anyone goes buying the text for Avison, be advised (as I learned the expensive way) that the entire text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT is contained in ALWAYS NOW, VOLUME THREE. 17.95 for the latter and 13.50 for the former. Research done the hard way. B&N, without trying to lay in a plug for that outfit, had them in store in four days.

[Virgil]

You guys have completely sold me on Avison. I had never heard of her. Just tell me which book to buy. I'm intrigued.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, That's the thing, within ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three is the complete text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. So there's only one choice really when for just a few dollars more you get three collections in that volume.

[Virgil]

Virgil, That's the thing, within ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three is the complete text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. So there's only one choice really when for just a few dollars more you get three collections in that volume.

Ok great have we decided? When will this be final?

[quasimodo1]

I would say yes, I'm looking at the reciept and there's 4.45 difference between the collected poems and the smaller collection. So there we are...the subject of of poetry bookclub 4 ....ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three.

[Virgil]

Ok, I'll probably order by this weekend.

[quasimodo1]

Excerpt from "A Note on the Text" "...All of the poems in ALWAYS NOW having been considered and reconsidered, and small corrections having been made, the book contains definitively all of the published poems up to 2002 that Margaret Avison wishes to preserve."

[quasimodo1]

Margaret Avison, Writing Philosophy


(NOT Prescriptive) Initiate a poem only under compulsion. Hear the meaning, writing with a fix on the focus. Monitor the voice of the piece. If the focus lingers, overnight e.g., add or cut to clarify or simplify or complete the statement of the focus. After time has elapsed, reread rigorously, and revise--learned late from not doing it enough.





http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpo...ison/write.htm

[quasimodo1]

THE DUMBFOUNDING


When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?"

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.sentex.ca/~pql/always4.html An introduction to Margaret Avison's poetry.

[JBI]

THE DUMBFOUNDING


When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?"

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

{excerpt}

Hmm, I may be wrong, but I think it is safe to say she is talking about Jesus?

[quasimodo1]

Avison's poetry (and life) have the religious persuasion built into them and for myself, it's not important that my lack of organized religion as a meaningful thing comes into play at all. So far as I've read, she's a poet of great subtlety and economy and adds intense sincerety to the equation as well. Unique, completely unique.

[Jozanny]

Perhaps JBI, but seems to me she is playing off, or alluding to Eliot, though I could be terribly wrong.

I apologize to you all for my lagging here. My helper and I keep missing each other to finish up. My erstwhile father isn't coming by until later this week, if I am lucky to get that at all, and if we are keeping score, and substitute J for K, I am at the stage, in Kafka's famous piece, before I am willingly sacrificed by the plunging knife to my heart. The owner of a backgammon league once called me a drama queen, and that is true, charge accepted, but my hope has been simply and magnificently stripped away through their lack of competence and my own inability to assert myself better. I had a small box in my kitchen with some old issues of Small Press Review (and I am presently not sure my copy with my byline which was so pleasing to receive from Len, survived; it was in my publication copies in the closet) and DoubleTakes, which were irreplaceable. The volunteer threw them out, and I only have the one surviving issue of DT.

It was a beautiful photojournal with challenging articles and memoirs, contributions from friends. Wiped out because some stupid and rushed former housing manager did not stop to ask me if it wasn't trash, and I fortunately couldn't drive into her in the kitchen in hopes of at least breaking her leg.

I am 46 years old, and I cannot keep fighting these battles with society for the right to my autonomy, for the struggle to my voice to be heard. It is genuinely starting to overwhelm me, and I cannot use Avison's hard-on for the Incarnate. It must be nice, to really believe that a two-thousand year old radicalized rabbi is the *key* to all of this, a transmutation toward peace and triumph. I understand its power, and used to try to live in that belief, and I've been splitting apart like old wine skin ever since.