The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

I’ve been reading Stuart Ross’s latest poetry collection The Sky Is A Sky In The Sky for the last week, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about such a fun read. First of all, I think this is one of Ross’s best books and all the hallmarks of Ross’s poetic style are on display—the use of repetition, a wide scattering of allusions, the shifting of registers from low to high, from the quotidian to the deeply personal, and then, of course, his trademark swerve into a kind of screwball surrealism.

Ross has been writing and publishing poetry for over forty years now which is to say he has earned his stripes, and honed a very individualistic poetic “voice”. My dad, a forty year veteran of the police force, use to say of police officers whom he respected that he or she was “On the job!” Ross is a poet’s poet. He is most certainly “on the job!”, and whether a poem is more successful, or less successful, than the next does not seem to concern Ross as much as holding the imagination’s sluice-gates open, staying in that sweet zone, or “creative flow”, that all writers feel, and wish they could inhabit at all times.

Where a lot of younger writers try to write poems that sound like “poetry”, Ross chases the sound of words down language’s well, ratchets up both mischief and wordplay through an abundance of uncanny imagery, sometimes stacking poems thirty lines deep, while then other times “toying” a poem down to a few scant lines. Ross’s poems never go in the direction where you think they will go–they always go elsewhere.

Take, for instance, his opening poem “I Love Poetry” with its understated ironic title which spirals off into a wealth of allusions, from poets like the American Mark Strand to Nova Scotian Alice Burdick, while also broadcasting his dislike of poems about classical mythology, the fussiness of Greek philosophers found in “verse”, as if to say Poetry should be about what is happening now–the cut-and-pastework of the “present” moment. Here is the poem:

I LOVE POETRY
 
I hate poems that contain the word mortal, the word
angel, the word liminal, the word beauty, the word
scent. Mortal coil is particularly loathsome, though
Eddie Coyle was mortal is passable. I hate poems that
mention Perseus, Heracles, Hephaestus, Infestus,
Hydrochlorixideus, but I like hideous, rancid,
gizmo. Oh, Orpheus is okay if it’s in a poem by Mark
Strand. Eclogue blech, epilogue pretty good. I hate
the word ekphrastic so much it makes me hate
ekphrastic poems, except for Ron Padgett’s
‘Joe Brainard’s Painting “Bingo,”’ the best
poem ever written. I met Joe once
to interview him and was delighted he had
never heard of Margaret Atwood. I hate
poems that contain the phrase I love unless
they are written by Lisa Jarnot, and I love Lisa
Jarnot’s poem ‘Lisa Jarnot.’ I hate poems
that want to teach me something. Epigraphs
from Isaiah, Leviticus, and Dana Gioia are
non-starters. I once offered Alice Burdick,
Jaime Forsythe, and Lance La Rocque two
hundred bucks to start up a photocopied
mag of Nova Scotia poetry. Another time
I cut off part of my thumb with an X-acto
knife. I hate myself for loving poetry; I love myself
for hating poetry. I hate poems about poetry.
 

This poem is classic Stuart Ross. It is, at once, playful, smile-inducing, and yet also an interrogation of words, of allusions, of what poetry means to the poet. And “poetry” to the poet seems to be about keeping a reader constantly on his or her toes, and not allowing them to get too comfortable. Ross is saying with this poem that poetry, for him, is about community, and meandering consciousness, and capering linguistic high-jinks.

Another terrific poem is “Bouncing Ball” where what I called earlier “the swerve” into the weird or the surreal or “the zany” is on full display:

BOUNCING BALL
 
A guide appears in your living room, followed
by a cluster of tourists brandishing wooden spoons.
You sit in the old wing chair, reading a hardcover copy
of Marjorie Morningstar. The spirit of your dog
lies curled at your feet, doesn’t even lift her adorable head
to greet the visitors. You ask these people
not to get fingerprints on your ceiling, not to clack
their spoons so much, please, not to draw swastikas
on synagogue walls, to help themselves to some fruit,
to maybe have a cup of tea, then never come back.
You tell the guide you are not a monument,
a historical plaque, a famous painting, a notable grave,
a landmark. You pull a couple of twenties
from your pocket and push them into his fist.
‘I will never forget you,’ you say. Outside,
the winter fires crackle. A northern cardinal
darts from the smoke, flourishes its wings,
swoops toward the lake, admires its own reflection.
The horizon undulates. The full moon bobs along it,
like the ball bouncing along song lyrics
in one of those old cartoons, a technique
invented in the 1920s by Max Fleischer.
You dog-ear your page in the book, pull on
your grandfather’s galoshes, and hobble
after the moon, singing her perfect song,
becoming smaller and smaller yes smaller,
disappearing into the impossible luminosity of tomorrow.

This is a terrific performance that manages “to mean” despite its dream-like qualities invoked by the first two lines, “A guide appears in your living room, followed / by a cluster of tourists brandishing wooden spoons” which is made further strange by the speaker mentioning they themselves are not “a monument, a historical plaque, a famous painting, a notable grave, a landmark”. But then, Ross sprinkles a little dust of the ordinary or the quotidian into the poem—A northern cardinal swooping towards a lake—and even when the moon starts bobbing like the bouncing ball of old song lyrics, the poet connects the image to old Cartoons and the inventor of said animation technique Max Fleischer. If you are like me, you like your facts mixed in with the fantastical; the familiar dipped into a little razzle-dazzle surrealism.

Sometimes the poems are harder to parse into meaning, and really lean into Ross’s surreal aesthetics like in the poem “Education” which I highlight here not because it is a poor poem, but because it is indicative of a lot of the poems in the book:

EDUCATION
 
Hello, multitude of spindly insects
marching through my withered veins.
Sit down for tea, a croissant.
Let me read you some Peter Altenberg.
I have been waiting for friends like you.
Companionship is a shaky ladder
leading to an attic filled with hermit crabs.
Oh, can you help me with this crossword?
A 247-letter word meaning suit of porridge.
Come gather round this window:
yonder: beyond the creek: beyond the field:
Lipizzaners reenacting the Last Supper
for a scene in Jean Renoir’s latest
posthumous film. Comrade insects,
the world teems with such miracles.
Teach me all you know.

This is a really fun poem, but in purely evaluative terms, I like it a little bit less than the poems that create a firm base or patch of ground for the reader to stand upon before flying its imaginative kites all over the wild blue yonder.  Another great poem by Ross is the wonderful “Taffy and Clytemnestra”:

TAFFY AND CLYTEMNESTRA
with Sarah Burgoyne
 
It must have been magic or myth:
I saw only part of my face in the mirror.
I recognized myself the moment they washed up
onto the shores of my consciousness
with their twenty combined toes.
But I needed an answer when I stepped out to see,
spray-painted across my cracked windshield:
‘This is not my life.’ Ah yes, I think I remember.
Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t sleep.
My unanswerable sadness began because I
always confused her with her. Thing is,
modern oracles are so rare, they write
their names in a cloud of wet ink.
Someone told me they could be found
pulling taffy from the cashier’s red hair.
When I ran into them, I sneezed
and the scent instantly triggered my memory.
She and she spent ten good years writing
an entire book of poems dedicated to
the abandoned lilies that close at night.
She pushed open her one good eye
with an answer as big as the hieroglyphic sea.
I asked her and her – the gentle catastrophe:
was it a small island or large one I saw,
maybe a decade ago? They cringed, juggling
small coffees squeezed in styrofoam cups.
She and she gazed into the linoleum horizon,
mouths bent in the shape of disappointment
because they’d never killed anything,
having met over a brown plastic tray.
Even in the absence of wind,
talking was difficult. She said it should be
called ‘climbing.’ Leaning forward,
she poured it from the dark cafeteria
into the damp web of questions.

One of the things I love about this poem is that Ross contradicts one of the poetry edicts he sets out in his opening poem “I Love Poetry” by invoking Clytemnestra, a figure from classical Greek mythology. I like that Ross not only breaks the rules, but breaks his own rules, when searching out a poem. In this poem, we have the surreal swerve – “But I needed an answer when I stepped out to see, / spray-painted across my cracked windshield: / ‘This is not my life.’ Ah yes, I think I remember” which puts me in the mind of work akin to James Tate – but there is also real feelings, the idea of an “unanswerable sadness” in the poem, that I think all poets, all artists, feel. I also like the lines “Even in the absence of wind, / talking was difficult.”

So far I have only talked about those poems Ross stretches across whole pages, builds up with memorable lines and savvy surrealism, but the collection also has a number of shorter poems like “Valediction” that reads:

All that will
be left of me:
 
in the margins of books
pencilled murmurs
 
you will never
decipher.

It is this type of honesty I appreciate from Ross for in a few short lines he reminds readers so much of what he does—what we do as artists, and poets—fades in time, and to steal a phrase from a Nintendo Quit Screen “Everything not saved will be lost”. How to save one’s poetry? Readers. Building an audience. Community. Things Ross is clearly passionate about.

The Sky Is A Sky In The Sky by Stuart Ross is a thorough exploration of the various forces that animate Ross’s poetry–things like wordplay, artistic allusions, a kind of surrealist dexterity that cannot be imitated, but which can only be honed over forty plus years of writing. No one writes a Stuart Ross poem except for Stuart Ross. And there are so many fantastic lines in this new collection like “My nose becomes bored with the rest of my face” or “A pancake of snow slides down the side of the building” which is metaphorical perfection, or perhaps my favourite line in the whole collection “The abundant wonders never bumble.” Ross is a master of the non-sequitor and the surreal, but his best poems, at least to me, are the ones that reveal both the gladness and the melancholy whispering beneath the hilarity and the surprises.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.  His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.