The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

In her essay “An Anatomy of The Long Poem”, Rachel Zucker has written, “Long poems are extreme. They’re too bold, too ordinary, too self-centered, too expansive, too grand, too banal, too weird, too much. They revel in going too far; they eschew caution and practicality and categorization and even, perhaps, poetry itself, which as a form tends to value the economy of language. These poems are anti-tweets though they often contain twitter-like language.”

I like the idea of long poems being “anti-tweets” and  this is a good opening quip to talk about Alice Burdick’s new poetry collection Ox Lost, Snow Deep out with Anvil Press (2024) under Stuart Ross’s A Feed Dog imprint. Burdick’s book is expansive, is weird, and is too much, but that is exactly what I like about  it.

I think poets who try to write a book of long poems should be given a thousand extra invisible points because, after writing a few long poems myself, I don’t think you can “fake” the long poem. Some of my favourite books of long poems are Joe Denham’s Regeneration Machine, Jason Guriel’s Forgotten Work, and Stephen Dobyns’ Winter’s Journey. The sheer ambition to sit down and dedicate yourself to writing poems that spread across whole swaths of pages, and then factor in the structural restraints these books employ, and it leaves the mind reeling. I would say Alice Burdick’s poetry collection Ox Lost, Snow Deep is the most like Dobyn’s book as it a collection of long poems, thirteen to be exact rather than being one long poem itself, but every poem in the collection adheres to the form Burdick casts for it. Some poems are written in quatrains, in octaves, in sestets, and some are a mishmash of stanzas because why not throw a wrench in the whole works and see what happens?

 Although Zucker says long poems are “anti-tweets”, what I was struck by once I started reading Burdick’s first poem , “Old School Human Skills”, is how much every line feels like an aphorism or micro-blogging “tweet”, but contained within both the comfort and restraint of quatrains. Have a look and see what I mean: 

The difference between these lines and social media micro-blogging, of course, is the enigmatic, playful, and dare I say poetic quality of Burdick’s lines. They resonate. Just when you think Burdick is “putting the reader on”, the poet says something so wise and haunting like “Let’s stick together and fly / as a unit of the past” which is surprising and “dreamy” and conversation-like which makes me feel the influence of Bill Knott, and puts her in the company of Canadian Surrealist Co-conspirators Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin. However, Burdick is also not afraid of shifting gears from deeply aphoristic lines like “Don’t forget the background misery” or “Commodify the prohibitive grace” to the wonderfully absurd as the next lines might read:

I smile even putting these lines smack dab in the middle of my review but what do they exactly mean? I couldn’t tell you, but I’m here for it. For the poet Burdick, language is the event, the epicentre, and if something grand or weird or wise or silly drags itself ashore to rest on the white page so be it.  The whole books pinballs between these shifting high and low registers, between subtle acuity and babbling stanzas like the one above which are little bouquets of nonsense, but still the perfume of play permeates.

So yes, Burdick’s lines feel like “anti-tweets” but the veteran Nova Scotian poet also resists another major tenet or structural element of the long poem which is the pull of narrative. Earlier, I talked about Denham and Guriel who both wrote book-length poems that unfold a story and even Zucker in her essay says, “If a long poem is going to subvert narrative, it has to be radical. Even then, techniques used in short poems to avoid story-making — relying on images, condensing language, undermining the normal rules of syntax and grammar — often result in a long poem that sounds like an extended story told by a disturbed voice” which is an interesting idea, i.e. the “anti-long poem”, but Burdick’s voice is not disturbed. It’s more disassembling on purpose relying on the deep image, the condensing of language, yes, but it also fires up a little mischief which makes Ox Lost, Snow Deep so incredibly enigmatic.

I can’t give examples from all the poems or this review would run too long, but the various titles of the poems are an absolute delight like “Foglit Machinery” or “Big Trouble in Little China Trouble” or “Glass Bottom Memory–Florida Cycle”, or even “Life Irritates Art” where this particular section I have excerpted comes from:

The aphoristic qualities of Burdick’s imagination is on full display here as I love the idea that in archaeology the things found were things ancient people threw away, or the idea of going to a psychologist appointment being akin to puzzling oneself out of an escape room. Maybe that is why everyone likes Comedy shows and movies, for their patterns and structures, where “everything works out”. So much insight to burrow oneself into in these lines.

In Ox Lost, Snow Deep by Alice Burdick, not everything works out, and maybe a more serious reviewer might point out instances of that, but Burdick herself points out, “Just because you take yourself seriously / doesn’t mean I have to” which is why I am not going to choose between the aphoristic and the absurd, the deep Image and the deeply silly in this poetry collection. Far from blatherskite, the poems remind us that language is at the core of everything we do as poets, and Burdick is able to make the language in her poems garden-fresh (an exotic, alien garden for sure), revelatory sometimes, while other times just going too far like in the lines “This ocean is a small area near / the open trees” or “Harps play in settlers’ museums”  just for the hell of it. That is to say, for the sheer smile-inducing, impractical but satisfying language play and surrealist “dopamine hit” hell of it. As Burdick says herself in her last poem, “A fire in the whole idea keeps it in a small circle” and in this collection, that fire brightly burning is the poet’s imagination trying to make fuel from both the weird and the wonderful in a world that is mostly indifferent to poetry and all too consumed with practicality. A fun collection! 

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.