by Russell Thornton
“Poetry is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound declared. Among all the forms of literary expression, for me, poetry is also the one that’s always new. When I read what I feel is a superb poem, it’s as if it’s the first time I’ve read a poem. And it’s as if that poem defines poetry afresh.
The great poets have come up with an array of definitions of poetry that continue to pour forth abundant meaning. There’s Wordsworth’s famous idea that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … recollected in tranquillity.” There’s Coleridge’s claim that poetry is “the best words in the best order” and is “that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” There’s Andre Breton’s unabashed pronouncement, “Poetry is a room of marvels.” Joseph Brodsky called poetry “accelerated thinking.” Tomasso Ceva defined poetry as “a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”
The list goes on. I feel an elation when I read these and other characterizations, and I nod in agreement. Yes, that’s what poetry is, I hear myself say. For me, a poem is the most genuinely human imaginative document. Like most people who have been captured by poetry, I can recite from memory a raft of poems by a variety of poets, but even more than whole poems — again like most people, I think — what I recall most easily are individual lines or groups of lines. For me, these lines are poetry-defining moments. Aside from often displaying the uniqueness of an individual poet, they epitomize poetry for me and produce their effects again and again. They remake my awareness on the spot. Invariably, for me, they enact heightened, incantatory language; they concentrate imaginative movement —they’re chants of the deepest desires. And they’re my favourite moments in the language.
My inner trove of passages of English-language poetry that collects these moments is a large one. It includes lines by Shakespeare, of course. Then there’s classic Blake, Keats, Lawrence, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop… It would be easy to name several dozen poets.
For me, the moments abound in Canadian poetry. I think of the opening lines of Irving Layton’s stupendous elegy for his mother, “Keine Lazarovich: 1870-1959”:
When I saw my mother’s head on the cold pillow,
Her white waterfalling hair in the cheeks’ hollows,
I thought, quietly circling my grief, of how
She had loved God but cursed extravagantly his creatures.
Or the first few lines of the second section of Layton’s magisterial “A Tall Man Executes a Jig”:
Jig, jig, jig, jig. Like minuscule black links
Of a chain played with by some playful
Unapparent hand or the palpitant
Summer haze bored with the hour’s stillness.
These lines — and many more in Canadian poetry — never leave me. If I repeat them to myself, they quite literally work a kind of magic. Robert Graves said, “Poetry is stored magic” and I think he was right. The emotion, the thinking, the controlled music, the imagery, the play of metaphor and association — are all operating together, as in a consummate performance that quickens the life of the reader. The verbal magic reverberates through time.
It’s the same with the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “The Thing is Violent” — a poem I can’t encounter without experiencing almost hypnotic pleasure:
The thing is violent, nothing precedes it,
it has no meaning before or after —
sweet wounds which burn like stars,
stigmata of the self’s own holiness,
appear and plot new zodiacs upon the flesh.
And it’s the same with the closing of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”:
But the dark pines of your mind dig deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
The opening lines of Earle Birney’s “Bushed” never cease to exert on me their linguistic and imaginative force:
He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it
For those who have apprised themselves even glancingly of the corpus of Canadian poetry, I doubt these excerpts are unfamiliar. I could add many more examples of what I’d call high moments in Canadian poetry. These are only the first handful that comes to mind. What I’d like to present here are instances in recent collections of Canadian poetry that strike me as possessing in significant measure some or all of the qualities of those poetic moments that I mention. They’re “the best words in the best order” — and more. Of course, I can no better explain these moments in the end than I can the colour blue or a raindrop; I’d simply like to celebrate such moments. They define poetry for me; they allow me an experience in which I am reminded of what compels me to read and try to write poetry.
“Demolition” is from Tim Bowling’s latest collection In the Capital City of Autumn (Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn, 2024). The poem is about a speaker phoning his sibling to share his grief regarding the wrenching reality that their shared childhood home and their parents are now gone. Here are the concluding lines of the poem:
I called to say that I’m cold and I want to touch the old walls
as if they were the flesh of our parents
but your voice when you answered told me
that you had already heard the footsteps
walking down the gravel driveway and the road
vanishing where everything vanishes
at the dark address of the street without a streetlamp
with a moonbeam like the skin under a wristwatch
in summer when the wristwatch is taken off
lighting the family passage to forgetfulness.
Here are the concluding lines of “At the Estuary” (also from In the Capital City of Autumn), a poem about a speaker returning after a long absence to his childhood home located near where the Fraser River meets the Salish Sea:
I turn the body of my life to the west
where twilight shivers on the clothesline,
but do not move, as the blue herons,
flying by the dozens to roost, dismantle the frames
around the still-wet watercolours of themselves.
And here is the ending of “The Exit.” It’s another example — of which there are many in In the Capital City of Autumn — of poetic language opening an unfathomable moment:
Out here the stars
like baby teeth in a grave
never really disappear
“The Hairbrush” from Kayla Czaga’s Midway (House of Anansi Press, 2024) also offers an instance very much worth quoting here. The poem is about the speaker’s mother finding the speaker’s dead father’s hairbrush. The final stanzas are as follows:
Under other circumstances, it might’ve been mistaken
for a microphone generating its own static,
but there was nothing to say, no grand speeches
to be made because ultimately
it looked like nothing as much as what it was:
my dead father’s hairbrush.
Here, she said, handing it to me,
Go grow yourself a new dad.
And here is an instance in the final lines of “Coho” (also from Midway). The speaker in the poem tells us that when feeling sad, she lifts her book about fish off the shelf and lets it fall open on her lap as if calling upon an oracle (“That’s the game: one feeling, one flip.”). “Today I got coho,” she says, and goes on to recall fishing with her father:
When we finally reeled in
there it was at the end of our line, limp
and tiny, like an infant’s filthy sock.
My father knelt down at the river’s edge
to unhook it. Cupping it in his palms,
he said, “I dunno. Might not make it.”
Each syllable came out with a little cloud.
Then the fish swam away. I wish it would
let me go, this feeling, but I like its warm
hands, the way it wears my father’s face.
* * *
Russell Thornton’s latest poetry collection is The White Light of Tomorrow (Harbour Publishing, 2023). He lives in North Vancouver, BC.
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