In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

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Rushdie and Me

There are few I would consider marrying, but I’ve long been certain that Kramer could be the next one. We would be giant, over the top, demi-intellectual goofballs together. The sheer amount of merriment that would ensue sure beats the melancholy underworld I’ve been living in most of my life. Kramer could meet me halfway. Little Miss Chatterbox and Cosmo. Kramer’s oddball beauty just might be everything I’m looking for in a man. He could make New York fun. And I suspect that his depth is considerable, despite a surface veneer. He hides his true genius and creativity, and yet, what you get is what you see. The key to Kramer is in not trying to figure him out. The joy of him is that you look back and realize that everything he says is true, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time you first heard it.

Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that Seinfeld’s kooky neighbour does not actually exist, and that’s a big relief because I’m in no hurry to get married again. And much as I’d hoped for it in adolescence, I want nothing less in life than to move to Manhattan. Fictional or not, Kramer and I spend a lot of time together through these newfangled, magical wonder boxes- turn on; dispense laughter. And Kramer never loses the ability to surprise me. One day he comes home from the sauna and tells Jerr- Bear he saw Salmond Rushdie, of all people, taking a steam.

Now, a conversation with Kramer might be exactly what Rushdie needs in life. The man, though wryly funny, could use more belly laughs. It can’t have been easy, becoming the poster child for offending Allah, just by writing a book. I sure hope that if any of my blustery words weren’t always as reverent as they ought to be, God could handle my outburst. I’m pretty sure we are supposed to study and learn and question our world, not just reach for what we’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need armies on earth to censor our explorations if they veer from the truth- then every single one of us must be taken down. The cosmic world is a little more flexible than some adherents of faith think.

But that bit of fuzzy logic didn’t occur to the Ayatollah of Iran, who certainly drew attention to a newly successful author, an ordinary looking guy named Rushdie. He put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. It’s ludicrously arrogant to think that no one should ‘insult or malign Muslims’ and that anyone has the right to kill for doing so. How can we seek truth if we cannot discuss it, and in discussing it, may offend some players? The book that caused this furor was, of course, The Satanic Verses, and the poor writer, now a popular award winner, went into hiding, fearing for his life. I guess by this principle I will also be executed, then, for portraying a pic of Georgie Bush with a lump of white paint by his nose and the caption, “I inhaled.”

I had a hard time myself, having read hundreds of books that defamed my childhood faith of Christianity, seeing what was so offensive here. I’ll give anyone’s faith its due, but true faith means having ethics, and the beginning and ending of ethics is always ‘thou shalt not kill.’ But here’s what caused the world of terrorism to erupt- the title, for starters. It allegedly implied that the Holy Koran’s verses were the work of the devil. (What was so devilish was that these verses, which in historical allegory were withdrawn after their first transcription, encouraged intercessory prayer to three pagan goddesses of the Middle East. The crescent moon, strangely, may still evoke the namesake of Allah, in Allat, the moon goddess….) Additionally, the prophet Mohammed’s wives appeared here in a brothel and the name of a Mecca-like place translated to something like ‘ignorance,’ which was deep sacrilege to the faithful. The list goes on, but surely by these standards, Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb, about Christ’s adventures with Bif and Maggie and a zealous evangelist, had better head indoors.

Indeed, there were endless death threats and multiple bombings of bookstores, assassination attempts on publishers, and more. I thought the prophet Jesus warned us that we would be persecuted in his name and would have to stand up to all kinds of offense, including Moore’s very funny novel. We were instructed to turn the other cheek, however, not to bomb and murder wherever we didn’t like something.

Rushdie’s prolific career started in 1981, pretty much after he threw in the towel. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, his first work was a sci-fi experiment. He says he wrote three other novels that “mercifully weren’t published.” He was also working in advertising and questioned whether he should just move on from writing. “Maybe I’m just pretending to be a novelist,” he told a mesmerized audience last night (June 9, 2008) at the Danforth Music Hall. He said this following a reading from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Sitting there, all I could think was, wow, must be nice to be out! Indeed, Rushdie got tired of staying in, and eventually the fatwa was lifted, but fresh upheaval and new threats haven’t driven him back in.

Thankfully, after tossing up understandable concerns about becoming a writer, Rushdie promised himself that he would never give up. Midnight’s Children came out 6 years after Grimus, and it blew everyone away. Rushdie won the first lot of more than 25 of the most prestigious literary awards in history. A few years later, the uproar over Satanic Verses meant a career of death threats and chaos. But Rushdie doesn’t talk about all that, even when an audience member asks him about Islamic terrorism today. Instead he tells fledglings like me frankly “there are enough books.” If we are wondering why we want to be writers, then don’t be writers. The only excuse, he says, for becoming a writer, “is that you can’t avoid it.”

Now you’d have to be pretty imaginative to come up with any possible commonalities between an unknown pop culture and vitamin writer like myself, and the recently knighted Mr. Rushdie. I’m not even a fan, really, though I intend no disrespect in saying so. The lavish plots and painstaking historical details, the majestic span of human endeavours and dilemmas, the depth of the characters are all astounding things, and so, Rushdie is my teacher. But I confess to finding the going difficult and convoluted, and I find that his ‘magical realism’ lacks the kind of resonance and natural flow I find in Allende or Marquez. I suspect two things here: one, I’m just not smart enough to really absorb the reading and its contexts, by one who is generally regarded as a genius. And two, just plain old personal taste.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we nonetheless had a few things in common. Sal’s dry humour, which I think underlies a great deal more of his writings than is perceived, reigned clear. While there is certainly an inflated aspect and also something of a defeated one showing in Rushdie’s persona, there is absolutely an earthier charm, a faint silliness, and a sure grip on how comical the absurdities of the world are. There’s even something vividly gracious about a man who doesn’t scoff for what must be the 2144th time he is asked “how did you become a writer?” and “what are your favourite books?” I appreciate humour, more and more, as one of the most important ways of bearing life’s bullshit. I think Rushdie would agree.

Second, I’ve always thought Rushdie’s work a little wordy, and to be frank, most of those who know me find me rather wordy as well. I admit I go on and on. I edit quite a bit out, trust me, and I’m still left with an extraordinarily verbose verbiage. I cannot say in ten words what I might say in four thousand.

I decided to embrace my wordy weakness and named my other blog Little Miss Chatterbox. Minimalism may be the trend for distracted modern audiences, but a quick overview of literature assured me I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, now these are not exactly the most terse writers I’ve ever read. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rushdie, me- well, we all tend to digress a lot.

“Stories are what define us,” Rushdie says, in defense of humans prone to loquacity. “We are the only creatures in the world who have developed the curious habit of telling each other stories.” This, he says, is an amazing way we have of making sense of ourselves. Certainly, it’s a technique he uses. “I go forward by going sideways.”

The real question here is what the million-dollar man was doing with Kramer in the sauna when there was a price like that on his head. When Kramer asked his name, the writer in the towel said “Sal Bass.” Jerry wasn’t so sure it could have been Rushdie, but Kramer knew that the ‘sal’ part was too much to be a coincidence, and that the ‘bass’ part alluded to fish- you know, to Salmond! Foolish hilarity ensued.

See, the uber-elite literati pooh-pooh television, but I think we take great joy in TV shows and in movies for the same reason we give importance to literature. Rushdie himself enjoys the occasional acting foray (though it was actually Sal Bass and not Rushdie who played Sal Bass/not Rushdie in the Seinfeld episode.) These are our stories. I’m not the only one who views life as Seinfeldian. The meaning of life is, quite literally, the reason of the show. It’s a show about nothing, and so, it is about everything.

Now, Rushdie’s a remarkable man, and while I was honoured to learn from his passion and experience during this terrific reading and interview, it still holds true that I wouldn’t care to run into him in a steam room. He may be smarter and have a better job than Kramer, but he’s a bit formidable, blustering, just through with his fourth wife, and well, not all that good looking. Kramer, on the other hand, has an offbeat quirkiness that makes him look hot with a cigar in an old-fashioned jalopy, despite the pompadour and trademark leggy clumsiness. I’m also pretty sure that Rushdie would find my work and my life too breezy, too girly, too soap operatic, with too many talismanic trinkets lying about. Despite his penchant for writing magic, he doesn’t believe in it, and I do.

But I digress.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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