Reading S.E. Venart’s Woodshedding

You aren’t expecting the poet to talk about Peaches, known for such musical subtleties as Fuck the Pain Away. You aren’t expecting to go outdoors, leaping with goats, like Heidi, or to be hallowed by hope.

You aren’t expecting most of S.E. Venart’s surprises. They are as startling and stunning as fresh, crisp autumn apples.

It took me a few months to get to my commentary, and I felt guilty for taking my time with the poet’s first collection, from Brick Books, called Woodshedding. But I suspect she wouldn’t want me to hurry. Woodshedding is many things to the poet, including the solitary and arduous practice of jazz musicians, their spontaneous singing. It is also about writing alone, in a “Waldenesque environment,” the author says on her website, woodshedding.org. And so I imagine my reading was as the writer intended it to be, after all is said and done, flipping to random pages during rare solitude, carefully brewing ginger tea and sipping it from tiny goblets.

Indeed, despite every effort, “we still can’t save each other/ instead, we drink pot after pot of tea,” Venart muses. These small rituals, the pouring of hot water, the sounding out of words, make scars from wounds, and ordinary, specific joys out of chaos and upheaval.

Try this morsel, from Postcard to You.

Since I came back, my days
so thin, barely there: Peaches,
the burlesque queen of techno-
punk’s in town. Tonight,
I could go see her but the urge
is just a tip
of all that’s wrong with me.

Forget all the poetry you’ve read before, either to bored tears for its stuffy irrelevance, or to the head-scratching disbelief over greeting card schmaltz. Venart’s gift at conveying the quiet textures of everyday life with the magic of words is quite different from anyone else. The poems, and the playful exploration of the theme of ‘woodshedding,’ evoke all the surprise and pleasure at words found in e. e. cummings, or indeed, in fridge magnet poetry, yet they are honed, with chance a kind of chosen element, hardly random.  They have a playful feeling of discovery, yet they mirror our deepest emotions, pull up the fragmented parts or our lives we’ve never found the words for ourselves.

Anyone who has grieved will find resonance in Edison, in following Venart through her kitchen, “not wanting hunger, but faced all the same with its pain.” A pear, half an orange, a graying fig become a detailed landscape where the emptiness is shiny and stark. “It was hope with a twist. I wanted you not gone./ I imagined you netted, pulled back from ether or domed/ In still life, caught in the grid-work of clouds.”
Then the poet steers us deep into childhood, making jam and wax handprints with Mom. “We don’t talk about the days you didn’t get up,” she begins. Then later in the poem, celebrates the wax, “preserving our smallness to hang on strings, now fading in the kitchen window.” She surmises that throughout these days on Varsity Drive, “Sometimes we were good enough to trick you out of sadness.”

But as in William Carlos’ Williams ice cold plums, it is in the kitchen where my favourite piece by this poet takes place. Each of us has likely experienced firsthand the traumatic consequences of doing the dishes, whether we have been the martyred dish-doer, rightfully nagging for a bit of effing help at the sink, or the one who rushes off after filling her stomach, forgetting that sustenance and pleasure require some sacrifice from somebody. Nothing, not adultery or dirty laundry has as much volatility as the damn dishes do, and yet until this day I know of no one who could capture the essence of this quotidian drama in a perfect poem. “I missed my chance to be graceful,” the narrator laments in Escape. “Instead, I left you with the dishes.” Roaming outdoors, searching for the goat “who’d eloped into the clover,” she frolics with Timothy in the “lofty dusk” against a landscape of jagged pines. As the  “first stars pricked their sharp time into mine,” the poet recalls the task she has abandoned.

Finally, it must be noted that there are little windows behind the details. Like the continual resurfacing of the title’s random complexities, each detail has more than one face. Take the opening quote by Ernest Oberholtzer, an American conservationist, as a tour guide through Venart’s stories. “I want to see everything,” he says. “I don’t care how hard it is.”

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

Katia Grubisic’s What if Red Ran Out

How beautiful our children would have been, though poor at pool, Katia Grubisic laments. Just why this catches me so, I cannot say, but her book of What if Red Ran Out is filled with such what ifs and were nevers. Forget about hopes of grandiosity or words tangled up to make themselves unreadable to all but the chosen few academes who must translate them for us: Katia’s world is here on earth, here with strawberry jam and moths and “cardboard eclipse thingies.”

Katia’s work has appeared in all the mandatory Canadian literati publications like Grain and The Fiddlehead and Taddle Creek. But all of this is just a disguise. Sure, she can wrestle the big themes with the best of them, or slip images into your mind that will never leave it. She can use words like ‘concupiscence’ and ‘montivagant’ and ‘convivial,’ and drop names like Seamus and Camus like she means it.

But, Katia assures us, not to worry about all of that. “Don’t worry, this is a poem/entirely without grace,” she writes. Words are important to her, but the real concerns are more along the lines of “what if red ran out?” and about the laundry. Life, however tragic or rare, is also silly. In the world Katia sees, “Eros and Thanatos have gone to the mall.” If red does not run out, she will ‘exist on raspberries” like “others who have successfully lost their minds.”

All this suggests that what’s ahead for Katia’s writing will be witty, realistic vignettes, with sweeping metaphors and astute observations, rendered with cleverness and distinction. For now, there’s still that sense of a poet trying too hard, pushing words together to make a cellist appear under a tree, for example, without any real reason why she should be there. Poetry would do well to avoid more volumes in the archives with phrases like “missing the filigreed metacarpals’ infinite division.” You can feel the earth, though, if you toss away this heavy-handed surrealism. You can feel the pulse of a very funny, very unusual, very vivid woman, and you want to get rid of those unnecessary layers, to see her naked.

What if red ran out
Katia Grubisic
Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 2008.

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

Buy Katia’s book or mine, or help out my blog by buying any books through this link:
chapters.indigo.ca

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World’s Best Poems

Fans of Camille Paglia’s Salon column and her collected sex and pop culture books may have skipped this treasure. They should know better- poetry with Paglia is the class I wish I’d had. Forget about suffering through old English- this dynamo cracks the whip and gets your noggin’ into shape fast, leaving you hungry for more. Even better, you may find yourself coming up with other suggestions for the ‘world’s best poems’ and so you should. Just because we live in the age of e-greetings and celebrity gossip doesn’t mean we shouldn’t visit the panaramic backdrop of our culture’s products time to time. It all began way back when. Consider this: “My attentiveness to the American vernacular- through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs…has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets labored, affected, and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative…(but) those who turn their backs on media…have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English.”

And if, like me, you fear you are just not smart enough to sit through John Donne or another Shakespeare lesson, let Paglia’s cadence and remarkable insight take over. Follow her through the puzzles as she unearths the most fascinating interpretations. She begins at Shakespeare and ends with a pop song by fellow Canadian poet Joni Mitchell, so the range is astonishing and lively. Yes, you will occasionally head to the dictionary, as per the usual Paglia read. But she says herself that she has tried to “write concise commentaries on poetry that illuminate the text but also give pleasure in themselves as pieces of writing.”

And that they do. Paglia never misses anything, so don’t worry if you don’t ‘get’ a poem. Just sit back and absorb her marvellous interpretations. Seeing as the woman has read and memorized every piece of literature, and knows the chronology of history impeccably, she fits everything for us into the epoch we need for context. Her enthusiasm vibrates through. Revisit Williams’ little red wheelbarrow, alabaster graveyards with dear Dickinson, and have fun saying “Bysshe Shelley” over and over.

And if you are a poet, or even if you’re not, you may find yourself compelled to get out the old inkwell. “Authors strive and create against every impediment,” Paglia proclaims proudly. “Including their doubters and detractors. Despite breaks, losses, and revivals, artistic tradition has a transhistorical flow that I have elsewhere compared to a mighty river. Poems give birth to other poems.”

And how is that relevant in the material world? “Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse… Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object,” Paglia writes. “It is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.”

visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Collage by Lorette C. Luzajic. view more art at creativityvault.net

Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.