SUBJECT>Re: China Town (Draft infinity) POSTER>Asher EMAIL> DATE>1111564273 IP_ADDRESS>dyn129-100-215-79.alh.reznet.uwo.ca PREVIOUS>85279 NEXT> IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

GC--maybe the best thing for me to do is to spell out my intentions for each line. That way you can tell me where my thinking is off, if you feel so inclined. Otherwise, this can go on for too long. I started a response which began:

Well, since I'm wired on coffee, I'll try to explain and if you would kindly reconsider how I can make my intentions clearer...I'm grateful for your generosity, your sharing and your expertise, so please don't mind me. My problem with this piece is the etherial quality in it makes it hard to distinguish shifts, I think...

Good evening again,

: Of course it's not disrespectful! What these
: forums are supposed to provide, at their
: best, are conversations about poems, about
: poetry. And, in terms of critiques, there
: are always multiple options, viz. (a) the
: critiquer is right, (b) the critiquer has
: identified a problem patch but misidentified
: what could/should be done about it, (c) the
: critiquer has misread the poem, (d) the
: critiquer has manufactured his own entirely
: fanciful interpretation of the poem, (e) the
: critiquer is just plain wrong. (My goal, of
: course, is to do all five of these
: things--possibly more--in any lengthy
: critique.)

--thank you.

: In all seriousness, I think the hardest part of
: my own journey toward & through sharing
: my work with others involved learning how to
: differentiate between these different sorts
: of responses, from all different sorts of
: (mostly well-intentioned) people.

--yes, which is why I value....etc. You don't like all that so I won't go on and on. Ok. Ha.

: A few specifics: 1. In terms of "You can't
: gable unless you're stable": I loved
: "gable" as a verb here. I guess
: rhyming off "stable" might it
: sound a little jazzy, even a little hokey.
: But, as I said, it's so unusual that I'm all
: for keeping it just as it is. I was only
: asking.

--yes it is a bit hokey sounding because of the rhyme. But the reason why I (personally) like that is because it is so trite, and yet the line is quite serious. Also the syntactical and rhythmical contrast between those few lines
added a rhythmic texture to the longer lines, I thought. That was the intention, I think and I thought that the irony (of the rhyme) would be in contrast to what is actually being stated...well, maybe the build up before has to be considered--for instance. I could (in a month, ha) reconsider the consoladation line. And somehow make "home" the overarching theme of the poem...but I don't not spelling themes out. Which may lose people...again, I thought the maps touched briefly on this. But. I have to rethink what I want this poem to do. Should it be explicit, or should some of the lines wander syntactically to resemble the wandering state of mind, dream/wakefulness, Chinatown/child--all enmeshed in dream. Ethnicity/self.

Either way, this particular run-on sentence
seemed at odds with the syntax elsewhere.
What, then, is the purpose of this very
specific run-on, since you don't perform a
similar one (to indicate it's a choice, not
just an error) elsewhere?

The shrunken pashmina scarf on the edge of a driveway blown off
by the child's breath already her breath is an iguana with red red cheeks
and a cherry for a nose--the child, I mean a daughter.

This is the one.

China Town

Yes, there was consolidation in winter--Canadian winter, perhaps.

--why consolidation...and why the emdashe. etc. OK. My intension was this. And I don't really consider it wrong to spell things out. This way I can learn quicker...

The two yess can be read as ironic or not, depending on how you read this poem. But because of the two "perhaps" this yes becomes destabilzed. Right off the bat then, I'm trying to signal to the reader that this poem will a poem of ambivalance. Consolidation I wanted to slightly refract off of the jangling cash register etc. There may be consoladation in Canadian winter via becoming absorbed in the Canadian version of ethnicity, but this is no consoladation. Simply put, it is a Canadian way of seeing the immigrant, refracted again in China town, where you seemed to like the irony etc. This irony should extend, I think, to these beginning lines. I thought about punctuation. The emdashe may not be correct. Perhaps a period/pause after "winter" would help bring this ambivalance home for a reader.

Yes, we are in a place that is arctic white, snow mobiling, perhaps

--the arctic white, I thought would refract onto the "snow of paper" an image used by a wonderful (quite dreamy Canadian poet, PK Page) which I was dialoguing with, or attempting to. White in this case is "arctic" barren, reflecting on the estrangement, the absent mindedness of the landscape...clearly then, dream does not suggest the mystical/mythical world of Page, reexploring the a childhood, but estrangement, from a father, from "place" refracting, again on his desire to "map" place. Not only map apples, but map the ear, which brings in the pertinent theme of hearing, language, and the suble (probably too subtle) idea that he can't hear the dialects of his father, possibly because they are not his own, or possibly because they belong to a memory he cannot access...again, this could be made clear by the insersion of a few words, but I like not spelling the themes out in this one.

along side driveways in a roiling cloud of exhaust: Dundas street.

--I liked that word roiling and the cloud which suggests a departure from the clarity of dreaming evoked by page and by the group of seven. Rather then providing a space of stability though, the narrator's dreaming is more suggestive of estrangement from the landscape, I think. The colon and the insertion of a "place" the street name is an attempt to signal a place, so I thought that the puctuation (the colon) was apt. As there is an attempt to root the poem, ground the imagery, all the "perhaps" into a "place" a "street" a locale and finally bring it into a ethnic space which happens to be China Town in this poem.

The boy-mind was drawing maps. Green maps. Maps on unboiled apple skin.
Treasure maps. Maps to a cochlea. His brother followed and recorded every word
he said.

--I thought that theme of hearing, again and the need for someone to "record" (a brother, in this case) was peritent. Why does the narrator need someone to make a record for him. Again, this can be read as pretence...which wasn't the aim. Like "the lonely poet needs a scribe" sort of thing.

You can't gable unless you're stable, in retrospect
the snow plough hasn't come alongside the lonely snow man and the cleaver.

--I wanted that shift from in retrospect to bring those jarring syntactical units together, as though by force...contrived, in other words, by the introduction of temporal linking words "in retrospect." This enjambment seemed peritinent to the moving, or trying to move into the present...trying to moor the poem, the images, trying to bind incongrous syntactical units.

Ha. The shrunken pashmina scarf on the edge of a driveway blown off
by the child's breath already her breath is an iguana with red red cheeks
and a cherry for a nose--the child, I mean a daughter.

--the run on sentence is key for me here. Is it clear that this child is not his; is a figure of his imagination. Yes, I think it is...the narrator is exploring the possibility of having a daughter. Is this clear...yes. But the child shifts to an iguana...an exotic image, and finally a cherry, refracting back on the snow man. Obviously (to me) the child will become a construct (she already is in the mind of the narrator) but she, too, will become whitened, constructed like a snow man with a red nose...the pashmina scarf blown off the snow man would support this reading. Finally, the run on sentence is exploring the fluid state of the narrator's mind and must be retained as it is, unless it is confusing and my reading of this is not what you're getting at all. Well, the white bit has to be strengthened. This would be quite easy by adding a white map above. This would refract of themes of mapping in the early candian explorers who appropiated native lands and were obsessed with naming....

She played a veena, the one stringed veena disappeared from her fingers. Aba,

--I thought that the two lines below where sappy, but so is the child...just a dream. But quite obviously the narrator is frightened that the cultural artifacts...whatever is left of their culture, will disappear from the child figment of his imagination.

no one plays the Veena anymore, or listens. You could almost say
the child or the snowman were living in a yard fenced in by wrought iron.

--the wrought, of course makes it obvious--the above reading...she is a dream, he is creating her...etc. This much should be obvious. The fact that she is living in a fenced off space of Wroght iron, again suggests that she will be (to the narrator) whitened.

She wanders on the snow of paper, ploughs through a paragraph unthinking,

--the plough at the beginning of the poem hasn't come. The child has become a "plough" clearing the white snow, perhaps trying to plough through the snow man. That should be made clear. I'm just thinking as I go along...But here she ploughs through a paragraph. Quite agreeing with you. That and "snow of paper" have to linked up more forcibly...

as if to say: this is your child;
she has cherries for cheeks. (The likeness of rum
on my breath mixed with egg nog.) The rain sops the snow off the spiny umbrella.
I walk through the loose wind by Lake Ontario and the absentminded landscape, waves clambering up granite. A tug of the wind to my liking...

--perhaps the lack of vicerality in the wind is necessary to the narrator not feeling part of the landscape, and yet grateful that the wind tugs him (out of his sense of estrangement)

on Dundas Street by the absent bench where I met a father. Green tea and sponge cake dipped in seaming cane sugar water. Here I can meet him again and he recites Iqbal
in accents that I cannot hear. Iqbal wrote a patriotic poems about Pakistan.
He went to Cambridge. He died unhappy. Here is my world in an armoire in Kensington Market, ragweed pollen for a sniffle. Here is a child grown black in the mind; a cardinal crooked on a juniper branch. I walk backwards again and be darned
by all this rotting. The "Chinaman's cafe" was packed. The registers were jangling.
I bought my father royal jelly. The royal jelly didn't work. I bought him wood ear mushroom. Here an effeminate mind rocks loose these mausoleums of snow;
perhaps the wipers are frozen and the gasoline is moody; I move
even as the car stops--jolts forward; buckle down, son; this is not
an Emily Carr painting.

Here there is bowing to the teeny bed bug that eats up a corpuscle

Why "teeny" because we are in China Town and it is poor. The narrator is trying to make this poverty romantic...

on the twin bed at the edge of China town. I met Namgyal there; she cleaned a cut
with lavender on this bed she changed her name to Holly.

--again, the changing of names is important here and key to understanding the poem, I thought.

The wind buffeting the car
and an avalanche of snow around Younge Street. Here I can hang all this on the snowman or not on the back of my old God, but here: a birch pollen restless to be cracked like a skull of a dreaming body departed from this world and back in a China man's street.

--the narrator does not want to dream. He doesn't want to see some China man construct. He doesn't want to see either a snow man or an old God. He is figured as a birch bark (I was trying to get to the "white" aspects again, but pollen isn't white..." Anyway, that's my explanation of this piece.

: 2. In re verb tenses & states of
: consciousness: I see what you're saying, and
: later, when you mention that in part we're
: dreaming. But I read this, at least for
: starters, straight up. I did not catch the
: shift between states of consciousness. Maybe
: my poor reading, or perhaps they're not
: sufficiently cued. I'm still struggling
: this, and still thinking that the failure
: (forgive me) lies on the part of the poem.

: 3. The poem does have one primary
: strategy--though it's rhetorical, not
: syntactical--namely accretion of detail.

: Either way, this particular run-on sentence
: seemed at odds with the syntax elsewhere.
: What, then, is the purpose of this very
: specific run-on, since you don't perform a
: similar one (to indicate it's a choice, not
: just an error) elsewhere?

: 4. I trust you when you say "The cherry is
: necessary," Asher. But, alas, I don't
: trust the poem. Meaning that while it may be
: necessary in your conception of the poem, or
: in the generating universe that gave rise to
: the poem, I don't see it as necessary
: within the universe that the poem creates,
: right here & on the page. This could be
: my blindness, of course.

--It's not your blindness at all. I have to make that point clearer. Thank you.

: 5. In re aba/veena/father: I see your point,
: though I think switching the lines preserves
: the effect you're wanting.

--cool.

: 6. I think it's clear that on some level the
: "absentminded" landscape and the
: "absent" bench refer to the
: distance between the speaker & his
: father. But it's really hard to feel an
: absence. Is there some way you can make a
: presence into an absence? (What is the
: sound of one hand clapping?) This is a major
: problem, not just in this poem but in any
: poetry dealing with loss. One does the best
: one can.

: 7. I should say right out that I did not get,
: in my initial reading of the poem, that the
: father was dead, and that the encounter was

--I think that the father is dead in the narrator's memory...or only alive in the imagination.

but this line...suggests paradox via pun:

here on this bench......in accents I cannot hear

again the hearing theme, blended with hear...obviously I have to clarify these points...

either with a shade or within the province
: of memory. At one point I thought so, but
: then I decided not. My bad, again, I'm
: sure....I suppose "mausoleums of
: snow" should have tipped me in that
: direction (as you intended). But at the time
: I was too preoccupied with what I saw as the
: overwritten quality of that sentence (I'm
: rethinking it now) to make the proper
: connection.

: 8. In re Emily Carr: no no no, I was not trying
: to be rude, and I was in no way implying
: that you, or the poem, were pretentious! I
: thought it was funny, and I was delighted
: with the moment of (rhetorical &
: aesthetic) humor in what is otherwise a very
: somber poem, in a somber landscape.

--well, I love Carr, I just don't think the Group of Seven really represent the narrator's experience at all.

: If anyone else wants to chime in on any of
: these, by all means do so. Poetry is not a
: democracy--no art is--but sometimes it's
: really, really helpful to simply get a show
: of hands from one's colleagues as to what is
: or isn't working.

: All for tonight,
: GC

Thanks again for all your help.

Good evening again,

: Of course it's not disrespectful! What these
: forums are supposed to provide, at their
: best, are conversations about poems, about
: poetry. And, in terms of critiques, there
: are always multiple options, viz. (a) the
: critiquer is right, (b) the critiquer has
: identified a problem patch but misidentified
: what could/should be done about it, (c) the
: critiquer has misread the poem, (d) the
: critiquer has manufactured his own entirely
: fanciful interpretation of the poem, (e) the
: critiquer is just plain wrong. (My goal, of
: course, is to do all five of these
: things--possibly more--in any lengthy
: critique.)

: In all seriousness, I think the hardest part of
: my own journey toward & through sharing
: my work with others involved learning how to
: differentiate between these different sorts
: of responses, from all different sorts of
: (mostly well-intentioned) people.

: A few specifics: 1. In terms of "You can't
: gable unless you're stable": I loved
: "gable" as a verb here. I guess
: rhyming off "stable" might it
: sound a little jazzy, even a little hokey.
: But, as I said, it's so unusual that I'm all
: for keeping it just as it is. I was only
: asking.

: 2. In re verb tenses & states of
: consciousness: I see what you're saying, and
: later, when you mention that in part we're
: dreaming. But I read this, at least for
: starters, straight up. I did not catch the
: shift between states of consciousness. Maybe
: my poor reading, or perhaps they're not
: sufficiently cued. I'm still struggling
: this, and still thinking that the failure
: (forgive me) lies on the part of the poem.

: 3. The poem does have one primary
: strategy--though it's rhetorical, not
: syntactical--namely accretion of detail.

: Either way, this particular run-on sentence
: seemed at odds with the syntax elsewhere.
: What, then, is the purpose of this very
: specific run-on, since you don't perform a
: similar one (to indicate it's a choice, not
: just an error) elsewhere?

: 4. I trust you when you say "The cherry is
: necessary," Asher. But, alas, I don't
: trust the poem. Meaning that while it may be
: necessary in your conception of the poem, or
: in the generating universe that gave rise to
: the poem, I don't see it as necessary
: within the universe that the poem creates,
: right here & on the page. This could be
: my blindness, of course.

: 5. In re aba/veena/father: I see your point,
: though I think switching the lines preserves
: the effect you're wanting.

: 6. I think it's clear that on some level the
: "absentminded" landscape and the
: "absent" bench refer to the
: distance between the speaker & his
: father. But it's really hard to feel an
: absence. Is there some way you can make a
: presence into an absence? (What is the
: sound of one hand clapping?) This is a major
: problem, not just in this poem but in any
: poetry dealing with loss. One does the best
: one can.

: 7. I should say right out that I did not get,
: in my initial reading of the poem, that the
: father was dead, and that the encounter was
: either with a shade or within the province
: of memory. At one point I thought so, but
: then I decided not. My bad, again, I'm
: sure....I suppose "mausoleums of
: snow" should have tipped me in that
: direction (as you intended). But at the time
: I was too preoccupied with what I saw as the
: overwritten quality of that sentence (I'm
: rethinking it now) to make the proper
: connection.

: 8. In re Emily Carr: no no no, I was not trying
: to be rude, and I was in no way implying
: that you, or the poem, were pretentious! I
: thought it was funny, and I was delighted
: with the moment of (rhetorical &
: aesthetic) humor in what is otherwise a very
: somber poem, in a somber landscape.

: If anyone else wants to chime in on any of
: these, by all means do so. Poetry is not a
: democracy--no art is--but sometimes it's
: really, really helpful to simply get a show
: of hands from one's colleagues as to what is
: or isn't working.

: All for tonight,
: GC