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| Kinetic/Frenetic:
Alice Burdick's Simple Master What is it that makes Alice Burdick’s poems (Simple Master) tick? Is there method to her madness or is she just frigging around? Are the short poems better than the long ones? What does she think of the new pope? Zach Wells and Chris Jennings pose these questions and more and come up with … more questions. |
| Simple Master
For me, what it is I like about her poems is very hard to pin down, at least generally. Many of these poems don't follow any kind of linear prose logic, but jump all over the place, arcing and sparking, dropping phrases and references that are both vulgar ("I want my cunt right on my face/so anyone who's scared can fuck right off.") and highly wrought ("A catch of fish catches light at night, the rays of stars and iridescent arms."). Sometimes her poems seem to be nothing so much as occasions for aphoristic zingers ("I want to go on strike against morons."), but then sometimes they present a perfectly parsable—and often moving—narrative arc. I often find her more wildly associative poems less successful than the more straightforward technique of others, but I'm more willing to forgive—and more able to enjoy, moreover—her obliquities than those of many elliptically difficult poems because there's so much kinetic energy here, even in the least of her verse; because there is a deep emotional, intellectual and political engagement in her work that makes her techniques resonate as a necessary individual expression rather than merely frivolous experimentation. Initial thoughts? CHRIS JENNINGS: "Kinetic" is a good word for the most consistent quality of Burdick's writing, "frenetic" an appropriate way to characterize the wilder, less successful applications of that energy. I'm most engaged when Burdick applies her energy to some subject, even if that subject is vague, oblique or abstract. When the motion seems more like static agitation, I tend to move on. What amazes me about Burdick's poems is how full her voice and method are. I was also thinking that the book seems part debut and part selected, though I came to the idea less charitably. It's easy to characterize most debut collections as uneven because the poet hasn't yet established a characteristic voice—you're often literally watching an idiom and style develop. That's not the case here, perhaps because Burdick has a series of chapbook publications from which to draw. Simple Master feels uneven because some poems rely too heavily on style. Instead of the aphoristic zingers or associative maxims, she gives us strings of nominative phrases that put considerable pressure on prepositions to hold disparate ideas together ("Furnace of fantasy and words at the wrong time." She asks too much of "is" as a main verb, and things pile rather than associate and orbit one another. I suppose I should look at this more charitably, though, and say that the associative impressions in the long poems create a complexity that exposes the weaknesses of the merely stylized poems. And just to complete the thought—it is the long poems here that work best. The more she accumulates in a poem, the more gravity it has, the stronger the impression of a core that links the various, often disjointed, stanzas. Both "Spadina Way" and "Light Daily Shifts" work remarkably well—easily the pillars of the book. ZACH: Funny, although I agree with the kinetic/frenetic distinction you make and with the idea that the better poems are the ones that focus on a subject, I disagree that the longer poems are the strongest in the collection. While I like certain parts of "Spadina Way," "Light Daily Shifts" and "Bubblies," I find that ultimately they feel like parts that don't add up to a whole, more like a series of short pithy poems than one long sweeping piece. The poems I'm really keen on are for the most part much shorter and more sharply focussed: "Under a Tree," for instance, with its gorgeous simplicity and understated anger; "Old Fashioned Salute" with its Dickinsonian rhythms and wit:
the Rilkean restlessness of "Archives 2" in which the speaker looks at her hands and asks "What yet have I done with these?/What good or bad or change at all?/And the hands don't answer"; "Fill My Ears With Silence," which flirts with clichéd tropes of "love," "memory" and "heart," but justifies them with the wonderful lines "Skin not so great/as to let the rain in"; the deeply moving elegy "For Gary," reminiscent in certain lines of Wallace Stevens; the contained despair and defiance of "Lost Air":
the potent irony of "AA Shitting Poems"; and the punning satire of "Vatican Decree 1993," which is so delicious I have to quote it in full:
I recently read with Burdick here in Halifax and was mightily impressed that, with the threnody over John Paul II's death still hanging thick and pungent in the air like smoke from a swung censer, she would read this piece in public with the prefatory remark that it was an older poem, but it doesn't seem like much has changed since then. It speaks to a chutzpah that is very much in evidence in her poetry and very much lacking in most of what's out there--or as she puts it, "There's a lot of the best of out there, but it's not that good." CHRIS: Oh good. After your opening comments, I was afraid we'd be nodding back and forth, agreeing too much to be interesting to anyone other than ourselves. I was also wondering if you'd mention the reading. I saw the promotional note and thought it was timely. I assume her reading confirmed your appreciation? You've given me a lot there to respond to—maybe I'll pick my spot and reserve the right to return? I'm not as enthralled by Burdick's political commitments. They don't do much for me on their own, which may be why I find the shorter poems that put more pressure on their political aphorisms less memorable. In "Vatican Decree 1993," the thinking seems too easy even if the expression has some snap. The punning on "organs" is fun (if a bit juvenile), as is the friction between subject and idiom, but the idea is preaching to the converted. The apostrophe of the final paragraph suggests we're "overhearing" a direct address, but that address has no intention of arguing with "the stupid pope" directly. If the poem appeals to me, it appeals to the atheist or agnostic in me who is already disposed to argue with religious doctrine. You make a useful distinction when you assign the poem chutzpah or moxie. This kind of poem works reflexively for me; it does more to incarnate a personality and a social position than to question, explore, or communicate the politics of that personality. The personality then informs and grounds the kinetic idiom that I feel unifies the book. But listen—I'm starting to worry that your appreciation for Burdick's work is making me seem like a disputatious crank. I like the book too, though for different reasons (high praise, I think, that two readers can appreciate the same book for different reasons). I connect the book to the circumstances of buying it. I picked it up from the Pedlar Press table at the Toronto Small Press Fair just after it came out. I'm a fan of Beth Follett's press and make a point of checking out her new titles (though I've fallen off since leaving Toronto). The TSPF takes place right near the corner of Bloor and Spadina, a corner of the Annex that had a much different feel a few years ago than it does now. All of which is, I suppose, no more than preamble to saying that what distinguishes the long poems in my mind is the way they conjure a particular place and environment that I know pretty well, from Bloor south to the lake between Spadina and Bathurst, through Kensington Market and Chinatown, Queen St. West and the old Fashion District. That sense of place grounds my reading of Burdick's politics too. "Light Daily Shifts" reminds me obliquely (that is, without attaching the feeling of oppression to questions of race) of Ellison's Invisible Man because it's unified thematically by urban loneliness and invisibility:
The final stanzas are the most political, but the politics are now fully contextualized within a sense of place and the experience of a particular speaker:
The irony of the idyll builds out of the catalogue of ridiculous conveniences and the conflicts between the urban and natural world. The language of the penultimate stanza sets up an idyllic image transformed by intrusive cops and copters, and the sound of that final line of bitten-off monosyllables gives the poem an attitudinal climax. That yawp of personal frustration, of feeling oppressed by a surreal city, unifies the poem for me and gives it a very satisfying balance of verbal texture, subjective personal experience, and social vision. ZACH: Yes, hearing her read did, I think, confirm what I like about certain poems and made me more appreciative of other poems I found less successful on the page. I find this often happens at readings of non-linear poetry, that I "get" them more when I hear them read by the author than when I read them to myself, even aloud. I don't know if this means that the poem fails on some level—because too personally encoded to allow an outside reader in without a key—or whether it's simply a good reason to publish poetry in multi-media formats so that it can be appreciated and approached from more than one angle; personally, I'm a big fan and half-assed collector of recordings by poets. Or whether it's merely evidence of limits to my own imagination as a reader (though I know from various conversations that I'm far from the only person to have similar experiences of obscurity clarified through oral performance). I understand your reservations about "Vatican Decree," Chris, but I wasn't trying to make a case for it as a "great poem" per se. There are things in Burdick's book, as there are in the oeuvres of most poets whose work I enjoy and admire, that don't give a shit about Great Poetry. Sure, the atheist (or more accurately, the anti-institutionalist and anti-dogmatist) in me nods along with the poem's argument. But I wouldn't care for it if it was yet another earnest political poem, if it "preached" as you say. I like it because it has a bit of wicked fun, because it knocks the pope's big popehat askew, not because it threatens to take the Vatican by storm and convert all the foolish believers to secular skepticism. Burdick's political "messages" are often pitched down the heart of the plate, but the sidearm delivery she uses hides the ball from the batter as it were, so that it's past him before he knows it and he just has to shake his head and wonder how the hell she managed to slip that one by. This is evident in the lines you quote from "Light Daily Shifts," which I think is the strongest of the longer poems in the book, though I don't have the intimate displaced-Torontonian appreciation of them that you do. I don't know that I have much more to add. I find the book impressive, intelligent, irreverent and occasionally irritating, all of which are signposts of serious art—which in Alice Burdick's case doesn't take itself too seriously. Any final thoughts? CHRIS: Thinking about you hearing Burdick read, I’m realizing that the very oral quality of Burdick’s poems has hovered over both of us. Under irreverent and irritating, the book does occasionally sound very much like the conventional admixture of youthful politics, vulgarity, and rapid rhythmic play that you hear at so many spoken word events and slam contests. It can be fun, but it too often amounts to sound and fury. But that’s not the dominant impression here because Burdick’s sense of sound and form are more variable and sophisticated. She escapes, for example, the temptation to repeat a single sentence structure or sequence of clauses to accommodate her rhythm. You mention Dickinsonian rhythms above (poor Em – she’d explode over the cucumber stanza), but I think there’s a balance there in the phrasing that’s a good example of Burdick’s playfulness. The passage is also part nursery rhyme or folk character, and, of course, Dickinson’s stanzas so often work off the same common or hymnal stanzas as nursery rhymes, jokes, and riddles. Burdick seems to recognize the usefulness of the deadpan coupling of high and low. She also makes good with internal rhymes of all kinds – though very little end-rhyme. The first stanza of “Covered” braids assonantal patterns of long and short “a” and culminates the string with a full internal rhyme:
Then, so you don’t miss the importance of sound, line four introduces another conspicuous internal rhyme:
This sonic emphasis doesn’t continue the whole poem. It gives way to division as a political theme (colonialism, etc.), and it seems as though the highly wrought sound gives way when division sets in. It returns again once the political intentions pass, this time as an alliterative pattern of hard ‘c’s:
I suppose what I’m marking here is the careful use of incidental rhyme, not as formal patterning or decoration but purposefully and as a way of sharpening attention to transitions. Burdick has very good judgment in this vein and it’s one of the key aspects of her particular style. Back to the common measure point above for a second. The pacing and axiomatic phrasing here also remind me how structurally similar parables and maxims are to jokes and riddles – and this is often a pointedly, darkly funny book. I think this is how I’d account for what you appreciate about “Vatican Decree 1993” when you say Burdick slips the fastball by. The trick is all in the poet/commedian’s ability to suddenly shift your perceptions, to catch you in a misconception. Burdick’s kinetic and fragmentary style keep you off-balance enough to slip more than a few past you. Final comment? I’ll repeat myself a
bit and say that I appreciate most just how organically Burdick
develops a highly artificial free verse style. There’s variety
in line length and mood, tone and volume, but the basic approach
to language remains distinct throughout. That always catches my
attention because it suggests a poet who has a very strong sense
of what they want to do. One of the joys of a book like Simple
Master is admiring how well the poet pulls off what she attempts.
Zach Wells is the author of Unsettled, a collection of Arctic poems. He lives in Halifax where he works as a train porter, demolition labourer and book reviewer. A chapbook of poems, Ludicrous Parole, is forthcoming from Mercutio Press. Chris Jennings is the author of the chapbook Vacancies. A long-displaced Albertan, he lives in the national capital and teaches English at the University of Ottawa.
(discuss) Alice Burdick Links: Simple
Master on Amazon |
| . |
ZACH
WELLS: Well, Chris, I guess we're both here because there's
something that's struck us about Alice Burdick's first book—though
I should qualify that by saying that she's been very active in publishing
chapbooks and broadsides for years and though I haven't read any
of those past publications, | Home | Magazine | Comics | Links | About |
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