Songwriter Samson mixes lyrics, poems

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This article was published 25/02/2012 (5010 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

John K. Samson, from Winnipeg rock band the Weakerthans, collects most of his lyrics in Lyrics and Poems (Arbeiter Ring, 110 pages, $15), along with a handful of poems. He is already recognized as a lyricist of great skill who can handle himself on the page as well as the stage.

Samson’s work oscillates between fanciful and sad, as One Great City! and its anthemic chorus of “I hate Winnipeg” attests. Whether imagining the dinners of theorist Michel Foucault, recounting the puzzled observations of a depressive’s cat, or scripting the Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist (who hangs “diplomas on the bathroom wall”), Samson does so with a portraitist’s skill.

Samson’s best images transform overlooked, daily moments into things of grace: “the hands that we nearly hold with pennies for the GST” are sad hands, almost touching in a meaningful way, but kept apart through rituals of commerce.

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Ottawa’s rob mclennan may be Canada’s most prolific poet, but while A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 96 pages, $18) holds few surprises compared to his other collections, its consistency is its strength. Where mclennan excels is in startling but striking observations, with undercurrents of black comedy: “if you understand clowns / you have understood fear.”

Elsewhere, mclennan notes that “Christopher Columbus discovered little / but the loyalty // of a worthwhile publicist.” Less hard-hitting, though no less clever, are his other musings: “if a murder of crows, why not just a pint, then, of poets?”

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Galician poet Chus Pato’s Hordes of Writing (Shearsman/BuschekBooks, 90 pages, $16) is translated by Ern Moure. Crafting philosophical prose with leaps of poetic logic, Pato writes “on the verge of catastrophic hallucination” to produce a long poem of sorts, that oscillates between playful twisting of poetic conventions and stark meditations on worldly horror.

Pato imagines that “you come upon tiny clothes, photos of children, of the children of Auschwitz and you’re eyeless” after earlier joking that “the contract stipulates twenty pages, but no directive on the excellence of those pages.” The result is intense dissonance, with poetry springing from the gulf between such poles. When sense fails, only a poetic logic has any hope of suturing wounds.

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Chus Pato also appears as a character in her translator’s own book, Ern Moure’s The Unmemntioable (Anansi, 136 pages, $20). Moure, a prize-winning poet, lives primarily in Montreal. Her recent work, often collaborative and multilingual, issues from the space between her selves as translator and poet pursuing inexpressible ideas as her title suggests.

Here Moure collaborates primarily with her fictional self, the poet Elisa Sampedrn (from Moure’s earlier books), in the manner of Fernando Pessoa (whose work Moure has also translated, in Sheep’s Vigil for a Fervent Person, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize). On another level, The Unmemntioable takes the form of a philosophical elegy, as “E.M.” buries her mother’s ashes in Ukraine and draws the attention of “E.S.”, who has given up writing poetry after reading Pato and observes E.M. to “research the nature of Experience.”

Moure hides poetry in matrix barcodes and adds trout to translated philosophy. Her stunning talent combines startling, direct imagery (“At night the children were harvested with flames”) and abstract, disjunctive meanderings (“In dark by fields resort to pathless tracks of where”) that display the method of a mind stuttering to speak of things unmentionable. The result is a stunning book, blending voices, mixing poetry and prose, seemingly addressed “to these shaking things that are my mysteries.”

Moure will be in Winnipeg to launch The Unmemntioable at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café (237 McDermot Ave.) on March 5 at 7:30 p.m.

Winnipeg English professor Jonathan Ball’s most recent book is Clockfire, poems about plays that are impossible to produce.