Vital verse

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This article was published 26/04/2024 (880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

April marks the 25th year that National Poetry Month has been celebrated in Canada. Every April since 1998, various stakeholders — from publishers to booksellers, from schools to poets — take part in events to celebrate poetry as a vital, living art form.

Since 2014 the Free Press, along with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, has participated by publishing and promoting Writes of Spring, a gathering of new and established poets edited by Ariel Gordon, this year along with Julian Day.

Poets featured in Writes of Spring will read on Sunday, April 28 at 2 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

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Shani Mootoo’s latest collection, Oh Witness Dey! (Book*Hug, 188 pages, $20), spans “Fourteen-billion-years and counting” to seek out the speaker’s “very first parents / [… .] / The can-only-be-fx-ed-to-be-imagined / Impenetrable darkness / Of time on the other side of time // The very very very first // !Kaboom!”

Within that enormous time span, Mootoo pays particular attention to the trans-Atlantic migration of Indians to Trinidad. In Documentary: Indian Limbo, she writes: “From 1845 to 1917 (cannot be a footnote) 143,939 Indians left India / (cannot be a footnote) / for indentureship in Trinidad (cannot be a footnote). 90% did not return (cannot be a footnote).” This repetition of “cannot be a footnote” acts as a rhetorical corrective to the history of exploration and exploitation in the West.

In addition to an invigorating use of documentary poetics, Mootoo uses linguistic maximalism to propel and punctuate the text. One such example is a list, which reads in part: “loved, ate, shat, made love, had sex […] invented, speculated, built, tore down, rebuilt, knew Better, / Never, Always, Right and Wrong.” She repeats this list throughout the book, and it functions to draw connections between disparate peoples’ experiences across the vast scope of the text.

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Winnipeg poet laureate Chimwemwe Undi’s much-anticipated debut, Scientific Marvel (Anansi, 96 pages, $22), showcases a formidable breadth of poetic technique coupled with a keen eye, which attends closely to both the world and to thinking about the world.

Early in the collection, Undi writes a numbered list that evokes the stereotypes of a Winnipeg Poem. Throughout the collection, she returns to aspects of these images and concepts, enlivening them with precise observation, critique and wry humour, as she does in In Defense of the Winnipeg Poem, which ends “& here / at the centre of a bad invention, / it is, in fact, pretty cold.”

Among the most engaging and moving aspects of this collection is the way Undi confronts existential dread about climate change. Here, Undi considers pregnancy, children and the future along with love and community. In Epithalamium Ending in Death, for example, she writes, “Every great love poem ends / in death by definition [… .] / The best I can do / is pledge you the balance // of my brief forever, vanishingly bright.” For all the speaker struggles to feel optimistic, she ends with a queer kind of hope — for the world, if not for humanity: “and I hope the worms survive.”

This collection is public poetry at its best: political, thoughtful, angry, hopeful, ambitious and ever-so-skillfully wrought — all this, deeply rooted in the specifics of Winnipeg.

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In her first collection of poetry, Acutely Life (At Bay, 114 pages, $25), Winnipeg’s Sue Sorensen uses ekphrastic poems to consider the relation of art to suffering. Sorensen’s use of art and literature enlivens the gap between life and perception, between sight and hindsight.

For all that the subject matter and questions that animate these poems are serious, Sorensen has a playful and witty relation to the works she considers.

In One More Time at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, for example, the speaker reflects on the dissolution of her marriage by allotting various works to either herself or her ex, which concludes with an imagined heist: “There’s a woman somehow veiled in marble who is only for me so I take her out of the Art Institute through the back way and no one notices.”

Whose suffering gets immortalized and why? In the persona of Tony Bennett, Sorensen considers the legacy of Bill Evans: “Who gets to decide which bit of suffering is noble? [… .] I wouldn’t have the guts.” Sorensen returns to this question in various guises, from the Bill Evans poems, of which this is a part, to the Freud poems woven throughout the collection, to the poems that confront the dissolution of the speaker’s marriage.

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With A Fate Worse Than Death (Arsenal Pulp, 160 pages, $22), Edmonton poet laureate emeritus Nisha Patel stages a poetic intervention into her medical records. In so doing, she confronts the pervasive ableist, classist and racist beliefs that inform medical and mental health care.

Among the ways Patel highlights this ableism is in the distancing way her health-care providers refer to her. In Date: August 8, 2013, Patel’s name is struck through, and the note that follows reads: “Client states she experiences regular and intense changes in mood client describes client notes client considers client consultanted client is on the wait-list.” This repetition of “client” is not only distancing, but it blurs language and its meaning.

The trajectory of the text is toward a poetics of resistance — to traditional aesthetics in the forms of her poems; to capitalist and colonial political structures — and of liberation that centers the oppressed and the disabled. In let me be of no use, Patel writes, “let me be of no use / to productivity, to society, to orienteering, mountaineering / snow clearing, balcony sweeping, road-trip navigating.” For the speaker, this resistance to the exigencies of capitalism opens into a model for receiving love and care “not in spite of all that I can’t and won’t be / but because of it, because of the way you like it / and let it be of no use to apologize or ask forgiveness / for wanting and holding on to the joy you find / in taking care of me.”

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Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey’s Tumbling for Amateurs (Coach House, 112 pages, $23) reimagines an eponymous early 20th-century sporting manual written by a distant relative. Gwathmey blends language and visual poems in an exploration of physicality and homoerotic desire, as well as the way these are sublimated in sport.

The shape and scoring of Gwathmey’s poems, from ecstatic, maximalist lists and riffs to diagonal combinations of tumbling moves to a swirling, arching “tt uu mm bb ll ii nn gg,” enact the exuberance and physicality of gymnastic exercises.

“We have no way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Gwathmey repeats “no other way to touch each other” through different grammatical formulations that emphasize the changing distance between the speaker and this desire for touch.

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Melanie Brannigan Frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.