Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.

So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.

It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.

I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?

His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.

I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.

Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?

And finally, this gem:

The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.

Which the reviewer justifies thusly:

As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.

I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.

If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.

My plan to take over the world is in motion. Walking to work two days a week (40 minutes each way, up and down a super-steep hill), pilates twice a week and yoga once a week. Soon, the cloning.

...when frog pond plop
is forged at my feet

a block and a half
from words to wet frog...

One day in Japan a few years ago, I was reading either bp nichol's versions of basho or maybe some of derek's poems that eventually went into frogments from the frag pool. In any case, I went out with frog pond plop in my head, for a walk along the narrow roads surrounded by rice fields. The rice was low, so the fields were like swamps, about two feet of warm, sludgy water. There were dozens of different types of frogs in all sizes that would jump in and out of the water and across the road. Each type of frog had a different tone of ribbit. Some were high and quick, while some were quite disturbingly low and loud. I'd walked about a block when there was a small movement at my feet. In the three seconds it took my brain to register what I was seeing, I saw a frog, I saw a pond, I saw a plop. I've never felt a more satisfying convergence of words and world.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?

If you want to feel attractive, attend a Canada Revenue Agency sponsored presentation on tax regulations for charities. I did, and I got all sorts of attention ranging from significant looks to awkward conversations of the "how you doing" variety punctuated with nervous laughter and self-conscious gestures. Who are these men? What grimy offices do they burrow out of and what is it in my demeanour that encourages them? I have to admit I really enjoyed learning about tax and charities, and I guess that spells geek. Most things I do spell geek. Still though, these charity geeks seem to be a notch or two below your cooler geeks, the indie rock geeks, the poetry geeks.