Poetry Club – Wheaton, Tait, Parker
3 poets, 4 books of poetry today! I had just started reading American poet Morgan Parker’s There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé when books by Canadian poets, Lynn Tait and Margo Wheaton arrived in my mailbox. This afternoon, I sat outside and re-read them, spending a bit more time on the dogeared pages. The thing about poetry is that one tends to read it over once (or at least I do), and then re-read, then, go back to the dogeared poems. And the cool part is that say, 6 months or a year later, different poems will stick out for you, grab your attention. I think part of the reason I wanted to persist with this “poetry club” is just to model a behaviour of reading, one possible approach. We don’t read poetry like we do a novel. And you know I love novels, but poetry is a special thing, a special gift. One needs to learn one’s own flare for reading poetry.
We read poetry to resist, to rebel, to come into our hearts. We read poetry because poets, as W.S. di Piero says, “want to say small things intensely.” He says, “Empty heart = empty head” and I’m inclined to agree. Poetry goddamnit teaches us the terrain of our decrepit hopeful broken hearts.
The Unlit Path Behind the House by Margo Wheaton is a meditative read full of memorable images. It’s that kind of quiet poetry that you have to meet in a bit of a dream state if you’re to hear the subtle music. I very much like this kind of poetry. You have to read it slowly, and multiple times. For example, when there is no moon some night we are given:
“On the horizon, an orange wolfish
clatter of lights from the mall:
a dollar store brooch
someone’s pinned to the dark.”
In a poem, “Broken,” in the woods:
“you’re trying to imagine the weight of snow
on the backs of willow branches
that cannot refuse to bear it
and bow, aching to know how to carry
your own suffering so well.”
And for me, a very relatable Canadian moment in a poem titled “Work”:
“Minutes before the thunderstorm,
my neighbour goes into her garden
to rescue the peonies.”
In Margo Wheaton’s book Rags of Night in Our Mouths, there are three longer poem cycles which I always need more time to sit with, to contemplate. These do reward one. I found them reminiscent at times of Ondaatje’s Secular Love. Perhaps that’s just me.
“Can your dulled heart
carry the weight of its spell?
Somewhere
on the High Marsh Road,
bits of sweet, unsellable hay felt like hourglass grit
in the funnel of my great-grandfather’s hand.”
In other poems, there are very fine lines like, “Dare to peel things back.” “I’ll carry the weight of your kiss / in my bones.” And, “Just stare at the world with all your being; / make of your body an eyeball and burn.”
I was really struck by the words of Jan Zwicky, another esteemed poet, who said in her blurb, that the poems had “emotional integrity.” Sometimes you read the blurbs and think, that could be about any book of poetry or poet. But that phrase really rings true here in Wheaton’s work. It’s not flashy but it’s quiet and true and imagine having that to refer to in this world of ours which is often too loud and fake and garish and without integrity or even an understanding of what that looks like.
Lynn Tait’s You Break It You Buy It takes its title from a poem titled “Measures of Forgiveness.” The speaker of the poem looks
“down the long table,
a yard sale of porcelain hearts,
all cracked,
five cent apologeis,
fragile in the hand.
You break it, you buy it,
no longer applies.”
The book grapples with immense unthinkable loss, but is also profoundly, and relatably so, about “disconnections and misconceptions.” In “To Whom This May Concern,” Tait says,
“Present, with full citations,
everything I should have done,
should not have said.
Plot a course of action based on these assumptions.”
This is a poetry of wounds and survival.
“In time, I became a wound,
too many colours for one woman.”
And in another poem about the loss of her son:
“Cemeteries are now my home away from home.
We celebrate our son’s birth, his death —
a shot of tequila on site.”
I enjoyed her poem “A Litany of Curses for Everyday Assholes,” and I appreciated “Poem Written by a White Woman,” who is listening and questioning, and trying to understand other lives through poetry. I found myself saying, ah, yes! That’s exactly it! And, ugh so relatable, while reading. It’s also very hard to believe this is a first book of poems! I found it inspiring that this is the case and look forward to a second book by Lynn Tait.
Which brings me to Morgan Parker’s book There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé which is truly startling. I was thinking and wondering while reading Lynn Tait’s aforementioned poem if this was the book she was reading and learning from. (Probably not, but it could be). Because it is a wake up. It’s also entertaining and alive with pop culture references. If you haven’t read Parker’s 2015 essay on diversity it’s a good one. She talks about “My Poem” by Nikki Giovanni and reading it “as a reminder that art is an opportunity for us to locate our identities and create portraits of our worlds. As a black woman, I can think of almost no other space where I am allowed to do this for myself.”
Parker says,
“art is nice but the question is how are you
making money are you for sale
people in movies are always saying
I can’t live like this! packing a little bag
or throwing down their forks…”
A poem titled “Another Another Autumn in New York” begins:
“When I drink anything
out of a martini glass
I feel untouched by
professional and sexual
rejection. I am a dreamer
with empty hands and
I like the chill.
I will not be attending the party
tonight, because I am
microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines…”
Lines like the following in the first poem of the collection are just such a huge awakening to another’s life experience:
“I do whatever I want because I could die any minute.
I don’t mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me.”
I’ll definitely be seeking more of Morgan Parker’s work out including her recent essays, You Get What You Pay For.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll look for these books or just browse your local book shop’s poetry section. It has to be one of life’s great pleasure to read poetry in the morning with a cup of coffee, experiencing, thinking, feeling….