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Puzzling over Current Swell

Current Swell

Ulysses, 2014 

Review by Emmett Robinson Smith

Current Swell is looking for something. The Victoria band’s fourth album, Ulysses, is jam-packed with ideas of desire, some attainable, some not. On the album-opening title track, Scott Stanton sings, “I want to go / where every man’s gone”. In contrast, on the following track, “Keys to the Kingdom”, we find Stanton longing for just those: the keys to the kingdom. Stanton fantasizes about bringing “the king down to his knees” to “give him a piece of my mind”. The desires described on Ulysses range from humble to fantastical, but are all sung with such conviction that it’s hard to know what Stanton truly wants.

These two tracks, “Ulysses” and “Keys to the Kingdom”, are prime examples of not only the lyrical, but musical contradictions that exist on Current Swell’s latest effort. The song “Ulysses” features a southern-style romp, complete with a stomping bass drum and folk-country vocal melodies. This sound can be seen to occupy the same musical realm as a band such as Blitzen Trapper, known for the warmth and delicacy in their songs. Current Swell has recreated these qualities with authenticity, and the band comes out on top for it. “Keys to the Kingdom” begins with spacey vocal harmonies straight out of the band Fleet Foxes’ book. However, “Kingdom” soon turns into an electric, sauntering groove more reminiscent of the White Stripes. The transition is smooth, but it leaves the listener somewhat confused as to the particular sound that Current Swell is aiming for. This confusion is stepped amplified on the third track, “Rollin’”. It’s a song fit for cruising down the highway, utilizing a swung meter, hand claps, and grimy guitar riffs. Taken individually, each of these tracks is genuine and effective. However, in the larger context of the album, this opening batch of songs renders Current Swell sounding restless and unfocussed.

Fortunately, the album becomes more consistent as it progresses. The standout track “Who’s With Us” hits its stride with rich lyrics and musical intricacy. “She said that dreams are just what you make them / High hanging fruit, the risk that you take them” Stanton profoundly cries. After the second chorus, things reach the most instrumentally intriguing point on the album: A nearly two minute agitated, stuttering guitar solo builds and builds, helped along by a stammering snare drum. The guitar tracks become layered and the soundscape gets more and more tense. The song climaxes as the second verse repeats, but this time with the gush of blazing power chords, unrelenting hi-hat, and an anxious-sounding lead guitar track.

The final consignment of tracks is varied, and, at times, unsatisfying. “Desire” lurches back and forth between normal-tempo and half-tempo. The song’s lyrics sum up Current Swell’s predicament: “Don’t know what to desire”, Stanton admits. (Apparently they don’t know which tempo to desire either, which, for better or worse, plays to that line.) The final track, “Flesh and Bone”, is a vulnerable, honest tune which functions as a satisfying closer. As with most of the songs on Ulysses, its strength lies in its lyrics: “Could a flower wake you up and tell you no one is the same as you?” David Lang asks. “Nothin’ like love, nothin’ like pain” is repeated as the song dies out. It’s a simple thought, but it’s so honestly stated that the words carry significant weight.

It’s evident throughout Ulysses that Current Swell plays with honesty and conviction, especially in their vocals. Their lyrics are ultimately what shine through here, and it’s a shame that their clashing musical choices couldn’t better complement their lyrical gifts. When Current Swell hits, it’s enormously satisfying, but when they miss, it’s puzzling.

Find more from Current Swell at currentswell.com

Emmett Robinson Smith is a music reviewer and student. 

Routley internationally recognized for LGBT lit

Andrea Routley, an alumna of the University of Victoria, has recently published her debut short story collection, Jane and the Whales through Caitlin Press. The collection is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, an international English-language award for LGBT literature. Previously, Routley’s work  has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including the Malahat Review and Room Magazine. In 2008, she was shortlisted for the Rona Murray Prize for Literature. She is the founder and editor of Plenitude Magazine, Canada’s queer literary magazine. She also edited Walk Myself Home: An Anthology to End Violence Against Women (Caitlin Press, 2010). Recently, Coastal Spectator Managing Editor Nadia Grutter discussed Jane and the Whales with Routley via email.

Andrea, I was delighted to read a series of short stories that skims so close reality. Your stories—particularly “The Gone Batty Interpretation”—challenged and moved me emotionally. Would you mind describing the emotional journey you went through writing this book?

Well, each story is its own journey. I didn’t begin writing the first story with an over-arching concept for a collection, but, like any writer, your obsessions begin to reveal themselves in your writing patterns. That particular story, “The Gone Batty Interpretation,” I wrote about six months after the suicide of a high school friend, so it is not a humorous story or an intellectual story at all. Suicide is something that comes up in several stories. So many of us are touched by this, but I most often hear it talked about in medical terms, as a treatable disease, and it’s not that simple. “The Sign,” on the other hand, deals with the same subject but in a way that (I think) is humorous. It looks at choices like that from a more logical perspective.

Your writing is powerful in its restraint—both in its brief form and concise content. Is this something you learned to cultivate through, say, workshops during your time at UVic or has your writing style always been so distilled? Basically, how did you learn to write the way you do?

When I first started writing stories, I’d often get the question, “Is this the beginning of a novel or a short story?” At first I felt proud of this question, like looking like a novel meant it was a big, fat, interesting story and this was a good thing. Then I realized this just meant I had a lot of superfluous detail or was alluding to potential plot twists that were never going to happen. You definitely learn to pare down the more you write. (And yes, I learned this while at UVic with the fantastic instructors!) I think this is in part because your writing becomes less precious to you, simply as a result of quantity. I’ve axed characters from some of these stories who I’d thought were critical in early drafts. For example, there was a kid like a wild animal who likes to stalk around in the sage by the clay cliffs and hisses at people, but eats his wiener like it’s corn on the cob. Maybe he’ll come up in another story, and if not, that’s okay too–it was fun to write the scenes with him. It’s not about publishing everything you write. It’s imperative to just enjoy writing, too (or just feel compelled to do it).

Your stories are very diverse content-wise. How did the stories inform each other in the writing process? Was there one core story that sparked a sort of leap-frog of ideas into the other stories?

Every story explore in some way humans’ and animals’ relationships with the world around them, that search for a place. “Habitat” certainly carried over into “The Gone Batty Interpretation” with the protagonists both coping with grief and expressing their sadness through empathy for an animal, among other things. Many of the stories have characters trying to make sense of the past through their unreliable memories — or the way we discover just how unreliable our memories are when something surprising happens to a person we thought we understood.

The conclusions to your stories strike a careful balance between inevitable and surprising. What did the process of rounding out an individual story look like for you?  

I’m glad to hear the conclusions feel that way. I try to write a “satisfying” ending to stories. Sometimes stories end so abruptly and the satisfaction is really delayed; it only comes later when you’ve had time to unlock its meaning. I can appreciate those endings, but I don’t really “enjoy” them. I try to write something that will feel concluded and satisfying, but give enough to leave you with something to chew on. For some of these stories, the rounding out involves the editor’s feedback, deleting one line too many, or adding one more beat. (Sometimes more than that, of course, like going back and rewriting a scene that obviously was not doing its job of setting up the ending and things like that).

Are you working on any projects aside from Plenitude at the moment?  

I have some crazy, daunting, stupid idea of writing another book, one of linked short stories of exclusively queer characters, across decades. I have read at a couple queer events and it was incredibly rewarding to read a queer story for such an engaged, lively, appreciative crowd. I want to make more of those characters that we are obviously in need of — “we” includes me. The queer past is full of diverse and wonderful people and experiences, and there are not enough of us in story. If anyone would like some ideas on new queer books to read, though, I have an ever-growing list of new queer Canadian titles at PlenitudeMagazine.ca.

For more on new queer Canadian titles, visit http://plenitudemagazine.ca/resources/new-queer-books/.

Poet tackles life’s uncertainty

The Fleece Era

Joanna Lilley

Brick Books

105 pages, $20

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Joanna Lilley’s The Fleece Era is the discovery of Brick Books’ spring season, a first poetry collection with a subtle, shifting vision of ecological and human connection. Lilley is a transplant, raised in England and now living in the Yukon. Because of her northerly coordinates, I thought first of snow clouds and then of sheep when I read fleece. In fact, the title poem refers to that fuzzy synthetic fabric so symbolic of current environmental questions. The narrator, a lost hiker, talks to the man who’s given her a ride: “Big deal, he said, we can make / sweaters out of plastic pop / bottles, yet there are places / where it’s illegal to hang your / washing out to dry.” This question of relationship—between strangers and family members, between individuals and culture, between human beings and nature—drives the collection.

The Fleece Era is divided into four parts. Each gathers variations on the theme of relationship, which modulates from section to section. The first part, “A Riddle,” concerns family and distance—both emotional and geographical. The narrator of “Overheard” imagines herself “shouting from the shore / of my mother’s Atlantic teacup.” The next section, “Emotional Expenditure,” considers the intricately interwoven social and bodily alienation experienced by its female narrator. In complement, the third part, “At Each Exhale,” examines the latent violence of intimate connections like marriage. “Scientist” narrates a painful disconnect between partners, enacted while skiing: “How is it I’m lost / yet you’re not, although / we’re on the same blank trail.” The troubled relationships of The Fleece Era remain open-ended.

The final section, “Nobody Else Dies,” takes up the vexed relationship of human minds to the natural world. “Ten Thousand Trees” is stark about the destructive drives of even ethically committed human beings: “I didn’t know the flash / of a forest gash could mesmerize, that there could even be a lust / to witnessing the first road ever forced on feral land.” In “Earth Twin,” the collection’s closing poem, Lilley writes wryly of a scientist who theorizes that “there might be planets even more / suitable for human life than ours.” She recognizes this as a dangerous fantasy: “It takes / a day or so for me to comprehend / he was talking about Heaven.”

Across the four sections, key relationships, characters, and themes create a world that feels consistent. There is a mother and a father, sisters and a brother, a husband. Yet there is a perceptual wobble, or say a parallax, built into the language that describes the central figure of these poems. This figure is sometimes an “I,” sometimes a “she,” and sometimes a “you.” This unstable centre, surrounded by more static figures, builds a sense of self-alienation across the collection. It seems an appropriate choice given the ecological position of contemporary Canadians, whether in the Yukon or Victoria. As Lilley queries in “Earth Crack,” “What if the piece of the world / I’m on tears off?”

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet and essayist.

YA novel confronts life on Vancouver streets

Rabbit Ears

By Maggie De Vries

Harper Trophy Canada

232 pages, $14.99

Reviewed by Kyla Shauer

Every young adult novel I’ve ever read has concluded with some sort of bow-tied happy resolution. Usually the hero/heroine procures the love of someone dear, defeats their inner and/or outer demons and makes the world better. This is not that kind of novel. This novel discusses real problems from the streets of Vancouver. While it does not feature a brooding love interest, its complex characters give faces, voices and life to stories we normally hear as news statistics. Rabbit Ears shows that every story and person matters.

Many readers will remember De Vries from her compelling memoir, Missing Sarah, which focused on the author’s sister, who was one of the young women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the Robert Pickton case. A former editor at Orca Books, De Vries teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia, focusing on children’s writing. She has written eight previous books for children.

Rabbit Ears follows sisters Kaya and Beth as they navigate Kaya’s inner problems that lead her to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in late 1990s.

At 13, Kaya starts high school already at issue with her identity. Kaya collides with the return of a former friend Diana, whose presence at her new school pushes Kaya to run from her secret past. On one of her trips she meets Sarah, a prostitute and heroin addict, who tries to protect Kaya by shoving her onto the bus home. Soon Kaya returns and searches for Sarah but finds heroin instead.

De Vries utilizes the viewpoints of both sisters to tell the story from the perspective of the family and the runaway herself. Unusually, Kaya’s character is presented in the second-person point of view: “It feels weird being outside in the city so late all by yourself. You can feel the eyes on you. And the danger. You think briefly about your bed. Warm. Dry. Safe. Then you shake that off and march down the sidewalk.”

By contrast, the first-person point of view focuses on the emotional conflict that affects Beth and her mother as they search the streets for Kaya. “I’m on my way back downtown when I see her, standing right there on the corner, teetering on her high-heeled boots.”

The transitions between the sisters can be jarring, especially between multiple shifts within a few pages. De Vries evidently chooses the viewpoints to engage the reader by looking at teenage runaways, drug use and prostitution from different sides.

Rabbit Ears is a rewarding read for anyone wanting to understand what could make a person choose the streets when she had other options. This novel does not shy away from brutal reality but neither does it dwell on the violence or abuse. De Vries modeled the character, Sarah, on her sister and gave Sarah to Kaya as a guide and defender in honour of Sarah’s memory. I would recommend Rabbit Ears for later teens and adults.

Kyla Shauer is a Creative Writing student at UVic and a Communications Assistant at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics.

Farrant fearlessly paints life’s details

The World Afloat

By M.A.C. Farrant

Talonbooks

96 pages, $12.95

 Reviewed by Marjorie Doyle

I’ve been taken on a wild ride, with reflective stops along the way.  I wasn’t scared.  I trusted the driver.

Reading through M.A.C. Farrant’s stories is like taking a tour through the psychedelic album covers of the 1970s – simultaneously laughing and probing for meaning.  These 75 “miniatures” invite us to loosen up a little, see the world through a freshly cut lens.  Many readers will know the Vancouver Island writer for her 11 previous books, especially wonderful 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years.

Miniatures, yes.  Or if we see Farrant’s new collection like a painting, like a wide comprehensive Bosch-like canvas, these are details, lifted from the whole and magnified, allowing us to look more closely.  We never fear we will go adrift in this world afloat because the narrator is anchored.

Characters roaming this canvas include the teen who talks “outside of humans like a poet.” The couple “speaking to each other in Vain, an old, old language. He said, she said, neither one of them listening.” A man named Mark: “Short, rugged, lovable, and not unhandsome.” The person who arranges a busload of Japanese schoolgirls in a Zen garden: “one schoolgirl to every ten thousand pebbles.” And Muses who “have gone mad and are living as lady golfers in Palm Springs California.”

The distinctive voice is breezy and energetic.  Farrant is playful but never frivolous.  She’s a humorist (that rare breed!), but as with all good humour there is a point.  You can sober up quickly in the middle of a guffaw.

Some pieces are complete stories, but short. Others are teasers or hints or scenes.  And some are small works of genius – laugh out loud funny or thoughtful.  She has perfected this technique – nay, it is an art.

Consider the story “Our Spiritual Lives.”  It opens: “We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists.” We then meet a woman who lost all her money to fiscal fraud, “So we pray to the banking industry not to do the same thing to us,” and a man who doesn’t pray.  He’d “rather trust the presence of hamburgers in his life to render it benign.”  The story moves along to composite pictures tacked on telephone poles.  Then:

“It’s Jesus Christ again.  The pictures are meant to show what he’d look like if he were alive today and sixty-nine years old and lost. Like practically everyone we know.”

“Along the Way” satirizes the funeral industry.  As we’re half laughing at embalmed corpses sitting in rocking chairs, we are gently towed into a thoughtful reflection on life and mortality – in a few hundred words.

As with most good art, some pieces eluded me, but who gets everything on one visit to a gallery?  I must, and will return.

 Marjorie Doyle is a writer in St. John’s, Newfoundland.  Her latest book is A Doyle Reader:  Writings from Home and Away. 

Genuine heart animates Real Ponchos

Real Ponchos, Since I Let You Go (May 6th, 2014)
Produced by Jesse Gander and Real Ponchos
Catch Real Ponchos at Logan’s Pub on June 13th.

Reviewed by Noah Cebuliak

Real Ponchos’ debut full-length, Since I Let You Go, is refreshingly honest, optimistic and devoid of the clichés that often muddle country and roots music. Real Ponchos describe themselves as “psychedelic alt-country soul,” and from the first track, “Aged in Oak,” this Vancouver band demonstrate their capacity to deliver goosebumps up the spine. The opener is a heavy, open highway, big-sky victory of a song, with an earworm electric guitar riff and swelling pedal steel and organ, all under Emile Scott’s unique, honeyed voice.

Real Ponchos boasts two vocalists, and the following track, “Outta This Place,” features the gruff Ben Arsenault, who sounds like he’s come from a sunny southern state. Arsenault and Scott trade songwriting and main vocal duties throughout the record, a successful trick that reminds me of Conor Oberst’s Outer South, on which his Mystic Valley Band members contributed songwriting and lead vocals. Speaking of Oberst, Real Ponchos are alike, but far lighter and clearer – again, it’s refreshing. Some other positive comparisons include early Randy Travis (Storms Of Life, No Holdin’ Back), early Wilco and Victoria’s The Wicks. A thread of real authenticity and genuine heart carries through all of the above, and Real Ponchos follow in that lineage.

The rest of Since I Let You Go is a satisfying listen. Co-produced with Vancouver’s Jesse Gander (Japandroids, Pack AD, Corbin Murdoch), the sonic atmosphere and mix is crisp and welcoming. Juxtaposed with the exceedingly popular electronic music of today, with its quantized rhythms and saccharin synth glitch, Since is packed full of human warmth. Rhythm section Michael Wagler (upright bass) and Emlyn Scherk (drums) are absolutely solid in their tempo and rhythm, never cluttering, always adding nuances that reveal themselves after multiple listens.

Real Ponchos show their Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers’ likenesses on the back half of Since, with extended jams “Along The Way,” and “Take Me Back Home.” They ride the jam-band edge carefully though, keeping the movement and story of each song progressing tastefully, while demonstrating their instrumental skill at creating contemplative atmospheres reminiscent of their country roots.

One of the most interesting aspects of the overall production on Since is the now-rare quality of delivering deep emotion – nostalgia, hurt, longing – in a strong, masculine way. The record’s big heartbreaker is the song, “Just Like A Slow Burn,” which builds to Scott’s beautiful vocal testimony, singing long and with longing over sweet, glimmering guitars and dark-chocolate piano chords.

Emotional and sonic depth animate the success of Since I Let You Go. It’s a strong debut from inspired, talented young men on an honest mission to make their best music.

http://therealponchos.bandcamp.com/album/since-i-let-you-go ($7 Digital / $12 Hard)

Noah Cebuliak is a Montreal poet, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. He leads a lyrical jazz-pop conspiracy called Ghost Lights. http://ghostlights.ca 

Poet’s new book ruminates upon death

Brentwood Bay writer Eve Joseph’s new book, In the Slender Margin:  The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying, is essential reading for everyone.  She recently took the time to talk to Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven. Joseph’s first book of poetry, The Startled Heart, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay poetry prize, as was The Secret Signature of Things.  She is the recipient of the P.K. Page Founders Award for Poetry.  Joseph will launch In the Slender Margin on Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. at Munro’s Books.

Eve, I so admire this profound book of nonfiction, which reads like the exploration of a lifetime. Can you talk about how long ago you started this book “in your mind” and how the compilation of the essays came together for you?

The idea for the book started in the fall of 2005. One year before I left hospice. I was burning out – saturated with images and thoughts about death – and that wasn’t something we talked about in any organized way at hospice. I clearly remember calling one of my colleagues from a phone booth in the Mayfair Mall and saying I could not continue working with the dying if I couldn’t talk about the work. We both agreed this was badly needed and, over the period of a couple of days, we contacted three other friends we worked with and started a group. We decided we would meet once a month, talk about death and drink whiskey. The Women and Whiskey group as we called ourselves. It was from those meetings that the book began to take shape.

I first attempted to write about death in my first book . . .  the poems –  ghazals – really only touched the surface but the associative nature of the form allowed me to use imagery without narrative and that was a breakthrough for me. When it came to this book, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative; rather, I wanted to build a kind of thematic resonance. One of the most immediate challenges was how to write about death without sentimentality and writing “fragments” as opposed to continuous story helped me do that. It was also really important to me to avoid the kind of false wisdom and new- age language often found in books on death and dying. It helped to have works by Joan Didion and Annie Dillard close by. Didion for her clarity of thought and Dillard for her imagery and the marvelous way she weaves things together.

In The Slender Margin started as an essay that was later published in The Malahat. I returned repeatedly to that essay and “blew it up” from within. I kept going back in and expanding my thinking. The greatest pleasure of writing this book was the opportunity to think on the page and to follow thought as far as I could. Don McKay once said to me my poetry was spare – as if I was a bird hopping from branch to branch. Prose, he said, requires one to be more “doglike.” Nose down, rooting along the ground, getting muddy and lost in the exploration. I’m more dog in this book than bird.

Your brother’s sudden death in 1964, when you were 11 years old,  appears to have been a touchstone-event for your whole life. Does writing a ruminative book like this assuage feelings of loss?

This question is interesting to me as it raises the topic of art versus therapy. In the book I tell a story about a friend of mine who teaches weaving on a reserve in North Vancouver. When she applied for a grant to teach local women, it was suggested she gear her classes for women with alcohol problems. She refused to run the classes as “therapy,” choosing instead to concentrate on creativity and tradition. As it happened, some of the women who came did have problems with alcohol and the course helped to turn their lives around. The intent was not to “heal” people but, interestingly, engaging deeply with the creative act was healing.

I did not set out to assuage an old grief, and I distrust that impulse. When people say “that must have been so healing” I feel grumpy and argumentative as if there is some unspoken belief that writing helps one to “let go” and provides some sort of “closure.” If anything, the opposite was true for me. Rather than letting go, I embraced my brother fully for the first time. I was immersed in thinking about him, in remembering and in learning new things.  In the end, the act of writing and remembering – of giving voice to sorrow – was cathartic. But it was never the purpose of the book.

I find it amazing that you were able to work in palliative care for two decades when so many of us fall apart at the death of a parent or family member. Does glimpsing the Grim Reaper daily harden one’s spirit?

I think it tires one’s spirit more than hardens. There is just so much sadness. As strange as it sounds, on one level it was just a job. It’s what I did to make money and support a family. There was a kind of compartmentalization – I did not feel the immensity of grief that family members felt because I was essentially a stranger to them. It’s completely different to lose someone close, and all my years at hospice don’t soften the grief I feel with personal loss.

To harden one’s spirit implies a shutting down or turning away from something. I don’t think I did this. The problem for me was one of deep weariness. We don’t have an adequate language in the West for problems of the spirit. My mother-in-law, who was Coast Salish, worried that my spirit was walking with the dead, and she encouraged me to pay attention and to practice certain rituals – which I did, but not nearly as often as she would have liked. As much as I appreciated her concern and suggestions, I felt as if I was “borrowing” something that wasn’t mine. If anything, writing has been the thing that has helped me to enter places of darkness and to maintain an open spirit.

In the Slender Margin is laced with wry commentary and humour. Do you think you would have lasted 20 years in your hospice work without a sense of humour?

Humour was an essential part of hospice work. It helped us to laugh at ourselves and at death. It kept us from taking ourselves too seriously and, for many of us, humour made death smaller and less terrifying. Sometimes it allowed us to see beyond illness. One of the stories I tell in the book has to do with a well-respected First Nations man who was dying of leukemia at home and had been in pain all day. When the nurse and counselor arrived from hospice to attend to him, he asked his wife if she had shown them the smokehouse. When she said “no,” he asked her to take them out to see it. Bewildered, she did as he said and showed them the rows of salmon slowly smoking in the shed behind the house. When the three of them returned, he looked over and said to his wife “you didn’t leave them in long enough, they’re still white.” Everyone collapsed laughing and for a moment he was a man with a sense of humour and not a man dying of a catastrophic illness.

People we encountered often called us “angels.” Humour flies in the face of that. It mitigates against the work becoming precious. The saying attributed to Abe Lincoln “I laugh because I must not cry” has a ring of truth to it. We found humour in the absurd and could share things with each other in a way we couldn’t with friends or family. I think it just helped us cope.

I love the ending of your book, when the Egyptian God of Writing, Thoth, tells you “You’re on your own with death.” I’ve always thought that to be the case. Is our final task on this Earth to figure out how to accept that reality, preferably with some modicum of grace?

Yes, it is our final task.  And, I’m not sure it is a task that one can prepare for completely in advance. There will be surprises and unforeseen circumstances and what we may have imagined in advance may or may not be possible. A friend recently asked me if I was less afraid of death having worked with it for years and my answer was mixed. On one hand, I’ve seen so much that I have way more ways to imagine what death could look like – the good and the nasty; on the other hand, at least with expected deaths, I saw that most people met their deaths without the struggle that one might fear or expect. In my experience, I saw that the dying most often enter into a kind of altered state in their last days. Maybe it’s that the body takes over. By the time things are shutting down people are often unconscious and so are spared the “bigger picture” in the way the living are not spared.

Of the few people I saw who fought right to their last breath, family often said that was true to their nature and couldn’t imagine it any other way. You have to remember, though, that I saw people dying in a hospice with excellent supports. The reality of dying in an under-staffed hospital might be quite different.

The analogy of birth makes sense to me. We labour to be born and we labour to die. Childbirth may be painful, but if it were intolerable no mother would have more than one child. The work of labour is so focused that other things disappear – I saw this exact thing with the dying. So, while I have no illusions about how we can die, I also know that most people do it with a modicum of grace.

When I first started working with the dying I didn’t believe in euthanasia. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think there’s “one” best way to die. For some people, probably myself included, I think the knowledge that there is a choice about the timing of our deaths could be a very good thing. We don’t have control but we can be active participants in our dying.

Who knows? I may well go out kicking and screaming. I have no wisdom to impart. The things I learned about embracing death and helping others turn toward it may be of absolutely no help to me with my own death.

It’s a funny business this death business. We just don’t know!

Language play enlivens Barton’s Polari

Victoria poet John Barton, perhaps as well known as the editor of The Malahat Review as for his 10 previous books of poetry, has just launched Polari, a new collection with Icehouse Poetry, an imprint of Goose Lane Editions.  Co-editor of Seminal:  The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, he has won a number of writing honours, including three Archibald Lampman Awards and a CBC Literary Award.  He teaches poetry workshops across Canada, at such places as The Banff Centre, the Sage Hill Writing Experience and the University of Victoria.  He recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions about Polari in an e-mail exchange.

John, I like the title of your new poetry collection, Polari.  Can you tell me a little about when you first learned about the word, derived from the Italian parlare, which you define as a “coded anti-language or idiolect at one time spoken by gay men.”

Polari? I am not sure when I first became aware of the term, exactly. In the last 10 years, maybe longer?  I would hear mention of polari, then forget what it was or how to spell or pronounce it, go searching for it, find it and forget it again, in a long, irritable and irritating cycle, until one day it stuck.

Of course, I am not of the generation who would have used polari terms in order to pass, since the reasons behind needing to “pass” are now nowhere near as relevant as they were sixty years ago (or more precisely thirty years before I came out)—at least not in the part of the world and the stratum of society that is mine. It’s a different matter in Russia or Uganda, for instance—and God knows how one chooses to pass in either. However, I am old enough to remember when the society I belong to was not as open-minded and the urge to speak plainly did truly involve risk—though not risk of imprisonment. I am sure gay men do still talk differently amongst themselves than they would if “non-gay” people were present—and when “non-natives/speakers” are part of the exchange, “experiences” are “translated” for them. Any group is like this.

I realized a few years ago that anyone who might overhear a group of gay men discussing matters solely of their mutual concern might still find the conservation hard to follow. This tendency toward opaqueness—toward this anti-language—is a way of marking and restricting space—and even of policing access of it.  The idea of polari even became a kind of joke to me—”Oh, am I speaking in tongues again—LOL?”

I can’t claim that I was consciously thinking about all these ideas while writing the poems collected into this book, but after writing the title poem it occurred to me that “polari” helped characterize their texture. The surface “beauty” of their language is a protective crust that challenges the reader to take a firm bite—sharpen those intellectual incisors!—by reading carefully (and sympathetically) in order to break through to whatever substance resides within. (Or so I vaingloriously and self-consciously think.)

I also enjoyed the way you played with rhyming language in this collection.  There was a time – not too long ago – when Free Verse Ruled; a poet dared not rhyme words for fear of being thought fusty, but now I see it cropping up in many contemporary books of poetry. Can you talk a bit about this shift?

Observing metrics and rhymes has fallen in and out of fashion since the origins of modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. The current vogue in Canada found its inspiration in the New Formalism movement that began taking hold in the United States in the mid-1980s, with Canadian poets like the late Diana Brebner taking up the influence in her work; I can’t think of anyone who would have tried her hand at such formal concerns in Canada as early as she did—or at least not as well. Today, Matt Rader and Elizabeth Bachinksky, I believe, are among the best practitioners.

For myself, I grew tired of writing in free verse and was looking for a new challenge, which so-called traditional, rhyming forms offered. I had written a little bit of formal verse—the sestina, the sonnet, and the villanelle—when I had been a student over 30 years ago, but had never explored the opportunities to be found in formal writing with any focus until eight years ago.

Writing a formal poem is akin to offering different appetizing tidbits to a fussy eater, having them refused one after the other until said child (or poem) takes a bite and some sustenance—and substance—has been both derived and transferred. It takes patience and inventiveness—much more than I would have ever guessed, especially once one gets beyond thinking that merely observing the rules is enough—the “what a nice plum, what a good boy am I” syndrome. Writing a formal poem is less like filling in the answers to a crossword puzzle than designing a mandala—it’s all about balance and intent. I like how adhering to a strict syllable count and a subtle rhyme scheme forced me to make decisions I might not have had to make had I chosen to write a free-verse poem. I might settle early on for something reasonably satisfying in the latter, whereas to get to something satisfying in the former takes much more tenacity. Writing formal poems expanded my vocabulary, made me more flexible in my expectations, and open to change. Writing in form is like doing aerobics or weight training; writing free verse is like going for a nice walk with great scenery, and if you have a dog, picking up after it.

Writing formal verse has re-enforced my belief, developed while writing free verse, that it doesn’t matter which words you use as long as they work well together.  The challenge ultimately becomes how to write a formal poem that still feels contemporary. For example, I decided not to be a stickler for singsong metrics—ten syllables always, but not necessarily in iambic pentameter. You want the formal attributes to support the poem and not be the end in itself. Also, to match the form to the subject can be crucial; it can make the tension between traditional form and the contemporary subject a subject of inquiry too. However choosing a form arbitrarily, without regard for the subject, and then making it seem like the obvious and only choice is great fun too.

 Some of your titles — I am thinking of “Bombproof Your Horse” or “The Book of Marmalade . . .” — tackle the world with a wry eye that simultaneously notes its violence and its mundanity.  Is that a renewed tension in your work?

The absurdity of these titles—which are titles that have won a Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year—automatically draw attention to itself, doesn’t it?  They bring the humour implicit in my work right to the surface. That said, I agree this book is wryer than my previous books. Humour is a defense mechanism we all deploy to sample a smorgasbord of personal and social hurts—a way to make them visible, to decry them if necessary, and if we are lucky, to put them into perspective. Up to a point, self-deprecation is so much attractive than self-aggrandizement. I might not have been able to write many of these poems had humour not empowered me to do so.  In the case of the Diagram Prize poems, they might not have occurred me at all.

 John, you have lived and worked in many regions of Canada – Saskatoon, Fredericton, Calgary, Ottawa – and your family history in this country goes back a long way.  Do you think of certain of your poems as products of geography, or is your relationship to space and place more nuanced than that?

I am not sure what place means to me any more, having moved about so much. It is a pleasant wallpaper against which I live my existence.  Now my response is less one of a tourist, by which I mean I don’t write a poem simply because I have been somewhere (though I have written my share of such poems)—a temporary geographic cure equivalent to grazing at a salad bar. I suppose I see locale as an opportunity to give a particular concern a context. Sometimes, through the concern in question, I become connected to the place where a poem is set. Writing a poem set in a familiar location renews my connection to it. “I am somewhere, therefore I am a particular am”—and am forever. How many tourists taking selfies of themselves with a smart phone can truly say that?

 I’m an old fogey, I fear, but I think our use of language is growing less precise every day.  Is there any one essential piece of advice you like to give the emerging poets you mentor in workshops? 

 No poet can afford to be imprecise, if she or he hopes to be any good. Anyone who aspires to the craft (however fey that may sound), should never allow themselves to think that their readers will get the gist of what is intended—i.e., don’t become too wed to what you’ve put down in your initial draft and think it’s good enough. Instead, revise, have fun, agonize, fall in love with your genius, despair, be surprised, and explore. And most importantly, be your toughest and best reader.

5 Questions with Glenna Garramone of Tower of Song

Victoria musicians Glenna Garramone and Oliver Swain have collaborated to create the Tower of Song project. Tower of Song has just released its debut album In City and Forest, primarily a collection of reimagined Leonard Cohen songs. Garramone, a former University of Victoria writing student, has been a force in the BC music scene for several years, winning the grand prize in the 2010 Artswells Songwriting Contest and performing at venues such as the BC Festival of the Arts and the Victoria Independent Music Awards. She took the time to write thoughtful, insightful answers to reviewer Emmett Robinson Smith’s questions about the Cohen project while on tour with Swain for the album. In City and Forest recreates a selection of Cohen’s works to sound fresh and exciting again, and also includes two originals from Swain and Garramone.

How has Leonard Cohen influenced you as both a lyricist and a musician?

I first listened to Cohen’s music as a child, from the back seat of my parents’ car.  My dad is from Montreal, and both my parents are Cohen fans, so Cohen was often the music of choice on family road trips between our home in Ottawa and visiting extended family in Montreal.  Cohen’s songs have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.  Because of this, I’m sure there are ways in which Cohen’s work influences me subconsciously.

On a more conscious level, the honesty of Cohen’s lyrics continually inspire me to be more honest in my own writing.  Cohen has a way of being serious and insightful, and surprisingly light and and even irreverent at times.

The first time I saw Cohen perform his music live, I was suddenly struck with the realization that he was able to write from such a vast consciousness because he lives his life in such a way that he really exposes his heart to the spectrum of human experience.  I remember hearing an interview where Cohen said something to the effect of (and I paraphrase here) “Poetry isn’t what you set out to create.  It’s a byproduct of a life well lived.”  Seeing Cohen perform his own work inspired me to make changes in my life so that I could risk more, and feel more, so that I could write from a similar expansive place.

In terms of his musicality, some critics contest whether Cohen is actually a “musician” or not.  In my experience of working with Cohen’s songs, the songs are thoughtful, and well composed in terms of the chord progressions, the melodies, and how they interact with the words.  Cohen is not a particularly “showy” musician, but his compositions are durable.  The fact that so many great artists have covered his songs attests to the strength of the work, I think.  Some of Cohen’s songs are simple/straightforward in terms of the chords’ progressions, but there is often an unexpected turn or shift in the development of the song, sometimes even just one chord or one ornament that makes the song more memorable and distinct.  In this way, Cohen has inspired me to be more minimalist as a songwriter, and to allow the simplicity of a few chords to work their magic.

The musical arrangements in many of your covers are quite different from Cohen’s originals. What are you hoping to achieve by this reimagining of Cohen’s music?

When I first started the Tower of Song project, I thought that it was just going to be an evening of some of my favourite west coast artists getting together to bring their own voice to Cohen’s work.  Oliver Swain was the first artist I thought of when I was brainstorming about musicians and songwriters who have a very distinct voice and style. I’m grateful that that first night gave Oliver and [me] the opportunity to reconnect and to sing together because our harmonies became intoxicating for both of us, and that has lead to us forming this duo around the project, arranging, recording, and touring together.

As a performer, I’d participated in a few different tribute nights to various artists, and my favourite part of a tribute is to see how a song can become new again when someone else brings their voice and their interpretation to the work.  Because Cohen’s work is so dense and rich, and because he is one of my favourite songwriters, I wanted to see what would happen when I asked some of my peers to explore his work.  I also found that when I covered Cohen’s work, the songs seemed to have a life of their own.  When I begin learning one of his songs, I learn the song as he wrote it, and then keep playing it over and over and allow it to shape shift into something new.  Essentially I let the song guide me in terms of how to best express it.  Of course I bring my own biases and experience to the interpretation, but I can say that it has been a very organic process.  Some of the songs on “In City and In Forest” I’ve been singing for over 15 years, so they have just evolved with me.  There are a few lines in “Chelsea Hotel #2” where I alter the chord progression and melody, and repeat the lines “I need you…” and that particular melody came to me when I was living in the Arctic and was feeling quite isolated and lonely.  In that way the songs are like companions that have travelled with me, and they change as I change.

Another goal of the project is to keep these songs alive and in the repertoire of modern songwriting.  They’re just too valuable and insightful to stay put.  Since I first started covering Cohen’s songs (about 18 years ago), every once in awhile I would have someone approach me after a performance and say “You know, I have heard that song before, but I’d never really heard it until now.”  I think that for some people in my generation, when they think of Cohen’s music, they associate it with the synth-heavy and very produced studio sound of Cohen’s work from the ’80s and ’90s.  So in some ways, I wanted to present the songs in a different context, so that they could be heard by people who perhaps didn’t resonate with Cohen’s original version, or with Cohen’s voice.  I wanted to honour the song, and Cohen’s original vision, and also to allow the song to be fluid.  That is the nature of songs in the folk tradition.

The Cohen works you selected for the album span a good chunk of his career – 1967 to 2001 — yet you perform them in such a way on the album that they sound cohesive despite the significant time gap. Was this sense of unity and timelessness one of the goals of the project?

We (Oliver and I) definitely put a lot of thought into the songs we chose for the album.  We were also being strategic with the first album, because we had a finite budget (which means finite time in the studio), and so we decided to focus on the foundation of our collaboration, which is our vocal harmonies.  About a year ago I had applied to the Canada Council for the Arts for a grant to make a Tower of Song recording.  At that time the recording we were planning was more of a traditional studio album, with several guest artists and a full band.  But we didn’t get the grant, so we decided to focus on recording the songs where we could carry the majority of the playing and singing between the two of us. We were very fortunate to have the support and financial investment from a fan, and that allowed us to work with Joby Baker and record at Baker Studios.  Joby is extremely talented both as a producer and as a musician (he plays all the drums and percussion on the album), so he is also responsible for the cohesive sound of the album as a whole.

I think that the cohesive sound is also just a reflection of the work that Oliver and I did together to really explore every note and every harmony in the songs, in the two years leading up to the recording of the album.  Sometimes in our rehearsals, we’ll spend over an hour just working on one line, trying to get it just so.  We are both perfectionists when it comes to our music, so when we collaborate we work with the subtleties of harmonizing — blending, breathing together, timing.  This thorough vocal exploration is one of my favourite aspects of the collaboration.  Singing in harmony with people can be a very intimate experience.  I have found that practicing harmony with people cannot just be isolated to “making music” together– you actually find your way to harmony through all the other stuff too– running a business together, touring, dealing with challenges that come up in life.  I think it’s almost impossible to stay rigid when you need to harmonize with another person every night on stage.  It’s a compelling archetype/model of being in the world– I get to maintain my own voice, my own note, my own vibration and perspective, and “the other” gets to maintain their own voice and note and sense of self, and rather than needing one or the other to be “right,” we find that the blend of these two selves is more powerful than the individual.

There are two original songs on the album: Oliver’s “Baby in the Bay” and your “Unicorn.”  Why did you include these two originals in the context of the Cohen-themed album?

The concept for the Tower of Song project came to me through listening to these lines in Cohen’s song (The Tower of Song):

“I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?

Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet.

But I hear him coughing all night long

A hundred floors above me in the tower of song.”

Here Cohen acknowledges his place in the tower of song, and the lineage of inspiration that extends through time.  I resonated with the idea that all artists (in this case, songwriters) are in a dialogue with one another, even if they are not aware of each others’ presence.  When you produce a work of art and put it out into the world, you may feel that you are alone in a room where no one can hear you, but in reality the work is now part of a conversation that is timeless, and there is no way to predict the impact of that work on the world, and the impact on other creators.

I think we all have our own “Tower of Song,” where the creators who have inspired us reside, and we overhear their work as we create our own.  We create [partly] in response to what we overhear through the walls of the Tower.  It is important to me for this project to also hold space for the original work of the artists who are involved.  Both Oliver and I are songwriters and musicians with our own individual projects, so the intention is to also showcase original work by artists who name Cohen as a primary influence in their songwriting.  In terms of selecting these two songs in particular to add to the recording, that decision was informed more by the fact that neither of us had recorded these songs as individuals yet, and that we had created arrangements that featured our vocal harmonies.  It was also on some level an intuitive choice, just going with what seemed to fit with the overall aesthetic of the album.

How did the partnership between you and Oliver form? Will you be collaborating in the future?

I first met Oliver at a jam in a mutual friend’s living room in 2005.  We basically locked eyes and locked voices and then were under a spell of sorts.  Normally at a jam, you sit in a circle and take turns leading songs.  That night Oliver and I kind of hijacked the normal jam circle etiquette, and insisted on playing and singing each others’ songs, while the rest of the musicians had their patience tested, since we didn’t want to stop singing and let other people have their turn.  We continued to collaborate in different capacities — I hired Oliver to play bass on my studio album “Seasky-Starsong” (released in 2008), and a few years later, he invited me to sing harmonies with his band “Big Machine.”  So we collaborate in several different configurations.  The plan is to continue to tour as the Tower of Song duo, and we work with a rotating cast of guest artists as well.  We already have songs selected for the next Tower of Song album!

Find their music here: http://towerofsongmusic.com/home

Brave debut from a promising songstress

Review by Mark Anthony Brennan

Victoria’s Zoey Ockenden (a.k.a. lavallee) recently released her debut EP. ‘above the treeline’ comes with minimal musical accompaniment, placing Ockenden’s singing and lyrics front and centre. This is a brave move, given the wealth of strong female singer-songwriters out there today. But if Ockenden is at all daunted by the task, she does a good job of hiding it. So comfortable is she in her own musical skin that ‘above the treeline’ sounds like the work of a veteran.

The EP is a satisfying listen, with each track stronger than its predecessor. ‘Tides’ introduces the EP in fairly familiar territory with a folk/pop confessional about a woman who regrets that she can no longer maintain a relationship eroded over time. The tempo picks up slightly with ‘Pony Circus’, although the subject matter is just as mournful. Here the singer begs her lover to buy her a pony, take her to Russia, buy her a dress or just about anything to bring some joy into their life. After all, she gripes, “…you owe me…”

The next track ‘Ragdoll Waltz’ technically is a waltz, but you won’t find yourself tempted to hit the dance floor. It’s a break-up song where the narrator admits she saw it coming. Even though he is the one leaving, she was willing to drag him into a doomed relationship, making her equally guilty. In ‘Pack of Wolves’ Ockenden’s dark outlook hits a low point. Our inner demons, she tells us, are like a pack of wolves, and they are always there waiting for us. Her piano pounds out an ominous tune, and the harmonizing voice that hovers over the chorus adds to the despondent air. The song also features a crisp guitar solo by Ockenden’s brother Ryan (the only other performer to appear on the EP).

The closer ‘Sugarcane’ is the standout track. All instrumentation is abandoned, leaving Ockenden to play to her strength. The southern-tinged lyrics set in a country/blues style demonstrate Ockenden’s vocals well. On this track she is in her comfort zone as she sings about a woman on a journey. It is not clear whether the “place” she is leaving behind is literal or figurative, but it doesn’t matter. What we do learn is that she is moving on to a better place and that “…my heart feels more like a heart today/than money spent in a gambler’s rage…” So, after all the doom and gloom, Ockenden leaves us on a positive note.

‘above the treeline’ showcases the talents of a gifted lyricist with a distinctive voice. This is a strong first outing, and it will leave you looking forward to whatever Ockenden does next.

Check out Ockenden’s bandcamp here: http://lavalleelavallee.bandcamp.com/

Mark Anthony Brennan is a fiction writer and freelance article writer living in Victoria.