Happy 10th! Marilyn Gear Pilling on Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas

Robyn Sarah’s Little Eurekas is a book that has meant a good deal to me. I open it regularly and for a variety of reasons. From it, I may gain inspiration or add to my knowledge of specific poets or read about one or another of a wide variety of topics that pertain to poetry. Or I may want to enter a world where poetry is taken seriously and filtered through the sensibility of a writer and critic whose work I greatly admire. At times I open the book just to be in her company for an hour or two. This is a work that enlightens, entertains, surprises, and communicates the beauty, depth and necessity of poetry.

- Marilyn Gear Pilling

Truth and Lies in Poetry

Robyn Sarah has taken over the helm as guest-blogger at the Best Canadian Poetry blog this week, and her first post is up, on Truth and Lies in Poetry.

Some years ago, at a poetry event, I heard a fellow poet preface his reading with the remark, “A good poem is like a good lie.” He meant, I assume, that both are verbal constructions that succeed based on the extent to which they can persuade us to believe them. Maybe he was half tongue-in-cheek, intending to be provocative, but nobody around me seemed provoked. I understood what he meant, but my own thought at the time was, “I could not disagree with you more.”

A successful lie manipulates language to achieve the effect of truth, but to me, a good poem is true. The power of the words comes from authentic emotion which is the moving spirit behind the poem. The words move us because the poet has been moved to words. Or, as I put it in the concluding sentences of my essay, “Poetry’s Bottom Line”: “Whatever else it is or does, a poem should deliver to us unmistakably the sense of an urgency behind the words. The sense that there was a need to say this. That the poet means it. That every word is a meant word.”

All too often, reading contemporary poetry, what I feel is, So many dishonest lines! Lines that sound beautiful but that aren’t meant. If you aren’t really paying attention, you can be seduced by them. But if you’re listening closely, they don’t ring true. They have the sound of trying too hard, or of trying to put something over. They sound as though they are listening to themselves, admiringly, rather than speaking from a real place inside the poet. The words may be gorgeous, they may be clever, they may have dazzle or flash, but they aren’t speaking in a real voice.

For the rest of this post, please go here. And if you like what you read there, then you may also want to check out Robyn's excellent essay collection Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry, where you will find a lot more of the same.

Robyn Sarah Speaking at U of T March 23rd

Three Reviews...

In the Winter 2009 issue of Arc -- Volume 61 -- there are three reviews of Biblioasis Poetry titles. The first, of Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry. T'is a feature review, and largely full of praise:

"I've never met Sarah, and was previously familiar only with her poems, but i've come to like her through these essays. Conversational in tone, her voice sounds like that of a friend. ... This easy-going style gives the book much of its clarity and approachability, two traits that poetry -- and poetry criticism -- could use more of.

Nest up: Shane Neilson on Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers:

"She's the poet of compression, of no time and small space. ... Young at her best writes a noose around loss ... There is indeed a quiet, firm, almost questing brand of dignity in Young's brand of loss. It has made for an excellent collection ..."

Lastly, a review of Zach Wells's sonnet anthology Jailbreaks, which Alessandro Porco says "has scope ... As with any anthology, there are a few head-scratchers ... but also some jaw-droppingly good eye- (and ear-) openers."

Montreal Review of Books Review of Little Eurekas

A very good review of Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry in the MRB. An excellent Christmas gift! You can buy it here:

www.biblioasis.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=57

or here:

www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Little-Eurekas-Decades-Thoughts-Poetry-Robyn-Sarah/9781897231296-item.html?ref=Search+Books%3a+%2527little+eurekas+and+sarah%2527&sterm=little+eurekas%7csarah+-+Books

or even here:

www.amazon.ca/Little-Eurekas-Decades-Thoughts-Poetry/dp/1897231296/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196439505&sr=8-1

Yes, I know: so much for all I want for Christmas is 600 new subscriptions...

Oh yes, the review:

"If anybody had told me, years ago, that I would one day publish a book of literary criticism, I think I would have laughed out loud," a rather astounded Robin Sarah writes in her introduction to Little Eurekas. Yet here it is, a tidy collection of diverse writings gleaned from essays, columns, reviews, and collaborations, and arranged in a volume that is certainly substantial evidence of a literary life, among other things. Indeed, the volume "reflects personally upon a life in poetry" by one who has written, edited, taught, reviewed, published, and even typeset it manually. Rooted in the personal, Little Eurekas is unencumbered by any of the potentially daunting theory that typically characterizes the genre, and in this sense, one hesitates to categorize it as LitCrit proper. If Little Eurekas is literary criticism, then it is, as Sarah points out, certainly an unconventional contribution to the genre.

Organized into five parts, Little Eurekas is a friendly, even hospitable collection, and the conversational but sophisticated prose makes it all the more so. Part I offers a handful of essays ranging from Sarah's account of how, as a young girl, she fell for poetry, to a frank discussion of poetics in "Poetry's Bottom Line," to a thought-provoking trio on teaching, publishing, and editing poetry. In "I To My Perils: How I Fell for Poetry," Sarah describes poetry's insidious creep upon her: "No primal 'Eureka moment.' Many little Eurekas - some of them unconscious, smiting me after the fact." She goes on to say that "it is an addiction to the little Eurekas, those moments of electric response to a particular poem that makes one a reader of poetry." While this reviewer was not smitten with the title of the collection, the sentiment behind it - the exuberance, the joy, the electricity that poetry can yield - is certainly true enough.

Throughout the collection, Sarah shows herself to be a writer who, in the fullness of time, has developed particular ideas about things. She does not shirk from asking and answering thorny questions that probably should be asked by more writers but too often are not. Consider: "If poetry is a good thing, can there be too much of it?", or "What makes a poem a poem?" Nor does she hesitate to share her various gripes. For Sarah, all that ails poetry - the current cultural program, the overproduction of poetry that nobody reads or reviews, the poet as celebrity, creative writing training, less than stringent editing - seems to boil down to an abiding concern that quality over quantity be poetry's mantra. Whether or not one agrees with her opinions, Sarah demonstrates no small courage in laying her views out clearly and plainly.

Perhaps the best way to describe Little Eurekas is to say that it "Dances with Poems," for the collection is, by and large, comprised of Sarah's essays on, and reviews of, poetry. In the chapter of that name Sarah is clear: "Appreciation of poetry begins with poems." And true to her word, she is generous with quotation. Like a good dance partner, Sarah's engagement with poetry is attentive, considered, and at its best downright inspiring. Her collaborations (with Dennis Lee and Eric Ormsby among others), taken from interviews, symposia, and most interestingly letter exchanges, add yet another dimension to the dance.

This reviewer is not a poet, and Sarah might be heartened to know that Little Eurekas made her want to read more poetry; it made her pick up a dusty collection from her bookshelf; it made her send a poem to a friend who seemed to require just those particular words; and it made her want to seek out some more of the poems Sarah reviews. And is it not just these little moments of electric response - these little Eurekas - that make one a reader of poetry?

Brenda Cockfield is a Montreal writer.

Globe Review of Little Eurekas

In Today's Globe & Mail. That makes all four of our Spring titles, five Globe reviews since April, and our last six books. How I wish that meant increased sales.

The review was paired with Di Brandt's So This is the World & Here I Am In It. Porter's take on the book -- on both -- is largely religious or spiritual. Which is not at all invalid, but at least with Little Eurekas seems only a small part of what is often going on in these essays. Still, a good review...


POETS AS PROSEURS

George Grant in conversation with Dennis Lee uses the phrase, "loving one's own." Love what belongs to you, by family or kin, or what is close to you, by heart or proximity. Love your heritage and tradition, what comes down to you by ancestral blood and experience. Grant's phrase contextually enriches a comprehensive reading of poets Di Brandt's and Robyn Sarah's new collections of literary essays.

Brandt, with all her ambivalence and qualification and rebellion, loves the Mennonite tradition. She honours her peasant farming and Anabaptist roots, her Plautdietsch mother tongue. She also quarrels with certain patriarchal tendencies in her tribe. Hers is not an easy love, not a requited love, but it's love nevertheless. You can't write a sentence like the following without love: "... like Leonard Cohen, who threw away his noble rabbinic lineage for bohemian excess only to recapture its grandeur in his poetry and contemplative practice, I put myself, precipitously, in [his] company to claim that I've been faithful, are you listening, daddy, grandma ... I've been true, trying as hard as I can to understand what that idealistic, crazy, stubborn, ecstatic, beautiful, terrible heritage was about."

Brandt's Mennonite heritage bookends So This Is the World & Here I Am In It, the 10th publication in NeWest Press's Writer as Critic Series, and forms a midway investigation called Je jelieda, je vechied: [roughly: the more educated you are, the more corrupt]: Canadian Mennonite (Alter)Identifications.

For the most part, she keeps the reader on Manitoba soil with reflections on Manitobans Adele Wiseman, Dorothy Livesay and David Arnason, and James Reaney's Winnipeg. Along the way, she meditates wonderfully on bees and makes fascinating notes on Berlin. Her other excursion beyond local soil is her rather academic-sounding response to Mavis Gallant's German-centred The Pegnitz Junction. As insightful as her critical thoughts are, especially the ones on Wiseman and Gallant, they don't rise to the level of poetry in prose. The result is that Brandt's is a two-voiced book, the voice of critical prose and the voice of poetry-in-prose.

When she loves her own, when she cleaves to blood and bone, she writes some of the most ecstatic prose in Canadian letters. Long Faulknerian sentences, such as the one quoted above, defy the straitjacket of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, which shaped a generation's prose. Keep the writing plain and simple, the manual says. That's fine when your reality is plain and simple, but what if it's convoluted and contradictory, where there are more collisions than coherences? What then?

At her best, Brandt writes with the intensity of Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Her prose lifts, it gallops - picture wild horses let out of a barn - and it accumulates phrases and verbs and modifiers like ivy gone mad on a wall. It comes close to those holy moments in writing where critic Alfred Kazin says that the word and the object are one. Fecundity and luxuriance energize her style.

Robyn Sarah's style is quiet, measured, thoughtful. She is open to the mesmerizing and incantatory, but tends to favour smaller celebrations. Little Eurekas showcases the full range of her personal poetry lab. She writes poetry, reviews it, teaches it and edits it. She collaborates with fellow poets; she interviews and is interviewed by fellow poets. Divided into Essays, Review Essays, Appreciations, Short Reviews and Collaborations, all pertaining to poets and the nature of poetry, her book closes with three of her finest poems: Riveted, Grace and Fugue.

What Sarah loves is clear: She loves poetry and words, and draws strength from the Jewish tradition. The best of her writing sometimes brings the three together in a single utterance. When asked about the spiritual in her work, she replies, "The expression that translates as 'Pay attention' is Sim Lev. It means, literally, 'Apply Your Heart.' " She does that in her own poetry with "closely observed concrete particulars," and in her observations on Margaret Avison, Don Coles, Ken Babstock and others.

In her poem Grace, for instance, she has the aging poet O make the connection between poets and sparrows, "hopping around at the foot of café tables, waiting for crumbs. Waiting for God to drop something, by accident or on purpose - as today, these sparrows." In an interview, Sarah says: "If God is dead, I must have missed the obit." She begins to study Hebrew in order to read Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

In contrast to Brandt's full-voiced exuberance on her Mennonite tradition, Montrealer Sarah speaks less explicitly of her spirituality. But she adds, "that doesn't mean I don't think it's central." The reader hungers to listen: "Remember and keep, the twin commandments regarding the Sabbath, express an essential Judaic imperative." Sarah explains that when the Temple was destroyed, its rituals were abandoned in practice but turn up as minutiae in supplementary passages inserted into the prayer book, often "mumbled at breakneck speed in synagogue."

She remembers Elizabeth Brewster's lines concerning her conversion to Judaism in her 80th year as not coming from Sinai or heaven, but "only human voices in an old shul/ singing Adom Olam/ ordinary daylight,/ bread, fruit, wine ..." She notes that Amichai "may have ceased to believe and practice, but he remembers."

Sarah says that you know a good poem if you remember it "as one remembers an individual face from a crowd," and if you want to say it out loud, savour it, share it, be puzzled by it. You also know a good poem if, when you've read it, you immediately want to write a poem of your own. She gives an example of a good poem: George Johnston's Cathleen Sweeping, about his three-year old daughter sweeping her room against dust, wind and gloom. She applies loving attention to the poem reminiscent of Molly Peacock's charm and intelligence in How to Read a Poem. When she later broadens her discussion of Johnston, she loses the intimacy.

Sarah says that what makes one a reader of poetry is the habit of, maybe the cumulative addiction to, "moments of electric response to a particular poem." Certainly one is grateful for the homeward lunges and electric moments in both Robyn Sarah's and Di Brandt's well-sculpted prose.

Two Short Winnipeg Free Press Reviews

The Winnipeg Free Press ran two short reviews of Biblioasis titles this past weekend, Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas, and Eric Ormsby's Time's Covenant.

Poet has a few surprises up her sleeve by Mauriece Mierau

Montrealer Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry (Biblioasis, 272 pages, $24.95) is stimulating and fiercely articulate. Sarah has published four full-length collections and appeared in numerous anthologies. There is much here that will surprise people who believe poetry is merely self-expression. Sarah advocates the memorization of poems in schools, for example, rather than misguided classroom 'analysis.' Her essay 'In Praise of Smaller Servings' will also raise eyebrows. She argues that Canadian books by individual, unknown poets are 'a form that alienates readers and buyers' and that such collections are 'mostly over-long.' She describes book awards as 'an annual lottery' where poets increase their chances by publishing as frequently as possible. " Little Eurekas also contains exemplary short reviews and appreciations that frequently make you want to rush to the bookstore.

According the the preface, Eric Ormsby's Time's Covenant: Selected Poems (Biblioasis, 288 pages, $29) is actually a collected volume. It brings together work from five books published between 1958 and 2006 and also some unpublished poems. Ormsby was a professor of Islamic studies at McGill University for many years, and wrote on the side. His bibliography is glamorous: he's appeared in the New Yorker, several Norton anthologies and the Paris Review. Many of the poems here are delicate, linguistically intricate observations of nature. 'Skunk cabbage ', for instance, describes "the foul magenta of its gorgeous heart," and 'Bee Balm' observes how "All night they cling sybaritic as pashas, / Their stiff golden fur dampened with pleasure.

Regaining a Feeling for Poetry

The Montreal Gazette devoted a page last Saturday to Robyn Sarah and her new book Little Eurekas. Alas, no internet link, and I'm not typing in the whole thing. But here's a taste:

"In a world where academic writings on poetry have drifted deeply into the realm of the theoretical and abstract, becoming completely inaccessible to the common reader, there is something refreshig and poignant in Sarah's "personal response" method. ... This is not traditional literary criticism; it invites us to respond as actively and viscerally to poetry as we do to music or the performing arts. ... Any book that reminds us of the power of poetry to inspire and transform, as Little Eurekas does, should be celebrated."

More Word launch photos...

Adrian introducing Eric Ormsby
Eric Reading
Adrian and Robyn
Eric Signing
Simon Dardick, publisher of Vehicule Press, with Jason Camlot


More launch photos, courtesy of Carmine Starnino.

Biblioasis at the Word

Adrian introducing the authors
Robyn Sarah
Eric Ormsby reading
Robyn Sarah reading
Eric, Carmine Starnino and guest celebrating outside the Word.

Photos, provided by Simon Dardick, of the Word launch of Eric Ormsby's selected poems Time's Covenant and Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas. Sounds like it was a packed, and wonderful event. Our thanks here at Biblioasis go out to Lucille and Adrian King-Edwards, who hosted this for us. From all accounts they did a magnificent job.

Eric Ormsby/Robyn Sarah Launch

Eric Ormsby will be in Montreal the last week of May to see his son graduate from McGill, so we're taking the opportunity to launch his Time's Covenant: Selected Poems. He'll be doing so alongside Robyn Sarah, who will be having the Montreal Launch of Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry. A wonderful and fitting pairing. What's more, Adrian at the Word -- who once upon a time, or so I've heard, ran one of the best poetry series in Montreal -- will be hosting it at the Word bookshop, at 469 Milton street. It will be happening Monday, May 28th, at 7:30 pm. Anyone within a day's drive of Montreal should try and be there. I'm going to try and make the trek from Windsor, if I can find someone to watch the kids.

For those who do not know, Robyn Sarah will be reading in Kingston this Wednesday, May 16th, at Novel Idea at 7pm.

Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas is back today from the printer, our first title of 2007. It looks wonderful, always a relief.

Here's the back cover bumpf:

A reader-friendly miscellany of essays, appreciations, reviews, and conversations, published in newspapers and literary magazines over the past ten years, and addressed to a broad audience, these are pieces that will resonate equally with the lay poetry lover and the specialist. With new material to contextualize individual pieces and weave them together, the collection explores all aspects of a life in poetry: reading it, writing it, teaching it, editing it, publishing it, reviewing it. In lively and lucid prose, Robyn Sarah reflects on her experience in all of these areas, sharing her convictions, her enthusiasms, her gripes, and her passion for the subject. A bonus section, "Collaborations," includes voices of other Canadian poets Sarah has engaged with, among them Steven Heighton, Eric Ormsby, Dennis Lee, and Robert Bringhurst. Little Eurekas is an invitation to poetry, a book full of variety and surprise.

Little Eurekas is now available for on-line ordering at the biblioasis website (www.biblioasis.com), and is available on amazon.ca, and from your favourite bookseller. (We now have national distribution, so if you've had trouble trying to order our books before, please try again: there should be no difficulty now.)

as Mike Barnes wrote as a comment to an earlier post:

read robyn sarah's upcoming book. i've read certain essays in magazines and can't wait to read the rest. to ensure i get a copy, i've ordered one in person, over the phone, and online. no need to emulate my goofball multimedia paranoia, but...find your way to a copy. robyn's humane and generous perceptions, her mindful responsiveness to poetry, may change the way you think, feel, respond to poems yourself. it's done that for me. she uses nudges more than cudgels, but that doesn't mean it's soft-focus "all is cool" stuff...on the contrary...she lays down strong lines you'll question, disagree with...but the point is, there's ample room in her essays for opinion, admiration, explication, love and loathing. not all will find their notions verified, but all may enter. that's rare i think. check it out.

Robyn, incidentally, reads at the Mad River Literary Festival in Conneticut next Wednesday, and at the Blue Met twice the week following.

Little Eurekas

Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry, will be back from the printer a week from tomorrow. It's a marvellous collection of essays, reviews, interviews, and appreciations. Robyn's criticism is really a wonderful thing: thoughtful, generous, elegant, and honest, it takes criticism back from the critics. It is written with a poet's eye and sensibility, with an understanding of the history of the form, and with obvious love. These essays also explain, in an accessible manner, how poems work, and this is, for me, at least, a rare thing: so many critics in this country seem more in love with their own voices and pronouncements than with engaging the work of the poet being discussed. This is not the case with Robyn's essays in Little Eurekas. Several of these essays have helped me find entry into the work of poets I'd not been able to appreciate previously: her essays on George Johnston and her review of August Kleinzahler stand out as examples. Her thoughts on publishing, editing and teaching poetry have changed how I will approach my job as a publisher of poetry going forward. Her reviews have helped to set the standard of what I want to see from my reviewers: honest consideration, elegance, passion, and a clear argument and explanantion.

Like any good collection of criticism, this is certainly a book that poets should read. But what separates it from so many that are published, it is also a book geared for general readers. It helps to take the fear out of approaching a poem for the first time, the fear of making a fool of oneself. Robyn is not merely another obscurantist; with these essays she pulls back the veil, makes things understandable. There's a lot of good old fashioned common sense here, a much maligned concept, but in Robyn's hands very powerful.

The pre-publication interest in this collection has been a bit astonishing. We've had close to a dozen requests for galleys and review copies. We go into the spring season knowing that there will be several timely -- and likely quite positive -- reviews. Robyn has been invited to read and teach at the Blue Met in support of this book. A couple of teachers have suggested that it might very well be something they put on their course list. It's all very exciting, and gratifying.

Here's a few choice quotes from Little Eurekas:

On poetics

“I believe that a true poem, whatever its subject or style, has a density of meaning, a felicity of language and an authenticity of feeling that cannot be faked—a mysterious synthesis that doesn’t happen every time a poet picks up a pen, but is born of some urgency of the moment.”

On publishing poetry

“I am all for the publication of healthy amounts of poetry—but if most new poetry releases go unread, unnoticed, uncritiqued, and unsold (even second hand!) surely something is not right about the way in which poetry is being published.”

“I have heard the view that publishing as much poetry as possible is a way of making sure good poems get published. In effect this asks the reader to do the editor’s job: to hunt for the gold in the ore, separate the what from the chaff. I don’t think readers can be blamed for not wanting to do this work.”

On editing poetry

“A ‘workshop habit’ can, I think, cultivate an entrenched insecurity about one’s own intentions as a poet—an inability to judge one’s own unfinished work, to decide when a poem is finished, and to stand by one’s choices in full knowledge of why they were made. Such knowledge is hard acquired, and it comes of long, solitary wrestling with one’s own texts.”

“A good poetry collection is not just a bunch of poems stuck between book covers. A good poetry collection is of a length commensurate with its substance, has been assembled selectively, and has been arranged intelligently. Thought and attention have gone into the presentation of the poems. The typesetting and layout departments have been given clear instructions. Nothing has been left to chance.”

On reviewing poetry

“Where are the reviewers who will recognize a poverty of metaphor in a poet’s work, and name it? Where are the reviewers who have anything at all to say about sound? who notice and are able to discuss a poet’s grasp and handling of form? or the niceties of diction in a poem? or the role that syntax, yes, good old grammar, the building-stuff of rhetoric, plays in this person’s poetics?”

On form in poetry

“Traditionally, poetry’s magic was partly formal, carried by metre, rhyme, and patterned structure. When these were abandoned for free verse, it became easier for people to call what they were writing “poetry”, but it did not make it easier to write good poems. This is not well understood today, even by people who should know: editors, publishers, critics.”

Incidentally, Robyn will be reading at the Blue Met April 25th, and teaching a 2 hour workshop on poetry Sunday, April 29th.