Windsor poet-cum-panel-moderator Robert Earl Stewart talks to Our Windsor's Michael Michalski about our upcoming poetry criticism event:
"One of the things that’s always up for discussion...is whether or not Canadian poetry is too Canadian, too in love with its own provincial sensitivities and sense of identity such as the pervasive Man vs. Nature theme featured in a lot of Canadian poetry, whether the poetry be historical or contemporary...The point (the panelists) make about this brand of Canadian nature poetry is one I tend to agree with: that it’s distinctive because it’s not very interesting. Which is not to say there are no interesting Canadian poets. Far from it. It’s just that the interesting ones have managed to transcend our literary fascination with the whole ‘True North Strong and Free’ ethos of surviving in the wilds against all odds. Though, for better or worse for poetry’s sake, it’s part of our heritage.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry, with Zachariah Wells, Anita Lahey, Jason Guriel and Robert Earl Stewart takes place @ Biblioasis Bookstore, Saturday March 22nd, 4:30PM.
Join Shō Art, Spirit & Performance and Biblioasis for a lecture by Dr. Lauren Friesen, Professor of Theatre at UMichigan-Flint in anticipation of Shō's upcoming production of the play RED.
Tickets for RED are also available at Biblioasis.
ROTHKO: A LECTURE
THURSDAY MARCH 28
7 PM, BIBLIOASIS
1520 WYANDOTTE ST. EAST admission is free.
RED is a Tony Award-winning two-man play by John Logan about the art of abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko.
Lauren Friesen is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of Michigan-Flint. He is a recipient of the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion for "Excellence in Theatre" and the Indiana Theatre Association's award for his "Outstanding Contribution to University Theatre." His recent publications include a translation of Hermann Sudermann's The Storm Komrade Sokrates (University Press of America) and the essay "Ritual, Race and Reconciliation in Anna Deavere Smith's Play Fires in the Mirror," (Munster: LIT Verlag). His monologue "Still Waiting for Rachel" was published in Monologues for Men by Heinneman Press. He just completed the translation of a novel...But Stones Can't Speak by the holocaust survivor Carlo Ross. In April 2007, Vertigo Productions in Flint produced his latest 2-act play Rothko.
Over at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Mary Jo Anderson weighs in about Light Lifting:
‘I’M OBVIOUSLY thrilled and surprised and almost stupefied that this little book made it through everything to get on the Giller (long) list," said Alexander MacLeod about his debut short story collection Light Lifting.
There is nothing little about this book, except perhaps the small, independent press Biblioasis, which published the book.
Though this is MacLeod’s first book and he is up against some veteran writers for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, including Douglas Coupland and Jane Urquhart, he has been writing for almost as many years as them.
"The first story was completed in 1997 so it took me 13 years to get to this point. I’ve been writing since I was in high school and I published my first story when I was 21 years old, a long, long road to this destination" said Macleod during an email interview.
Miracle Mile, the first story in this superb collection, opens with the conjuring of a moment in history. "This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear."
Mikey and his lifelong friend Burner are in limbo waiting for the start of a track meet where they are to compete in the 1,500-metre race. Television stations endlessly air the grisly visuals of Tyson’s "rawest impulse;" the channels "churn it around and around, the same thirty-second clip of the fight. It was like watching the dryer roll clothes."
Before every race, Burner will always "zone out and go way down into himself and stay there perfectly silent for long stretches, staring off to the side"
Mikey accepts Burner’s behaviour: "When you get right down to it, even the craziest ritual and the wildest superstition are based on somebody’s version of real solid logic."
There is a moment mid-stride when a runner has both feet off the ground. In each of the seven stories in this collection, the lives of the main characters are illuminated to reveal those pivotal moments where nothing is solid beneath their feet.
Mid-air can mean either falling or flying — and the stories have characters experiencing both as the action spirals through the past, present and towards implied future.
What is true in this story is true in all the stories — MacLeod’s subtle structuring embodies both the themes and the emotions of the narrative. The oscillating time frames bring us to and away from the threshold again and again. And the worlds in which we are immersed are so concretely and completely realized and so visceral.
It's been a busy weekend for Light Lifting, with major reviews in the Globe, Post, and Halifax Chronicle Herald -- which I'll link to in another post -- and a profile in the Toronto Star. The last time a first book of short stories has received this kind of immediate coverage was .... I'm not sure when it was.
Jeet Heer in the Post writes:
As a compulsive yet sedentary reader, I found this passage superb, appropriately lean, muscular and punchy. But I’m not even a jogger let alone a sprinter, so I couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of MacLeod’s details about the running life until a Google search took me to a short review in Canadian Running of MacLeod’s story when it had earlier appeared as a chapbook. The runner-reviewer enjoyed the story as much as I did, finding it a chilling portrayal of the hyper-competitive milieu of mile runners.
Almost all MacLeod’s stories revolve around people being bustlingly active at work or play. His characters swim and play hockey, they lay bricks and they build cars. All these exertions are described with such knife-sharp precision and finesse that your own muscles may start tensing up as you read them.
He is an unexpectedly physical writer; given his background, I would have expected him to be a more bookish writer than he is. His father is the writer Alistair MacLeod, a retired English professor. Alexander teaches literature at St. Mary’s University in Halifax. But unlike other writers ensconced in the Ivory Tower, he has an imaginative reach that extends far beyond the academy.
One of the stories in this book is about a graduate student; most portray blue-collar workers, many of whom live in the Detroit-Windsor automotive belt.
An undertow of anger tugs at more than a few of them, occasionally surfacing into violence. Many of the men have a need to prove themselves, either through barroom bluster or reckless acts of derring-do. In Miracle Mile, the runners aren’t content to compete against each other on tracks, they also play a game of chicken by running through the tunnel beneath the Detroit River, risking being crushed by an oncoming train. In one tense passage, a runner manages to stay only a few seconds ahead of death: “Burner was there charging toward me, the only dark space in front of the light. He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage.”
What makes Light Lifting an impressive collection is its variety. I thought I had MacLeod nailed as an explorer of gritty masculinity and adrenalin-fuelled anger. But he can also be surpassingly delicate.
Wonder About Parents starts unpromisingly (and unappetizingly) as a tale about a family struggling with lice, but splinters off into an engrossing examination of parental worry and the constant anxiety with which any guardian of children must live. In Adult Beginner I, MacLeod demonstrates he can write persuasively from a woman’s point of view. A young woman, long fearful of water, learns to swim, a training that parallels her growing personal confidence but also her increasing willingness to embrace danger, if not death.
