abby paige.writer.actor

McGill-Queen’s University Press recently released Failure’s Opposite, a collection of essays on the work of Canadian poet A.M. Klein, edited by Sherry Simon and Norman Ravvin. Klein was ahead of his time, using his mixed Jewish/francophone/anglophone background to develop a hybrid poetic language that Quebec English-language poets are just beginning to pay tribute to today. I’m excited to get my hands on a copy. Klein opened a creative door for me when I immigrated to Quebec a few years ago. His poems invited me to develop my own sense of identity in Montreal’s diverse linguistic landscape. I look forward to reading more about him and his work.

I’m also excited to be included in a chapbook compiled in conjunction with the book’s release. Poet Jason Camlot invited rewritings of Klein’s iconic poem The Mountain and collected the resulting work into a handsome little volume called, “After The Mountain: The A.M. Klein Poetry Reboot Project”. I was so delighted that my poem was selected, and since only 125 versions of the chapbook were created, I thought I’d share it here:

MAKING MOUNTAINS

The collision of tectonic plates
folds the Earth upon itself.

Blocks of rock slide along
and, lifted or tilted, pile up.

Magma pours over the Earth’s surface
then cools and hardens, or rises
from its mantle and lifts the overlying
layers of dirt to make a dome.

An uplifted plateau erodes.

The Earth’s crust erupts into a meadow,
a pebbly brook, buttercups. The bronze
tits of Justice.

The easy threes of trilliums thread dark
green, green, and white through the Earth,
beside bloodroots — Chokecherry black!
Terror, holiday!

To make a mountain bleed cross light
over streetcars, pissabed dandelions,
coolie acorns, green prickly husks of chestnuts
and, beneath a mat of grass, root
all the Os and amber afternoons.

Find a single sentimental bench, soften
the brass of a band with dark and distant
mood. Tell the loved girl
you love her. In the layers of a mountain
make a man a kind of history.

By Abby Paige
From “After The Mountain: The A.M. Klein Poetry Reboot Project Anthology”, Jason Camlot, Ed., Synapse Chapbook Series, 2011.

Poetry doesn’t have to tell a story, but I must admit, I like it better when it does. It doesn’t have to be a linear story; the story doesn’t need to have characters or an ending. But I always enjoy a poetry collection more if I feel that the poems are somehow knitted together.

Gabe Foreman’s “A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People” seemed likely to be held together by a thread. I look for it in my review, up on Rover now.

When I first moved to Canada, I went on a crusade to introduce myself to as much contemporary Canadian poetry as possible. Considering that I have spent the vast majority of my life less than an hour from the US/Canada border, I was a bit chagrined to realize how few Canadian writers I had ever read, and I went about remedying the problem with the kind of dedication that I think only an immigrant would be capable of. Isn’t the convert always more dogmatic than those born into the faith?

Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht was among the books that made an early impression. The poems had a strange ability to make a kind of meaning that you could only really see out of the corner of your eye; sort of like Ashbery, but less stream-of-consciousness and decidedly more Canadian. In his new (fourth) collection, Methodist Hatchet, Babstock goes deeper. The poems have less humour than I remember and greater obscurity. Are these the signs of a poet maturing into a master, or of poetry retreating further from the average reader? I dunno. My full review is up on Rover now.

I don’t understand why Hollywood insists on marketing movies by comparing them to other movies: “It’s Die Hard meets 2001: A Space Odyssey!” “It’s this year’s Shindler’s List!” Well, I do understand why, but I don’t like the idea that the only way to describe something positively is to compare it to something else that was previously good. It feels lazy and presumptuous and insulting to my intelligence.

Book sellers do something similar when they group together all the books about women who overcame an addiction by blogging or pets who buoyed their owners through cancer treatment. As though the quality of a book is determined not by the quality of the writing but by the combination of ingredients thrown into the plot. Publishers and reviewers to it, too, when they slap something on a book jacket about if you loved this, then you’ll love that, as though there can only be a few kinds of writers and familiarity is the greatest virtue. After all, who would want to read something that didn’t remind them of something else?

When I first picked up Joshua Trotter’s debut collection, All This Could Be Yours, and saw that its jacket described his poems as “the bastard love children of Frost and Stevens,” I kind of wanted to puke. Really? Seriously? Could you come up with a more grandiose comparison? I mean, even if the comparison makes sense (and once you’ve read this book, it does), can you set a reader up with a more out-of-proportion expectation of a book?

I resisted the temptation center my review of Trotter’s book entirely around this rant. Instead I tried to focus the review, which is up now on Rover, on what makes the poems strong in their own right. Perhaps a book can be extraordinary not because of who it pays homage to or how it lives up to the ridiculous expectations set out on its cover, but because it side-steps them and finds a way to succeed on its own terms. Trotter is not Frost or Stevens, though his debts to them are in some ways apparent. Trotter is a good poet because he has his own voice. That ought to be enough of a blurb.

I’m proud and more than a little bit humbled that my poem, “The Undefended Border,” has won the 2011 Founder’s Prize from RHINO, a Chicago-based poetry journal and collective. I’ve admired their work from afar for a while now; I don’t get to Chicago too often, but their furious poetic activity certainly makes me wish that I did. For a taste of their feisty style, check out Editor-in-Chief Ralph Hamilton’s recent blog post, “I am for a moment made more alive,” which describes what makes a good poem worth reading.

RHINO’s choice of this particular poem of mine is especially meaningful to me, not only because it’s the title poem of my manuscript, but because it is a sort of song to my great-grandparents. They immigrated from Quebec to Vermont in the early 1900s, and three generations and almost a century later, in 2008, I immigrated back in the other direction. The poem explores the borders we cross for love, for family, for preservation and transformation, and how crossing borders erases them. I’m happy to say that “The Undefended Border” will appear in RHINO’s 2011 Issue, as well as on their website. I’ll post the link as soon as it exists.

Addendum, April 20, 2011: The link to the issue is here.