Fiddleheads

It's fiddlehead season here in the Maritimes, and I've had three helpings so far. The ones above were the crispest I found, floating in a big stainless steel bowl of water at Local Source on Charles Street in Halifax.

Fiddleheads being one of my favourite foods, I was thrilled when I happened upon Nicholas Catanoy's The Fiddlehead Republic (Hounslow Press, 1979) at a second-hand shop a few years ago. Although I wound up being less than enthusiastic about the long poem inside, I've saved the book both for the bright green fiddlehead motif on its cover (borrowed with permission from McCain Foods) and because it's inscribed to poet Robert Kroetsch, making it kind of an interesting CanLit specimen. Catanoy is a Romanian doctor and author who spent a few years in the late 1960s living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Fiddlehead Republic is a curious book, not unenjoyable but not really poetry either.



Under the title, on the half-title page in my copy, Catanoy has written "log book" which is actually the better way to approach the work. It's arranged as verse, but contains large excerpts from historic monuments, road signs and tourist brochures, and lists the contents of several museum collections. It reads like a car-ride, or multiple car-rides, through the province of New Brunswick, largely verbatim, which I suppose is why I have trouble with it as poetry.

Rereading this year I also discovered an unsourced line from Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," which I wouldn't have caught previously: "Down by one of the fish-houses an old man sits netting." Catanoy has hyphenated fish-houses, which Bishop didn't, and capitalized "down" which appears partway through the first line in Bishop's poem, but otherwise it's identical. Could it be a coincidence? I don't know.

In any case, reading it all again this week was a good reminder that I am overdue for a visit to the province where I ate my first fiddleheads – in fiddlehead soup with a side of fries on the Miramichi River with my friend Mary. In case I've piqued your interest, here's a short, foody sample from Catanoy's section on Hartland:

HARTLAND, Potato Blossom Festival

French fries & milkshakes
Bumpers of cars

Sweet flute music.

Jean-Brillat Savarin:
"...The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they nourish themselves."

The Antigonish Review (#165)

I have two poems, "December 31" and "The Afternoon Show," in the new issue of The Antigonish Review (#165). This issue also features poems by Tom Wayman, Emily McGiffin and Jesse Patrick Ferguson, to name a few I like, so worth picking up a copy.

Return of The Intern

I've been battling a real diehard of a cold the last couple of weeks and managing not much of anything outside of work, but I did note the other day that a blog that I was sorry to see go on hiatus is now back. The Intern got me through a bout of unemployment a couple of years ago when I feared I might never find work again. She's an unnamed now former intern with a large publishing house in New York. Or is wickedly inventive and possesses an uncanny knowledge of the innards of a such an establishment and of the industry in general. In any case, she is pretty funny and I am delighted to see she's back, now writing from a farm in California but still with her finger on the pulse of the weirdness that is my chosen field. Check it out, and I will be back with some real live content as soon as my sinuses stop throbbing long enough to allow for the assemblage of a coherent thought or two.

Skulking in San Francisco

I spent last week in California, mainly in San Francisco, where there is some very good book shopping to be had. Here's what I came back with:

From Aardvark Books (used) near the corner of Church and Market Street:
–Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. Just a little Vintage paperback, but Jeffers, a California poet, has been on my to-read list for a couple of years now, so I decided to pounce in case I didn't happen to see any other editions of his work during the visit. A few days later when we travelled south, I was able to read the poem "Morro Bay" in downtown Morro Bay while in view of the town's legendary rock. Yes, this is the sort of dorky tourism I go in for.
–An Oregon Message by William Stafford. The first poem is about writing in a journal and the last about riding a bicycle. Sold.

From Booksmith on Haight:
–Sorry, Tree by Eileen Myles. A California poet, and an enticing cover design from Wave Books.
–Praise by Robert Hass, who I suppose needs no introduction though I have read very little of his poetry.
–In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison, of Legends of the Fall fame and a fellow Arizona enthusiast. (Also poetry.)

From William Stout Architectural Books on Montgomery Street:
–An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill
–Anatomy of a Typeface by Alexander Lawson
–The Business of Books by André Schiffrin

William Stout is well worth a visit if you have any architectural, interior design, visual art interests. They have a small typography section downstairs and I spent most of my time there. The Eric Gill essay is, I understand, sort of a classic, and since Gill's Joanna is one of my favourite fonts and one of the small handful I can pick out in a lineup, he is big in my would-be-expert world. The Lawson book is an in-depth look at the history and composition of thirty typefaces. Perhaps my repertoire of ones I can identify will have grown a bit by the time I've finished reading it. The Schiffrin I had heard nothing about previously, but the subtitle, "How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read," suggests a topic that looms fairly large in my life, so I couldn't not get it.

The trip wasn't all books, though. My sister and I also visited the Heath Ceramics shop at the Ferry Building for made-in-California dishware and glass jars, which then had to be carefully transported around the state, then through three airports, and finally home.

Borrower's Card: Lillooet Public Library

A couple of years ago I set out to write a series of poems about libraries: the public library in my town, the book swap that may or may not still operate in its very casual fashion on Mayne Island, BC, the little branch of the Buenos Aires public library system in the neighbourhood where I lived for a month one recent spring. But these poems just didn't turn out the way I had hoped, so a few months back I finally gave them up as un-editable and moved them into my Discards folder where they've been hanging out with all the work I did in university, set to auto-detonate the day I die. Then I started reading Kerry Clare's book blog, Pickle Me This, where she has a semi-regular feature she calls "Wild Libraries I Have Known." Perhaps, I thought, my little failures would be happier transposed into prose. I sent Kerry a note telling her of my plan. Libraries are for everyone, she said (more or less).

In the mid-eighties the Lillooet Public Library was housed an a one-storey building at the corner of Main Street and 8th Avenue. 8th Avenue is on an incline, so from inside the library, near the twirling paperback racks, you could see the sidewalk and the legs of pedestrians disappearing up the hill. My mother was one of the librarians and so my sisters and I spent a lot of time looking out the window, perusing the stacks, and in all the places other kids weren't allowed to be, like behind the giant check-out desk on the rolly chair using the date stamp, and in the glassed-in staff room behind it eating snacks.

The children's area was next as you came in, boxed in on two sides by higher shelving, with a colourful carpet and slant-topped tables with Richard Scarry, Robert Munsch, and the rest displayed. The book I remember best, though, was actually a Via Rail promotion of some sort, with photos of a girl, maybe early twenties, travelling across the country by train, getting off in Banff, then Winnipeg, and Montreal. I would love to find a copy of that book. It obviously had a lasting impact on my travel preferences. Good marketing, Via.

Speaking of trains, in the middle of the library was a large glass case where holiday-themed displays were housed. And one snowy day when I was maybe five or six my mum packed all the candy from the Christmas display into a bag and my dad and I got to take it on the train with us to Vancouver. (Kids, if your parents ever ask you for career advice, librarian is a really good pick. The perks for you will be endless.)

Toward the back of the adult section, near the large-print editions – which I always thought were intended for kids who were ready for adult fiction but not the drop in font size that went along with it – had been created a little sitting area with a couple of vinyl-covered armchairs and a reading lamp. I remember it as surprisingly civilized back there, and along with the fiction, I looked forward to the armchair and lamp that might go along with adulthood. Still waiting on the armchair.

Then, in the late eighties they moved our high school to a new building and transformed the old building into a rec centre. The library was relocated to this new complex, and it's never been quite the same for me.

PrairyErth

William Least Heat-Moon
Houghton Mifflin (1991)

I bought this on one of my last visits to The Odd Book in Wolfville, N.S., before moving to Halifax almost a year ago. The Odd Book is relatively small, but it's well organized and specific without being snobbish. There are dedicated Classics, archaeology and linguistics sections, for example, but also a wall of mass-market mysteries and a good stash of Archie comics. A friend of mine once said, before coming home for a summer while doing his Master's degree, that the only place in the Valley he wanted to work was The Odd Book and that if he couldn't work there he wasn't really sure what he was going to do. They weren't hiring. I'll have to check and see if he's over that yet.

On this visit I came to the cash with William Least Heat-Moon’s first book, Blue Highways, in my hand, and the store’s owner, Jim Tillotson, steered me toward PrairyErth on the new arrivals shelf. I read the first couple of chapters soon after, but was just too buried in the minutiae of moving into a new place and learning how to be a working person again – lunch-packing, for instance, eluded me for the first few weeks – and so I put the book aside. Then, after finishing The Great Railway Bazaar back before Christmas I found myself still in the mood for non-fiction but wanting something a bit more…stationary, and PrairyErth beamed from the shelf, looking fat and happy and entirely unscathed from its previous rejection.

The book is subtitled (a deep map) and that's exactly what it is. Heat-Moon went to Chase County, Kansas, a place where not much is thought to happen, and just inched his way through it, sometimes walking, sometimes rooting in courthouse records and the journals of those who settled or passed through, and sometimes waiting, in the grass or in a bar or in his van, to see what does happen. Some of his research has to do with particular routes through the county – railroads, secondary highways and paths. In one of my favourite sections he tries to uncover the Orient Line, a railway that was to have connected Kansas City and China, via Mexico, but that he begins to suspect may be no more than rumour.

Kansas is more or less the dead middle of the (contiguous) United States, and it's also where east becomes west, or vice versa. It's got the last large expanse of tallgrass prairie in the country, and one of the recurring elements in PrairyErth is the position of various people Heat-Moon interviews on the proposed Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve (which was successfully established a few years after the book's publication). It's a contentious issue for Kansans who still dream of a return to the days when a viable living could be made working prairie rangeland. In one chapter Heat-Moon recounts a conversation he has with essayist Wes Jackson in which Jackson outlines his vision for a new kind of agricultural community for a post-oil future, a model suited to the current economic reality in Chase County: relying and putting a greater value on human labour and keeping more of the products of that labour in the local area.

PrairyErth is of a piece with some of John McPhee's writing, in terms of the steady, on-the-ground chipping away at history, geology, ecology, economics, and ... I don't know, maybe happenstance, and the implied conviction that these need to be studied together. My one disappointment with it was that the parts I expected to like the most I actually liked least. These are where the author examines the effect of the prairie on his mindset. I travelled across Montana and North Dakota by train a couple of years ago and I guess had secretly hoped to find a closer articulation of my own experience of that landscape. The sentiments seem quite genuine, but the language he used often left me cold. Walking kept wandering into dreaming and into baggy statements about time. Given how much I like the rest of the book I'm tempted to say this is really a matter of vocabulary. Or a cultural divide, and I am just being ignorant.

Or maybe it's all the solitude. In the final chapter Heat-Moon and a friend, a fellow writer the (now) late Clive Scott Chisholm, embark on a multi-day walk to try to find the Kaw Trail, a path through the county, once travelled by the Wind People tribe when they were relegated to territory south of their original lands. Together the pair bounce ideas about the prairie off each other that to me are much more accurate and interesting than much of Heat-Moon's deeper solo musings. With Chisholm Heat-Moon has a sympathetic ear (Chisholm himself wrote a book about a long walk he did following the Mormon route from the Missouri River to the Great Salt Lake Valley) and someone to jog him out of the most earnest of his ruminations. There is a Tent Dwellers-like repartee here, both in terms of the wit and a particular brand of checked intuition. It was a good note to go out on, I thought.

Kay Ryan

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to try to memorize some poems I like. I don’t have a notion yet of whether this will necessarily improve my enjoyment of them, but I’m interested to see what the process will be like.

Although the obvious choices might be old favourites, I decided to make it all new with a new-to-me poet, American Kay Ryan. Like many, many other people, I had not heard of her before she took up her post as poet laureate (2008–2010). She’s stayed out of the mainstream – she lives in Marin County, California, and made a living teaching remedial English at the local college. When she was twenty-nine she took a cross-country cycling trip to try to decide whether or not to continue writing poetry. Somewhere in Colorado she posed herself the question “Do you like it?” and responded yes and then went from there. If you want to know more about her writing life, there’s a good interview with her here, from the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.

Her poems are about asking the right questions, too. What is this? I thought it was this, but instead it’s this. You thought it was this, but I think maybe it’s this. From The Best of It: New & Selected Poems (2010) I bookmarked six I liked best, on first read, and have decided to start the memorizing with "Easter Island." Once I've done that I have the ukulele and Spanish to learn, and more nuts and legumes to eat. Should be a busy year.