Vol 1 No 1 2007
Airstream Land Yacht
Airstream Land Yacht Reviewed by Christopher Doda |
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In “The Essentialist,” the opening poem of his third collection Airstream
Land Yacht, a moment of cognitive dissonance at seeing a young soldier
reading Thoreau spurs Ken Babstock into a poetic manifesto of sorts: “The
singing’s not/to record experience, but to build one viable/armature
of feeling over time.” Much of this book focuses on the intersection
between the imagination, particularly the poetic imagination, and experience.
And as the poems attest, Babstock is convinced that the poetic imagination
shapes experience; it does not generate experience. While he is willing
to write out of his own life, he is keenly aware that autobiography must
be run through the dual mills of imagination and poetic craft to produce
poetry.
The
book is divided into four parts: “Air,” “Stream,” “Land,” and “Yacht,” which
also contains the title poem, about a child’s toy wagon. Written
in childish meter (This big old wagon’s slow, it’s slow/My
beautiful wagon’s/slow//It shines a silver sheen, though/its silver
sheen a-glow), “Airstream Land Yacht” recalls a time when a
person’s thought processes are both crude and pure. If, as he told
Toronto’s eye weekly in March, Babstock has become interested
in theories on the origins and unordered nature of human consciousness,
it explains his decision to scatter six unrelated poems with the same title
in one collection, offering an atypical leitmotif to the proceedings. Each “Explanatory
Gap” focuses in some way on the interiorality of the mind and its
lack of general coherence. In the second one, he writes:
The cracks,
the jinks, what won’t cohere or blend but bends, fissures,
falls to the fields
or becomes figure. A visual percept is degraded light,
highlighting the unreliability of memory in the creative process. In “Expiry Date” he writes, “It’s what we think we saw that sticks, never what we see,” downplaying reality in favour of the perception of reality as the final arbiter in the act of creation. “Anxiety in Vigelund” is caused by culture shock in Oslo’s Gustav Vigelund sculpture park where
The energy density of empty Space
has actually been measured
and found to be valueless—
not of
no value
revealing that the invisible and intangible hold value by virtue of being
blank and therefore a repository waiting to be filled by the poet’s
imagination.
Indeed,
Babstock’s insistence on the unreliability of memory and the fluid
nature of consciousness finds a mirror in numerous poems that point the
reader to the act of writing itself, drawing more attention to artifice
than he has in previous work. An adolescent recollection of lost friends
in “Hungerford Note” is interrupted by “I am writing
by candlelight…” an artificial, almost Romantic, moment of
contrived spontaneity. In his attempts to describe “The Tall Ships
in Kiel Harbour,” he stumbles over the setting of the Germanic shoreline
before even getting to the seafaring vessels:
A
spectral mist had curtained the port and spread,
silken,
dewy over the crowded park grounds.
Can
we say spectral mist, or even mist, wasn’t
it
more like greased Baltic fog?
In these and many other poems (like “The Brave,” “Stencil
Artist,” and “So Hush A Mask”) Babstock relies on the
aspect of performance in writing as he injects himself, his act of cognition,
into the moment as it is experienced.
This
is not to say that the book is a navel-gazing exercise; many poems grapple
with the complexities of the external world as well. Babstock’s clean
language and wily mutation of fixed forms give Airstream Land Yacht some
strong and amusing moments. “Tarantella” is pure fun and if
you’ve ever wondered just how many words rhyme with the title (Babstock
finds around 20), this is the poem for you. As in the aforementioned “Anxiety
in Vigelund,” the confrontation between Europe’s wealth of
history and Babstock’s ‘naïve’ Canadian sensibility
shows the strengths and deficiencies of both. “The World’s
Hub” is a loose version of a poem by Italian film director and poet
Pier Paolo Pasolini. His ‘translation’ is more an enactment,
a Poundian rendering of a work into another time and place that summons
the spirit of the original, rather than its literal meaning. In his interpretation,
suburban Toronto doubles for the outskirts of Roma; the world’s hub “improbably” is
Malton, an ironic substitute of the local for the pan-national, the cosmopolitan.
The tone is one of bored menace and disinterest, and ably captures the
state of hopeless yearning that permeates such places. Part way through “Miles
of Europe went by, and then it was dark” the European narrator recounts
how
He
took a photo
in
Berlin of Hegel
on
a pedestal;
it
was evening, and bluish
and
his face
developed
wrong
before coming to North America. The anonymous ‘he’ represents
history and culture that finds itself moored in Canada, eventually to become
hobbled and lame, “alone, one leg is gone,” showing one place
burdened by too much culture, the other with so little that culture cannot
likely survive.
All
told, I suspect Airstream Land Yacht is a transitional work for
Babstock from his usual edginess to a more meditative style that we’ll
see in the future, less Al Purdy than Al Moritz. It’s a bit of a
shame though, seeing as Purdy (an obvious influence) did not make the leap
from reactive to reflective poet until he was in his 60s, that we could
not enjoy the angry energetic young man awhile longer.
Christopher Doda is a poet, critic and editor living in Toronto. His first collection of poems, Among Ruins, was published by the Mansfield Press in 2001 and he is currently finishing his second, tentatively titled Aesthetics Lesson.