Feel Happier In Nine Seconds - Linda Besner (Coach House Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Feel Happier In Nine Seconds.  Linda Besner.  Coach House Books.  Toronto, Ontario.  2017.

Today's book of poetry feels, with no disrespect intended, that Linda Besner's Feel Happier In Nine Seconds reads like a future television sit-com that we are all going to love.  These poems whip by at a punchline per second pace.  And make no mistake, Besner is as funny as she is clever, she is also juxtapositionally jolly.

But it is not all fun and games in Feel Happier In Nine Seconds world.  Linda Besner isn't above putting a dramatic ending in the proceedings to make a point.  Besner has one of those elastic imaginations, a time-shifting ESP at her sonic fingertips and, as if that's not enough, these poems are outrageously entertaining.

Panting Under Ripped Parasol's Lacy Enclosure

In an elopement no one noticed,

              I fled the public lecture with my lover's

                              espadrilles. It was the pinnacle of the tulip season,

me hardly bulletproof but for the periwinkle

              in my buttonhole, my roll of crepe paper,

                             and the rupee bundle under my petticoat.

My chevalier lay with his picnic basket

              and pince-nez, sumptuously crumpling

                            the Riesling label.

'Don't parade on my rain,' he begged.

              But I've been propelled to unreason

                             like a spectral helicopter.

I'd rather be  LARPing. My utopia?

               A luau before yuletide ships

                             rammed the island. Before

puritanical undertakers in period drapery

               unclasped their popsicle rods

                             to dripple into the Pacific.

Though I sculpt my emancipation

              from a rockface trimmed with pelicans, I know

                             I'll long forever for my lover's lotioned elbows.

💫💫💫

This here is superior word play, mastery of a sort, Linda Besner is clearly two-hundred and thirty-two years wise inside of her disguise.  This is mature writing, perhaps Besner has been reincarnated?  If that's the case I'll pro-offer a scenario:  Besner is part Emily Dickinson, part Dorothy Parker, part Anne Sexton and with a modicum of my personal heroine, the under-rated and mostly unknown Linda Pyke, thrown in.  A better writer than Today's book of poetry wouldn't have to resort to comparisons to accurately report on Feel Happier In Nine Seconds with precision and flair.

There's no denying that sometimes reading Besner it feels as though she is playing with the rest of us mere mortals, patient, while laying out easy to follow tracks to her light speed wit and world view.  Besner even has a few bawdy, nee romantic frissons.

Midway through Feel Happier In Nine Seconds there is a psychedelic monologue of epic proportion, it is colour coded and almost certainly candy coated.  It's a bit like the first ride you ever took on a motorcycle without a helmet.  

Linda Besner will entertain you, guaranteed.

First Kiss

The famous nonconformist

whose camper van I left

my pants in says I'm a rube

who's never seen the inside

of an apple seed.

That I'm a shade

overruffling the lamp

he can see is turned

on. Imagine my surprise

when, stepping outside,

I ran bang into his parents'

cows. Bessie, does it hurt

when common trilliums

graze your personhood?

Your infinity sign of flies

reties my shoelace lows.

I raise a stranger's trace

to clear the nimbus

of snot from your mouth.

💫💫💫

Our office reading was splendid today.  We did finally hear from the newly wed Milo, our new silent partner, and Kathryn his bride, our former intern turned Jr. Editor, who will be returning from their pilgrimage/honeymoon in San Francisco and City Lights Bookstore.  Today's book of poetry was present at their lovely nuptials before they slipped away.  They chose to go small and quiet and asked that Today's book of poetry respect their wishes and not give anything away.  Done.

The rest of the Today's book of poetry staff wishes they all the best and will, of course, fete them properly upon their poetic return.

Linda Besner's Feel Happier In Nine Seconds was like chum to piranhas for the morning read.  We just made the office air churn with these wildly playful poems.

Vacuum Meets Harmonica

in a motel bed nostril to nostril

where panflute madrigals play

on golem bones, a numbing verve

squeals the SOS of unmoored clarinets,

ushers yellow leaves to hollow logs,

haunts a house with sixteen doors,

neighbours of ascending heights

borrowing hairdryers, borrowing ice,

and fans the scarves of spin doctors;

sunken foghorns cue the skirmishing

vapour of exhumed gladiators,

their helmets crested with spinning

weather vanes, a mummer's dirty

squall-nozzle flutters the blinds

while dervishes sweep the carpet

of its mackerel sky, then speed

to scatter a passing gale of mary's hail,

concuss the hockey team, and pull

through regal cyclone the heaviest

tractor, a humbling valve

that whirls off modesty,

two raging female ends,

that glorious moment when

💫💫💫

Today's book of poetry is no genius for telling you that Linda Besner has a certain grasp of her own genius, certainly a hand firmly on the ring.  Feel Happier In Nine Seconds is proper solid.  Besner can burn any recipe she wants.

Today's book of poetry is already setting the table in wait for her next adventure.  We are sure it is going to spectacular.

Linda Besner

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Besner is the author of The Id Kid, published in 2011 by Véhicule Press and named one of the National Post’s Best Poetry Books of the Year. Her poetry and journalism have appeared in numerous magazines.

BLURBS

Brave art, raw not cooked, a pure pleasure to experience.’ 

     – Globe and Mail

‘Besner's imagination doesn't appear to have an upper or outer limit – Reading her poems is a bad trip and a transformational experience.’ 

     – Ken Babstock

‘Besner is one of the funniest poets writing in this country.’     – National Post

Linda Besner

Poets reading their own poems.

"Moonlight on Komatzu Extractor."

Video courtesy: Howpedestrian

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ [Sharps] - Stevie Howell (Icehouse Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
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[Sharps].  Stevie Howell.  Icehouse Poetry.  An Imprint of Goose Lane Editions.  Fredericton, New Brunswick.  2014.

The Today's book of poetry offices are empty this morning.  The windchill it is -39C here in Ottawa - but get this, it has warmed up from yesterday.

Milo, our head tech and Kathryn, our new intern, both called in this morning with a case of the St. Valentine's Day Flu.  The same telephone number popped up on the screen for both calls, quelle surprise.

Happy, happy, happy Valentine's Day my poetry puppets.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is made up of sledgehammer blows and razor-sharp ax swings.  Get into it or get the hell out of the way, Stevie Howell cut Today's book of poetry to shreds.  At every turn of the page Howell was able to bust up a different corner of my heart.

If you talk Rip Torn, if you dedicate a poem to Jimmy Webb you damned well better know the way to Phoenix and Galveston and every damned thing in between.  And Howell does!  She knows everything in some dark twist of fate. [Sharps] is an attempt to go public with her larceny and after reading it you're going to want more.

No Good

There's only one thing you can do

With a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity

about human biology.

                                            You wake at sunset, yourself still,

a storm-eye of boredom, drink and LSD.

The only thing that 

                                             ever made sense, was tidy or clean:

how convenient and pre-emptive excuses are,

arising out of capitulated-to

                                             desires, imbibing, cussing, so many

'good times.'

We can assume you were estranged

from yourself that night. But this is even truer

sober. We can guess your past

                                             is a neighbour's unfinished basement,

and when you recline you feel his breath

on your freckles again.

                                             You are a victim too, and the violence

of your life is all you've ever known. It gulps to unwind

its weaving, unknot, and breathe,

                                              but undone can't be done

by doing.

Rabbit trapped, quickening,

you march a man through a thicket, where no one

can hear him plead.

                                              You crush by moving, mulch

the recently fallen autumn leaves, snap branches,

snag open the tear in your jeans.

Your panting.

His panting.

It's a kind of transfusion.

...

There is some dark, dank and dangerous territory in Stevie Howell's world and she is fearless.   Todays' book of poetry was dazed and confused several times before I cracked dawn at the end of Howell's [Sharps].  The language in these poems comes off of the page as though an Al Capone tommy-gun were spitting the words at you in a ratatatatatat exclamation, Howell spills it over the sides of the cup, she turns up the volume, more, more more more.

[Sharps] is exciting stuff  -  full stop.

Howell has the ability to both kick and kiss your ass at the same time.  She is a poetry contortionist.

Airporter driver, ex-European tour guide, through Canmore says,

Canmore smokeless coal afforded war destroyers their

stealth. Stealthier. Carved out coal beds,

the town eroded, as a cough strip-mines and deepens.

The mine was shuttered in the seventies.

An open-mouthed, boomerang valley. The Olympic luge

was going to save it all, they said,

but the price was dear. Up on that peak, it is coiled and asleep.

They used if for that film about

the Jamaican boblsed team, Cool Runnings.

Now the wealth is folks clamouring in who aren't allowed

to buy a home in Banff. They come to ski

or hunt and try to stay -- royalty, celebrities, you name it.

But you have to own a business in town.

One woman, a doctor, schemed and plotted: promised

she'd open a medical office. Council said yes.

She bought a chalet up the side of a hill, leased a storefront on Buffalo,

placed a desk and phone inside, and never crossed

the threshold again. A bitter pill.

They filmed Brokeback Mountain on the Three Sisters. Little Big Man.

See those rocks there, those fingers

of rock like ribs? They say it's a man reclined. The Edge was filmed

up on that range. A terrible film, we can agree.

Alec Baldwin, his grimace and spittle-coated crescendos, beseeching

Sir Anthony Hopkins: How the fuck are we

going to get out of this hellhole? At the free screening

for the residents, we screamed: Look behind you,

you idiot! At the highway!

They dug animal tunnels beneath the road, like a colliery, and paved

animal bridges above. Cougars stalk their prey

from the bridges. Chain-link along the road discourages animals,

but doesn't repel them completely. Years ago, the big fire

cut us off from Banff. Wilder than anything Hollywood could dream--

smoke hurling bears, wolves, elk out of the woods--

ursus jaws, saber teeth, antlers, nautilus claws,

fur for miles, pummelling the fence,

droving their own hearts into the wire.

...

TBOP would be remiss if we didn't mention the spectacular cover on [Sharps].  Julie Scriver has given us an almost perfect looking book.  Icehouse Poetry is making us all look better.

The best part of the Today's book of poetry world is opening up a book like Stevie Howell's [Sharps]  If you love poetry, and we do, books like this fill you with hope, not necessarily in the world, but in poetry's ability to give you a real experience.  Maryse Holder would have said "to give sorrow words."

[Sharps] is an ontological scat of particular beauty, it is a roller coaster ride worthy of St. Charles of Parker.  Howell isn't trying to impress on us a system for a better understanding of God or faith but instead is sharing her rather unpredictable exuberance to light up some dark corners.

Ballad of Blood Hotel

A film on Bill Callahan,

I was to be the soundwoman.

The director and I rode a limo through Manhattan,

rented my equipment, then he queried what

I thought of every suit jacket he tried on at Kenneth Cole Reaction.

He insisted I sleep in

his 1-bedroom apartment,

informed me we would share a room when we visited

Drag City. Why didn't I move to New York to become

his live-in assistant? He darkened when I said I had a concert ticket

and plans that evening.

He filmed me while muttering

'I might not let you go -- and who'd know if I didn't?'

I made a fake call to a 'friend' as proof

someone was waiting for me. There's footage of this.

Outside, from a sticky payphone,

I cold-called hotels getting 'no, no, no';

until a vacancy by the Hudson, a scoliotic mansion.

A man inside a bullet-proof terrarium, lined in wire,

with taped up chicken-scratch signs: No visitors in rooms.

TV show laugh tracks

ricocheted through the ingress.

Four locks. Inside, a double-hung window,

the faint waft of bleach. The sun-faded floor

highlighted a dark rectangle where the bed had once been.

A black cockroach

the size of a butterflied sausage

hustled across the plaster wall and clung

to the window screen. I pulled down the pane, trapped him

in the lower sash, and he body-drew a panicked infinity sign.

Sweat spurted

from my scalp as I staked

blattaria. Closet: One wire hanger.

Nightstand: Bible-less. Beneath the bed: Not one mote

of dust. Behind the headboard, instead of bugs, an inch-wide

ray of blood sprayed

down the wall, thick as a surveyor's

fluorescent cross on an arterial. A line

steadied by force, the splatter deviated from mean,

skewed left. An ax, no doubt, one blow, to a person prone.

I kneeled on the bed and wept

about Woody Allen, Joan Didion, even Billy Joel's

insipid hit, A New York State of Mind. A class action lawsuit

ought to be launched over the decades of artists' propaganda that lures

you to New York, only to find yourself using a rooming house's

communal washroom,

where a man is asleep or expired

in a shower stall, door agape, water pelting his rump

like an instagram of a foreign countryside. 'Well, that's one way to escape.'

Bill Callahan fired the filmmaker on the third day.

There's all this.

There's all this.

There's all this unedited tape.

...

Stevie Howell just won over some serious fans here at Today's book of poetry.  I can hardly wait to foist this upon the troops when they return tomorrow.  /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ [Sharps] is so good you should wear gloves, it might cut you. 

It got me right to the bone.

Stevie Howell

(photo by Neil Harrison)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stevie Howell’s poetry and criticism have appeared in publications such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, and National Post.
Her poems have been finalists for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2012 Walrus Poetry Prize.
She is from Scarborough, lives near the Mink Mile, and studies psychology.

BLURB

"These poems are coded emergency and emergent code; hail, cut glass, cathedrals, systems, skeletons, and scorched earth. Stevie Howell has found a fault line underwriting Reality and turned this fissure, this terrible brokenness, into a lens. She sees the queasy, exact particular and can phase from its contours into metaphysics and back before we sense the ground shifting. As astounding debut. An astonishing collection, full stop."

     - Ken Babstock, author of Methodist Hatchet

Stevie Howell

Live at the Thirty-fifth Taddle Creek Happening

(June 12, 2015)

video: Taddle Creek

gooselane.com

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane - (Harbour Publishing)

Today's book of poetry:
The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane.  Patrick Lane.  Harbour Publishing. Madeira Park, British Columbia.  2011.

Today's book of poetry has seriously floundered in attempting to write about Patrick Lane and his collected poems.

How do you write about your heroes?

This monumental collection is a pure object of beauty before you open the covers.  Harbour Publishing have done their boy proud.

Oh yes, the poetry.

The Image

Now that he was older
the artists had begun to paint him, and the photographers,
the clever ones with their miniature machines came
and arranged him in gardens and poolrooms, bars and verandas,
to capture the images of who he was, who they thought
he had been. Most of the artists were his age
but some were younger, beautiful young men,
and woman with large hands, their hair pulled back
tight, their clothes unruly. He liked them best.
He liked the way they would walk around him
after spending days and nights with his books,
his poems, the way they would stop and stare
while painting him, all his words in their minds,
all the suffering intact, precise and imaginable.

...

You can pretty much jump in anywhere to harvest the rich vein of work Lane has been pounding out since his work was first published in the sixties.  Twenty-seven books of poetry so far.

Just so you know, from Today's book of poetry perspective, Patrick Lane is the poet of the people. Horrible moniker to lay on anyone but in this case it fits.  His very approachable body of poetry is working class no-nonsense and as erudite as the golden tongued whisper of the angels.

Grief

He sat at the foot of the low bed and watched her cry.
It was not like Rome burning and it was not
like the spare fires he had built
when he was alone in the wilderness,
the ones he sat away from, the ones he put out
when he was tired of watching.
Her grief was of another kind, an event
that was merely ornament, a thing
that perishes as it is made, as a performance
in a northern town perishes line by line
with no one to remember it, something less than art
as time is less than merit. He had made her love him.

She hadn't wanted to. He had shaped her love
by shaping himself, giving himself to her
in the exactness of her integrity, becoming
her, and so, becoming less, their time
together an intimacy which was only imitation.
Sitting there he felt the same
as when he was a child and dressed
in his mother's clothes, his posturing
in front of her mirror, the inaccuracy
of that kind of dance.

He understood his gluttony, the wanting more,
his greed for her loss, the pain
she seemed to love more than him.
She did not tell him to go away, and
she did not call out to him.
What he had was what an observer has,
the man who gazes alone from a private box
protected by velvet curtains, a glass of good wine beside him,
the play going on and him with no rights, one way
or another, the man who watches with detachment
as a critic does, having no stake in the event.

...

I had the privilege of meeting Patrick Lane once.  It was back in the late 70's.  I was driving taxi in Peterborough and writing my little poems.  I got a call from my high school drama teacher, for some reason or another she was meeting Patrick Lane for drinks and was inviting me to join.  Of course I did.  Pretty sure I was able to get another young poet, Richard Harrison, to join me.

And that's the end of that story.

I've met Acorn, Purdy, Layton, Birney.  And just meeting those men took my breath away.  But Lane has always been the poet whose work paralyzed me with pleasure most.  Of all the giants, he is the giant that makes the most sense to me.

My intern disagreed.  You will not hear from that intern again.

Last Water Song

It is not the water you tried to find when you were young.
That was the water that lost you.
You climbed trees to look and the water was there.
You walked on the earth and the water was nowhere.
That was the losing water.
This water is the finding water.
It is cloud searching water.
When you are old it comes down.
It stretches out on the earth.
It says follow this water.
First water is woman water.
The belly of woman has this song.
This water was the first learning song.
This water is the last learning song.
It is the cloud under the earth.
Now you climb down roots to find this water.
Now this tongue is a root.
Open this mouth in the earth.
Now sing this water song.
Now you are the last water.

...

For many of us at the Today's book of poetry offices Patrick Lane sets the bar for the rest of Canadian poetry.  The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane should be an essential for every poetry collection in the country.

Patrick Lane

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

BLURBS

"Like the classic Buddhist, Lane finds in the recognition of life's horrors, or the terrible things men do to men and even more to other beings, the reason for an ultimate compassion, for a desire to nurture love where it survives."

     George Woodcock

"Patrick Lane is our most essential poet; tough, tender, fearless, and beautifully dangerous. For decades he has been our guide to darkness, and our provider of unexpected flashes of brilliant, almost blinding light. Now gathered together in one spot, the poetry of his life enhances and energizes us, and takes us to places we would never go on our own. Lane is a true Master."

     Jane Urquhart

"Lane's poems have a lucid, generous eye for the unsung and excluded, an abiding dignity in their rhythms of blind continuance, compromised peace."

     Ken Babstock

"...a breathtaking achievement of moral and poetic genius."

     Tim Lilburn

Patrick Lane @ 2008 Calgary Spoken Word Festival

harbourpublishing.com 

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