The Burden and the Baggage

Puppies fighting: their legs aren't even strong enough to hold up their bodies.The PUPPY FIGHT and What’s BeyondA proposition: there are two levels operating simultaneously in the on-going, everlasting Great Canadian Poetry Review Debate (GCPRD): the baggage and the burden. We carry each in one hand. The baggage level is dominated by short spurts of energy directed toward members of the "opposite camp." It comes from the heart and its digital medium encourages its first-thought-best-thought rawness. At this level, caps lock keys are pressed, digital friendships severed, and severe accusations are lightly encoded into the digi-sphere.The levels are hard to differentiate. They spring from the same tension. But we may identify a difference. Baggage is something we carry, discard, and are done with. We get it off our chest. A burden is an anchor that can't be pulled up, only dragged. We might not be able to separate it completely from the baggage, but its perspective runs deeper.Many people check out of the whole debate at the baggage level. And why not? Poetry reviews just aren't worth getting that angry about, and whatever bullshit's in them doesn't really affect our ability to read the poems themselves. Those who hang in, though, are intense about it. Many would say too much so. Phoebe Wang has called it “exasperating, yet engrossing.” I think she’s right. This is a noisy mess of a public debate, but it serves a larger dialogue, and it’s heartfelt. It’s hard to turn away.

~

When the GCPRD rests on disagreements of taste, spats over this or that version of the canon, or the inherent value of negative reviews—this is the PUPPY FIGHT. This is fine; it’s a natural in-group conversation that needs to happen. But it can go overboard: the Traditionalist/Avant-Garde debate is mostly unbearable, but even this spat reveals some fascinating insights. And there, the underlying issues radiate beyond the immediate subject matter that animates them.Donato Mancini argues in his CWILA interview that the "issues of gender representation that CWILA wants to address ... are directly related to valuations of poetry in masculinist terms, and these are necessarily related to broader issues in feminist struggle outside the literary field." The same could be said of Mancini’s own argument in You Must Work Harder to Write a Poetry of Excellence. There, he's taking aim at a review culture that he claims is conservative and actively denies and discredits divergent voices, including post-modernist and avant-garde poets, as well as women and minorities.If he’s right, review culture is easily connected to the broader culture in which it’s nested and the GCPRD becomes both a microcosm of ongoing, history-altering cultural projects and a small, important part of those projects. I say 'important' largely because if the poets cannot work these issues out, what chance do the actual legislators of the world have?But what if that’s not the case? What if the claims of exclusion are just overblown instances of the PUPPY FIGHT? How exactly to decipher the baggage from the burden? At times, the distinction is clear, but grey areas abound. Carmine Starnino has labeled some of the accusations of misogyny against him “hyperbolic bickering,” and there is definitely some of that going on. But it was also easy to predict the raised eyebrows at Starnino’s CV2 interview, in which he suggested CWILA might be “panicky” over the unbalanced statistics they’ve unveiled.And so, one critic’s connection to an historical burden is another’s run-of-the-mill disagreement blown out of proportion. Likewise, profound, heavy truths can be claimed in caps lock on a comment thread, and high rhetoric can mask false, dishonest, or base arguments. Only our imperfect and impressionable judgment can distinguish between the levels.

~

Puppies fighting: that little guy on the bottom looks like he's getting a massage.Let us take a case in point. Helen Guri has taken issue with Jason Guriel’s review of Alice Oswald’s Memorial. Guri is bothered by what she sees as the critic's inability to posit Oswald as a "coherent actor with credible motivations," and by an overarching "subtext" to Guriel’s review, which emerges via Guriel’s word and metaphor choices. Guri is essentially claiming that Guriel allows gender bias to colour his review, either consciously or unconsciously.Guri’s essay meets the issue on the burden level. She’s not worried about poets or their fans’ feelings being hurt, because that’s some PUPPY FIGHT shit. In that case, disagree, refute the argument, and move on. In my reading, Guri is willing to do that. What she is unwilling to let go of is the suspicion that something more troubling is happening in Guriel’s review.But is it? Or is Guri overstating the case, or presenting it through a lens particularly suited to expose a gendered subtext? Carmine Starnino has found fault in her argument, and Stewart Cole has countered Guri’s argument pretty thoroughly, and I’d say effectively, without dismissing the importance of the points she raises. His point is not that Guriel is innocent of “distorting” Oswald’s text, but rather that “Guriel and Guri’s texts both distort” their target texts, and while Guriel takes liberties, the underlying close reading he performs is more or less accurate, while Guri’s contains a bit too much “ingenuity.” Guri herself, meanwhile, acknowledges that the “gender body stuff” she sees as problematic “leapt out at me,” but that “perhaps … you don’t see this.” As the Pope said, “who am I to judge?”

~

This is a discussion well worth having and may be impossible to finish. Between the review by Guriel, the essay by Guri, the responses to each, and the digital noise engulfing the whole thing, there are so many opportunities for interpretation that the argument can never really end. All the actors in this debate are poets adept at both creative writing and creative reading, so the interpretations that frame it will inevitably involve uncertainty. Cole does about as good a job as can be done in his close reading of the multiple levels in play here, but even he remains somewhat uncertain.Shit—this uncertainty applies to language itself, and these are poets we’re talking about. Wordplay is dangerous, in the reading and the writing of it.With that in mind, Guri’s advice to “err on the side of caution” strikes me as apt, not because I think critics should shy away from speaking their mind, but because readers of poetry are going to read into your comments and you don’t want to misdirect them from your main point, right? You can’t be sure of the way you’ll be read, but maybe you can actively avoid tipping off gender cues that make most people at least consider if you’re biased.Or don’t. Because who’s to say, really, what you truly mean. We should be used to this. Neither moral nor judgmental uncertainty is new. Even Starnino's "conservative" aesthetic stops short of demanding a rigid consistency, instead demanding "more shaped and sonorous forms." The ambiguity in that statement may be its most important attribute.

~

Maybe we can embrace that ambiguity while putting down our baggage and meeting this issue on the burden level. If we are able to let down our baggage—if we cut our anger short, and are careful and diligent in our judgments and accusations—we are left with one hand free. But what to do with it? We can't eliminate the burden, except for a lazy, fake happiness. We can grab the burden with both hands and carry it through our work as soldiers through a righteous struggle that, yes, involves baggage. Those who do so—you should buy them their next drink.Or, leave that hand free to live. Let it roam. The world is dire, always has been, and always will be. It is full of burdens. We should feel free to confront these injustices. We have little opportunity to reject them. All the more reason to discard your baggage, to travel as lightly as is possible, to engage in serious issues when they truly arise, but to back off when we can afford to.Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the GCPRD strikes me as wasteful. So many brilliant minds duking it out in the ideological arena while so much goes left unsaid. We need some of that, sure, but not nearly as much as we get. We need a better balance here.Maybe take Helen Guri's poetry as an example. Her first book, Match, invests heavily in the joys of sound, narrative and humour, yet her protagonist is deeply sad. The latter is a burden Guri could not avoid; she had to hold it with at least one hand. She left the other free to grasp beauty and enjoyment. Wise, I think. One just might get by that way.