Or maybe it’s just one of those assumptions you make about worlds you know you’ll never reach yourself: the thing I’m not supposed to have must be what’s most worth having.
5.
THERE IS A PIECE by Jim featured in the fall issue of
Atlantica
. It’s a review of Dermot Schofield’s new collection of poetry,
Malignant Cove
. I seem to recall that Schofield failed to find a home on either the Huckster or the Real Thing list at the beginning of the year. It looks like he’s come down solidly on the side of the hucksters with this book.
Jim—I don’t know any other way to put this—he wipes his ass with Schofield.
Perhaps this is what passes for talent in the perfumed salons of the Toronto literary elite, where running low on cognac is the closest anyone gets to hardship and the professor-poets dally in the faculty-club cloak room with colleagues’ wives in the attempt to graft some semblance of passion and genuine human feeling onto their airless, obtuse existence. This is no “garden” of “stay” as Schofield professes, although it is indisputably stagnant and fecund—much like a swamp, or a diseased animal—the perfect breeding ground for pestilence and infestation. God grant Canadian poetry be inoculated against the wasting illness that is Dermot Schofield.
I am in the library, poring over the new journals as I always do—feeling sick and envious and excited by them as I always do—wanting to be able to turn a page and see my own name under something so unspeakably brilliant it irradiates the page. I rip out
Atlantica
‘s subscription card and stick it in my notebook. So this is the Canadian literature of my time! No more trees and rocks and oceans and lakes and prairies and farms, but barricades. And battle lines—bothintellectual and aesthetic. Upper Canadian snottitude versus hard-nosed regionalism. City versus Town, fake versus real. It’s raw and pugilistic. Like a hockey game. Or war. It’s so
new
. I never imagined poetry could be like this.
Another sunny autumn day. I walk across the quad disrupting waist-high dunes of crisp, fallen leaves. Getting colder now, students wandering about in thicker coats, in chunky wool sweaters. But I can differentiate them—the leather coats versus the nylon parkas with polyester fill. The expensive store-bought woollen sweaters versus acrylic, or else the threadbare homemade ones. Like the one I have on—my father’s old curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back, so stretched out it almost reaches my knees.
The point is what I’m seeing: I see the difference. I see campus like a line drawn down a blackboard now.
“It’s good,” says Dekker, scanning our letter in his tidy office. Dekker I can’t determine. What kind of sweater would he wear? He clothes himself in the camouflage of academe. “Heartfelt,” he says.
“It
is
heartfelt,” I agree. “Everyone will sign it,” I say. “We don’t know the best way to go about getting signatures, though. I was thinking maybe we should post it in the lounge.”
Dekker purses his lips, scratches his clean-shaven neck as he often does. He’s got one of those beards that just wants to grow. The bottom of his face is always black by late afternoon, and I don’t know why he won’t just let it fuzz over completely.
“Chances are,” Dekker considers, “if you posted it, it’d be gone in an hour. They’d just take it down.”
“They’d just take it down? Who?”
“The administration,” he says. The word sounds like it should have a capital A, like something in an Orwell novel.
“But it’s the
students’
lounge,” I say.
“Lawrence, they’d find a reason. They’d say the bulletin board was only for departmental business or some such thing.”
I’m aghast. “People sell their bikes on that thing!”
Dekker smiles as though I’ve told a joke. “It doesn’t matter. The department has no obligation to be consistent. What they do is, they do what they want,
then
they
5.
THERE IS A PIECE by Jim featured in the fall issue of
Atlantica
. It’s a review of Dermot Schofield’s new collection of poetry,
Malignant Cove
. I seem to recall that Schofield failed to find a home on either the Huckster or the Real Thing list at the beginning of the year. It looks like he’s come down solidly on the side of the hucksters with this book.
Jim—I don’t know any other way to put this—he wipes his ass with Schofield.
Perhaps this is what passes for talent in the perfumed salons of the Toronto literary elite, where running low on cognac is the closest anyone gets to hardship and the professor-poets dally in the faculty-club cloak room with colleagues’ wives in the attempt to graft some semblance of passion and genuine human feeling onto their airless, obtuse existence. This is no “garden” of “stay” as Schofield professes, although it is indisputably stagnant and fecund—much like a swamp, or a diseased animal—the perfect breeding ground for pestilence and infestation. God grant Canadian poetry be inoculated against the wasting illness that is Dermot Schofield.
I am in the library, poring over the new journals as I always do—feeling sick and envious and excited by them as I always do—wanting to be able to turn a page and see my own name under something so unspeakably brilliant it irradiates the page. I rip out
Atlantica
‘s subscription card and stick it in my notebook. So this is the Canadian literature of my time! No more trees and rocks and oceans and lakes and prairies and farms, but barricades. And battle lines—bothintellectual and aesthetic. Upper Canadian snottitude versus hard-nosed regionalism. City versus Town, fake versus real. It’s raw and pugilistic. Like a hockey game. Or war. It’s so
new
. I never imagined poetry could be like this.
Another sunny autumn day. I walk across the quad disrupting waist-high dunes of crisp, fallen leaves. Getting colder now, students wandering about in thicker coats, in chunky wool sweaters. But I can differentiate them—the leather coats versus the nylon parkas with polyester fill. The expensive store-bought woollen sweaters versus acrylic, or else the threadbare homemade ones. Like the one I have on—my father’s old curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back, so stretched out it almost reaches my knees.
The point is what I’m seeing: I see the difference. I see campus like a line drawn down a blackboard now.
“It’s good,” says Dekker, scanning our letter in his tidy office. Dekker I can’t determine. What kind of sweater would he wear? He clothes himself in the camouflage of academe. “Heartfelt,” he says.
“It
is
heartfelt,” I agree. “Everyone will sign it,” I say. “We don’t know the best way to go about getting signatures, though. I was thinking maybe we should post it in the lounge.”
Dekker purses his lips, scratches his clean-shaven neck as he often does. He’s got one of those beards that just wants to grow. The bottom of his face is always black by late afternoon, and I don’t know why he won’t just let it fuzz over completely.
“Chances are,” Dekker considers, “if you posted it, it’d be gone in an hour. They’d just take it down.”
“They’d just take it down? Who?”
“The administration,” he says. The word sounds like it should have a capital A, like something in an Orwell novel.
“But it’s the
students’
lounge,” I say.
“Lawrence, they’d find a reason. They’d say the bulletin board was only for departmental business or some such thing.”
I’m aghast. “People sell their bikes on that thing!”
Dekker smiles as though I’ve told a joke. “It doesn’t matter. The department has no obligation to be consistent. What they do is, they do what they want,
then
they
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