Jonathan Bennett

There is something about standing at a microphone and reading new poems. Words arranged just so only days ago can suddenly feel not quiet so.

Two weeks back I read at the Pivot in Toronto. Nice crowd; cool host. People kindly listened to a clutch of my new poems. Some passed the test. Others, well, let’s just say that as I was reading outwardly, I began editing inwardly. 

This is why I read publicly between books. I like to “strength-test” (to borrow from auditors) my poems before people. The people don’t have to do or say anything. Their presence creates enough gentle pressure that unfinished poems self-disclose. 

A kind review of my last book of poems, Civil and Civic, in Prairie Fire Review of Books. Here’s an excerpt:

“Bennett’s eye for detail renders his poetry truly contemporary and lasting. A master of poetic sound…Bennett’s ear is flawless….Why this collection was not nominated for the Governor General’s Award can be only because of the exceptionally strong competition last year. I have no doubt, provided Bennett keeps writing like this, that he will one day not only be nominated for but win some prestigious awards.” - Prairie Fire Review of Books

Some very kinds words there Mr. Cunningham. Thank you.

“Speaking of Poets” CKUW. My radio conversation with John Cunningham about poetry.

An old interview with me on Brockwell’s Poetics.ca site disappeared but now has a permanent home.

there’s a new member of our family… world, meet Ellie.

I spoke with Ann Douglas on Trent Radio this week. Here’s our conversation on the topic “Your Writing Life.”

I’ll be emceeing a reading of that includes the wonderful @manualofstyle in Port Hope, ON, Oct 3. Join us! 

The best cottages are time capsules. Old towels, old board games, old books. My in laws cottage is just this place. Everything is a bit musty; everyone a bit sunburned or else tipsy. Stuck for some dock reading recently I found myself dipping into the 1996 bestseller, Boom, Bust and Echo, by David Foote and Daniel Stoffman.

No doubt you’ll remember it well because just about everyone in the country either read it, or gave it to their father as a gift. Many will then remember the very entertaining David Foote as being on the speaking circuit for almost a decade (he was everywhere it seemed, the perpetual key note at every conference, every planning day.) A charismatic academic, he took the soft-ish science of demographics, supercharged it with a shot of boomer ego, and repackaged the whole shebang as modern day get-rich soothsaying. How “to profit from the oncoming demographic shift” was the gist. It was a potent mix. He created one of the most successful books in Canadian publishing history selling more than 250,000 copies.

Now, demographics we learned, could be aimed at many targets, but most readers were drawn to it as a crystal ball into financial markets. So, as I plucked the book off the cottage shelf, and realized it’d been 15 tumultuous years, I wondered, how’d he score? What did he get right? How much of his too-clever-by-half caveat of “demographics explains two-thirds of everything” would he need to bail himself out now the future has arrived?

Turns out that 1996 had a lot more in common with 1982, than it did 2012. And, that we are suckers for a charming storyteller with compelling bar graphs. With the call of the loon close by, a few pages in I realized that Boom wasn’t a book about the future at all, it was squarely a book about 1996.

Now please, I’m no economist, historian, or social scientist; I’m simply a reader and a participant in 2012. So, that said, I’m here to report I didn’t recognize today’s financial or most pressing social issues in Foote’s version of the future. His then-description of the Canada we now live in has aged badly.

Take housing. He couldn’t have been more wrong in assuring us what the housing markets were going to do. Our national baby boom demographics were not to be the driver of behaviour; rather, as I understand it, interest rates, greed, sweat equity, flipping, swaps, and interconnected economies stole the show. I also couldn’t find a bibliographic reference to the word “internet”, or a decent stab at its influence on, well it turned out, everything. While he did talk about immigration, it was only in the context of added influential weight to his tell-all demographic percentiles. How immigrants have changed cities and suburbs, to lightly probe one example, is a lot more complex than Foote made out, and that was well underway at the time. Though his discussion of health care affordability and the decline of tennis seem close to our lived experience.

What struck me most was how provincial a book it was. It focussed predominately on describing a middle-class Canadian society that would act and look a lot less homogeneously than Foote promised. He told us a great, if simple story. It was a tale of how our collective future would unfold, about what we would become and how we would, more or less, act. We were each his main character, and recognized ourselves, our parents, our children, clearly in his analysis. If we applied the teachings of demographics, we would profit. It was a national fortune cookie. We ate eagerly.

Of course, with the wisdom of hindsight (usually an unfair measure, but he opened this door, after all) Boom foretold very little. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason to revisit his book now. In fact, do. Look for it on a bottom shelf during your next visit to a cottage and take a step back in time. It says an awful lot about us, just not in the way he intended—and, spoiler-alert, it isn’t always flattering.

As we all know, the last 15 years have been about global things—markets, borders, security, branding, warming, and meltdowns. Surely Boom is a book that no one would write today because a bulge in Canada’s birthrates are but a drop in a now-globalized ocean. With each passing year, artifices like borders and national birthrates, become less and less meaningful, important, predictive. These days, surely, there are just too many variables for a book with a single premise like Boom to catch on. Though a wander down the e-book business and personal investing aisles would suggest otherwise. Sigh. I seems we yearn for Occam’s Razor—that appealing principle that urges us to select the hypotheses that makes the fewest assumptions. What is certain now is that back 1996, Foote held up a mirror and called it tomorrow. We liked what we saw.

Is there anything better that a smart letter from a reader? Here, in its entirety, is a recent exchange between myself and a Mr. Chris K. I will keep writing if readers like Chris promise to keep reading.

> Subject: Message from “Chris” via your Flavors.me contact form

> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 05:58:20 
> 
Good evening Mr. Bennett,
 
My name is Chris, from St. Catharines, and I have just finished reading your book Entitlement, which I enjoyed.

 I’ve been thinking about your lack of quotation marks around dialogue. I’m not sure if this is a new trend or just coincidental, but yours is the third book in a row I’ve read with all the ” “s chucked out.
 
Of the three books, this worked best in Entitlement. I don’t know if you find quotation marks tacky, making the pages of text look too much like a screenplay or something, but the absent quotation marks in Entitlement had the effect of unifying the point of view of all the characters. Normally, a story told in the first person is forced to stay with one narrator (yes, there are many books with multiple first person narrators, but they’re usually segmented into their own separate chapters, and the gear shifting from one voice to another is always so rough). In Entitlement I felt I was simultaneously experiencing multiple first person narrators fused with your third person narration. Everything melded together seamlessly. I haven’t really thought much about the effect of quotation marks in a story, for the most part they are invisible, but your removal had an interesting effect on the way I experienced this story.
 
Take care,
Chris K

***

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 6:17 AM, Jonathan Bennett wrote:

Chris,

Thank you for your very thoughtful note. Are you a writer yourself? Or perhaps an academic? I ask because I don’t often (ever, really) get point of view questions or observations from everyday readers that display theoretical underpinnings and interests. 

To take a step back, I am, actually, quite conservative when it comes to grammar. I did grade school in Australia, and it had a decidedly British hangover. Up until Entitlement, I had never written a book without the use of quotation marks. But, writers are sometimes asked to change because the story demands it of them. When I was about a third of the way through Entitlement I found myself doing a quick refresher on how to use quotation marks when the direct speech is longer than a paragraph. It gave me pause. As you know, much of the middle section of the book is in the form of an interview. The quotation marks forced a finite and unambiguousness on what was spoken, what was interior thinking, and what was neither. Maybe I didn’t want the lines so clearly drawn? Besides, I then thought, it also made the entire section seem a bit stiff somehow. The boring mechanics of what to include to “keep it real” as in, “he reached over and pressed stop on the recorder” or “he looked out over the lake” just became distracting props, as opposed to something poetic, useful, enriching. So, in a brazen disregard for convention and personal comfort, I deleted all the quotation marks in the manuscript and began to rewrite without them. It suddenly gave the story new opportunities and it freed up the prose somehow. 

This is how I became “trendy”, as you put it. I am now just finishing up a new novel and I have not used quotation marks. I am not sure I’ll ever go back. I like writing without them, because it makes me be damn sure I am writing a line that is both a) speech and could not be confused as anything else by a skimming reader (naturalistic), and b) inherently clear in its meaning who spoke the line (voice). I see it as a formal constraint, I suppose, but one that pushes me to a better place.

Hope that helps. Thanks for your questions and observations. I am glad you enjoyed your time with the Aspinalls.  I might, with your permission, copy this exchange onto my blog. Would you mind?  

Best,

Jonathan

**

Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:07:33 -0800

Hi Jonathan,

No, not an academic. Even though my free time (usually at the end of a long day) is more likely to be spent reading than writing, I’ve been known to pen a story every now and then, so I’ll say yes, I’m a writer. Why not.

My interest in point of view probably comes from early experience. The very first “book” book I attempted reading was Dracula. I was very young so couldn’t understand much, didn’t get too far, but I remember being surprised to see the entire books was made up of people’s diaries and letters. I was expecting a synopsis of the movie, and it was then I figured out that stories in books could be told in a different way than they are told in the movies. At least that is what I remember. Might be too sophisticated thinking for a seven year old, so maybe I didn’t actually think of it till later.

Thanks for the peek into your thought process while writing Entitlement. Your prose reads very elegantly. Glad to hear you have another book. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it, though if you are “just finishing up” I’d imagine there is still quite some time before it sees print.

Sure, feel free to copy my letter on your blog.

Take care

Chris K

In 2004, I published the poem “Last Stand of the Wollemi Pine” in my collection Here is my street, this tree I planted. It’s a longer poem, and came out of my fascination with the discovery story of this Jurassic tree. There is much to read online about the unlikely story, but nothing beats James Woodford’s original book The Wollemi Pine. While I had seen one before in the Botanic Gardens in Sydney in 2005, I happened upon on in Canberra two weeks ago and was able to touch it. As promised by my poem, and the marketers, they are now widely available around the world, fast becoming nothing special at all.

Here is snap of me and the tree, and, for old time’s sake, the poem. 

Last Stand of the Wollemi Pine

“The location of the pines is a secret.”

I

Wollemi canopy pierced —

prehistoric whiskers

from a deep laugh line

missed by the thousand

foaming razor swipes

of sprawl, aboriginal firestick

farming, evolution.

Plucky, classified, alive.

II

King Billy breaks the soil during the Battle of Hastings

to find dampness, light, other editions of himself

clustered in deep cover. The leader of a band

of evolutionary exiles, humming songs of elapsed design,

left behind to their own loneliness,

genetic memories of shading great beasts.

Billy is a last war veteran, the one who recites legends —

telling what they all fought for, fled from,

how it mattered

at the time so many about them fell.

III

We learn on the wind Norfolk pines grow in California.

The sandstone cliff-top wears away in the heat and salt breeze.

Direct light steals further down the adjacent gorge wall.

Each year it grows hotter. There is nowhere left, only progress.

We hunker. On good nights, we have the American dream.

We await extinction. We are a hermaphroditic clone.

The eucalypts will rib:

It was a blessing. They were not themselves, in the end.

They are, though, too young to account for us,

our nameless conifer company, modish sway, abundance.

Far above we eye the forest, its traffic — sassafras

and coachwood roots work and wedge their way in,

chasing alluvium and the runoff lick. Rock splits,

along sedimentary layers. Erosion is erasure.

IV

First, their colour: wrong green.

And odd shape. Leaves like fern sprays.

Taller than trees here ought to be.

The sound changes, air at a standstill

as a cone is handled, bark palmed,

fingers dragged, bumping across

the rough of it. That was the first

(tender does it) touch.

Outclassing Banks, his mates reckon —

from that moment on, bloke in footy

shorts, professional bushwalker,

begot Wollemia noblis.

V

Thousands of tiny Wollemi pines

now grow in perfect rows inside

a subdivision of temperature-

controlled greenhouses,

premature babies in isolation units,

they may sense aberration —

they were not supposed to make it.

They would scream in protest,

demand death, if it were not so

beautiful here. Perhaps, they reason,

we are now in good hands,

and too young to know any better.

(c) Jonathan Bennett (excerpt from Here is my street, this tree I planted, ECW Press, 2004)

A podcast conversation with John Degen esq in his “Bookroom” and a bonus reading of a poem “Woody and Wiley” from Civil and Civic. 

I leave for a trip to Sydney, Australia in a few days. I return on Canada Day (which we are renaming “Richard Ford Day” this year, I believe.)   

Anyway, it’s been six years since I’ve been back to Aust. Long past due. I have nothing much to do while I’m there—this is an extended family affair from start to finish. It will be heavily photographed. Mostly, I suppose I’m just looking for that creative jolt one often gets from travelling. And, in my case, the extra wattage from a return “home”—the vernacular of bedrock memory, the dislocating sense that if I look hard enough, I might catch a glimpse of another version of myself, walking down King Street in Newtown, having never ever left, having become someone entirely different because of single alternate choice made long ago (damn that second lamington).

Reading for the trip: recent novels by McEwan and Banville, so I feel woefully inadequate. Al Moritz’s new books of poems, so I feel woefully inadequate. I might write, but likely not much. It’ll be a trip for memorizing, so I can later not quite recall events properly and, instead, re-imagine things the way I want. In fact, I’ve likely already begun to change what really happened. Yes, I am going to have had a great trip.

I’ve contributed a poem to Paul Vermeersch’s blog-based project “They Will Take My Island.” The title comes from a painting by Arshile Gorky in the Art Gallery of Ontario, but, as Paul put it to me, “that’s only of secondary importance to the blog.”

According to Paul, what he’s doing is asking a bunch of poets “to write a poem with the title “They Will Take My Island,” and then the poems get posted to the blog….So far, the poems have been really great — a good variety of styles and subject matters all echoing the same title. It’s a bit of an editorial experiment, but it’s also evolved into a pretty good read.” 

I’d agree. As a title to write towards, it really pulled the material out—in my case, a poem about my son Thomas who has Aspergers syndrome. It felt good to write, and I’m pleased to be among such good company in Paul’s project. 

Along with Nathanael O’Reilly, American poet Paul Kane and I read at a recent conference on Australian literature held in Toronto. I traded books with Paul. Work Life is his 2007 collection and it’s a gold mine.

A professor at Vassar and a part-time Australian (I mean, who isn’t around here?) Paul Kane’s collection is wise, meditative, and often times just flat out brilliant. I also laughed too. For example, “High-Rise Terminal” a play on the linguistic term that refers to a statement being given the feel of a question, was smarty-pants funny. The long poem “Third Parent” was a moving elegy for his late mother in law, that had the strange effect of leaving me feeling as if I’d known her too. I can’t do justice to this book in a few lines, but if you don’t know Kane’s work, Work Life is great place to start.

Here is a link to a recent Q&A I did with power Globe and Mail reviewer J.C. Sutcliffe over at her blog SlightlyBookist on writing, habits, among other bits and pieces. 

I met Kyo Maclear recently serving on a literary jury. Her insight into the work under review was clear-headed and considered. Impressed, I bought her new novel, Stray Love. 

It’s a second novel that could be mistaken for one penned much later in a writer’s career. It’s a complex, intriguing novel and I didn’t want it to end. All the more impressive because it’s in the first person, and the narrator is Marcel, a middle aged man with a lot of unfinished past that swirls from London in the 60s, to Vietnam during the war, to today. That I was completely convinced of his voice, of his masculinity, that he stayed whole and real over the course of the story, is no small feat. Marcel, a professional illustrator, is stuck. When a young girl, Iris, the daughter of Kiyomi (his own childhood friend and later lover) comes to stay with him, her presence unlatches him somewhat, and his story spills out. It’s a bildungsroman, a book about identity and belonging, colonialism and war, reportage and slippery truth, and the making of art and the artist itself.

There is much to be said about this novel. I found it a compassionate and brave piece of writing with few missteps. Personally, I loved Iris. She just somehow held space of it all, giving light and shade to Marcel in this, mostly, passive way that was just so effortless but necessary. Bravo.

Short clip of a poem, “Puts and Takes” that I read on Wednesday on CBC radio one show Here and Now. 

Great video from the folks at Black Moss press…

Of all the moving, difficult, wonderful, shame-inducing pieces in the new all-aboriginal issue of Southerly, Merrill Bray’s piece “Gloria Agnala” just blew me clear away. Set in Alice Springs it follows the final days of an Auntie, Gloria, also now a famous painter. With deft touches (she writes with a blade, not a bat) Gloria’s life is drawn small and straight but in every way writes itself large and complexly as the colonialism and the history that frames the narrative, and her life, sinks in. It’s a great short story.

It’s not always an easy journal to get here in Nth America, but seek it out if you’re able. Of course, it is a complicated and emotional read, especially for a white Australian—as it should be. Hats off to the editors for making it happen, and pulling in such a broad selection of work.

This is my belated “favourite books I read in 2011” post. Along with Coetzee’s Summertime and Malouf’s Ransom these two books I read in December were among the best from my reading pile last year.

In Scenes from Village Life Israeli writer Amos Oz does disquiet better than just about anyone. Disquiet is not bleak, and it is not nihilistic. It’s awfully life-affirming actually, because in order to shudder, one must be wholly taken in and convinced by what potential horror is being presented, and, as is often the case in this book, is also a blunt matter of fact. For what it’s worth, it occurred to me while reading this new collection of stories—stories that make irregular orbits around a remote town in Israel—that exploring disquietude as a state of being in literature, is not much in fashion presently. Shame, that. Because stories like Oz’s often earn the disquieting moment by facing it head on. These moments, honest and bravely pursued, resonated for days after I finishing the book.  

The village of the title is the central character. Hero as setting, in other words. Oz does fear and regret a lot in the book, and he is not shy of the (purposefully) untidy ending. I was moved by his memoir of a few years back, A Tale of Love and Darkness. This new one is further proof of his enviable powers, and that the short story form can deliver rare insight into the human condition when crafted by the likes of Oz.

Now to the other “O”. Over the long view, Michael Ondaatje’s career is a wonder to behold. Yet, as far as I can tell, he had a growing problem on his hands. Fans of his last two novels formed only a short, dutiful line. Was the love affair with one of Canada’s most important authors coming to a sad end? Having read the wonderful except from the Cat’s Table in the New Yorker last year, I, for one, was hopeful for a comeback. Thankfully, mercifully, indeed the book proved to be charming, beautifully written, tender, strange and smart. It’s a simple story, but like only Ondaatje can, he reinvents the novelistic structure to tell his story obliquely, leaving the reader with a sense of mystery into how it hangs together so well. While many believe he’s gone too far before, in this case I’d argue he gets it right as things never dissolve or break apart into cold fragments; his reader is pushed not shoved, and never abandoned or abused. For me, the voice of it was what I liked the most. Yes, it’s somewhat sentimental, but is always searching for the missing moments, the explanations, the real truth of the journey they took together on that ship. It’s a big metaphor, expertly carried off in this big book.

I would point those interested to a great review of The Cat’s Table by Annie Proulx, and to this first rate interview with Amos Oz by Charlie Rose.