a r t s & c u lt u r e W hat I’m Readin g
Warren Heiti Warren Heiti is a FYP teaching fellow and a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Dalhousie. He’s also a poet whose work has been published in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010. His book-length poem Hydrologos was published by Pedlar Press in 2011.
Warren Heiti
I’m reading two books which concern the ocean, in their different ways: Amanda Jernigan’s Groundwork (Biblioasis, 2011) and Joe Denham’s Year of Broken Glass (Nightwood Editions, 2011). Denham is a Canadian nature poet whose work I have admired for some years. His second book, Windstorm (Nightwood Editions, 2009), is one long poem, which starts with a personal shock—composed in calm, adept terza rima!—as a saw-blade kicks back inflicting a severe wound in the speaker’s hand, and a wind, right out of Rilke, comes swirling down, and then the poem opens into a much larger, selfless kind of witnessing. The Year of Broken Glass is Denham’s first novel, and exhibits his poet’s sensibility. A crab fisherman finds a precious glass fishing float, stamped with the insignia of a three-tailed fish, whose sale promises some relief from his divided life. At my bookmark’s place, the fisherman is standing in Vancouver, whose windows have just been blown out by an earthquake, holding the unscratched glass float—it’s a dramatic juxtaposition. The novel seems set during the recent collapse of the sockeye runs on the West Coast, and the heroic marine biologist Alexandra Morton has already made a brief cameo. I am anticipating that the glass float will become a metaphor for a kind of fragile ecological hope. Jernigan read at King’s in October. Her work is new to me, and truly astonishing. Groundwork is, among other things, a compact volume of formalist verse, and Jernigan handles the formalism with a range, dexterity, and naturalness that are very rare. The book’s last suite of poems is about the Odyssey. In one poem, Odysseus is speaking of a 22
Tidings | winter 2011/2012
mysterious dream of islands: “Penelope, I could relate / no end of this: all night I woke, / to island after island, each one / blossoming within the last, / like rings around a boat at rest.” The poem is complemented, perfectly, by a wood engraving by Jernigan’s husband, the artist John Haney. The engraving itself depicts a keyhole-shaped ship, seen from above, enclosed in inked ripples, which are, also, the rings of a tree. It is one of the most finely crafted books that I have read this year, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. A couple of signed copies are still available at the King’s Co-op Bookstore. How does being a poet affect your reading? Are you more critical? Less? Contrary to one recent trend in Canadian literary reviewing, I believe that studying poetry should, ideally, deepen one’s capacity for appreciation. In her essay, The Ethics of the Negative Review (The Malahat Review 144 [2003]), the Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky defends a view shared by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them” (letter to Franz Kappus, 23 April 1903). I agree. There is a prejudice, in this culture, and especially in the institution of the university, that understanding requires criticism; and so we like to teach something
that we call “critical thinking.” And I hasten to affirm the usefulness of such thinking! It can be indispensable, for instance, in redirecting attention to thoughtless reflexes of oppression. But it becomes destructive when it is mixed with the assumption that it is a universal instrument—when it becomes an addiction. Many things can be more fairly, more clearly understood, as Rilke says, by love. And notice that he is not talking about a kind of lax and arbitrary approval. No, he is talking about a kind of discernment, a way of making contact with truth. Hydrologos is a lyric poem that touches in part on the myth of Orpheus. Through even this brief description, I sense some themes that are decidedly FYP-y. Where would you say your love of poetry and your love of philosophy intersect? My pre-academic intuition was that good poetry and good philosophy were indistinguishable. It has not been easy to hang onto that intuition while confronting the academy’s ferocious instinct toward territorialization (what it calls “specialization,” or “departmentalization”). But King’s is a kind of sanctuary, isn’t it? We are tremendously lucky to be able to read Aristotle and Dante in each other’s company, without the pernicious discriminations that have lately segregated these thinkers. It is vivifying to participate in the expansive conversation here. ∂
Recent Alumni Publications Valerie Compton (’84) has published her debut novel Tide Road with Goose Lane Editions. Margaret Floyd (BAH ’93) published her first book, Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You with New Harbinger Press this past June. Mark Reid (BJ ’96) has released 100 Days that Changed Canada with Canada’s History Society and HarperCollins Cana-
da. It’s a collection of essays by Reid and 55 prominent Canadians. Shambala Publications has released a book titled Right Here With You: Bringing Mindful Awareness Into Our Relationships— an anthology edited and with an introduction by Andrea Miller (BJ ’02). Stephen Marche (BAH ’97) argues for the importance of the Bard in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, released in Spring 2011 by HarperCollins Canada.