"[Bowering] had a very easy go as the first poet laureate," sez ubiquitous wind-up barking-dog toy John Williamson.

I expect they didn't check his references before handing him the keys to the Laureate's Mansion at 18 Sussex Drive. Since his first GG award, the old vernacular line-cook has never put in more than banker's hours on anything, far as I can tell; he's the CanLit equivalent of the tenured prof slouching his way toward toaster-and-gold-watch day.

Apparently there's a lot of folks who think Leonard Cohen's the bee's knees. So there's a movement afoot to get him awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Now, this is not to disrespect Uncle Lenny: he's got a lot going for him. But to say that he's the best writer Canada's ever produced (which awarding him the first Nobel laureateship for Literature given to a Canadian would kind of imply) is just plain wrong.

What he is is probably the best young adult author we've ever produced. He taught generations of Canadian boys that writing poetry is a great way to get chicks. (In fact, most of Cohen's oeuvre might best be construed as an extended seduction letter.) Some of those boys, I'm sure, continued writing, and maybe even reading, poetry. He does deserve some kind of medal for that service.

He wrote a really good post-Henry Miller novel of Montreal bohemian life (The Favourite Game), Canada's first (but by no means most sophisticated or entertaining) postmodern novel (Beautiful Losers), a clutch of decent Layton-meets-the-Beats poems that are available in a selected that could have been a third the size it is, and more than a few excellent songs. He hasn't released a new book in over twenty years; and before that contrived (but mercifully slim) volume of religio-sexual puffery (Book of Mercy, 1984) he hadn't released one since Death of a Lady's Man in 1978. The silence speaks to nothing so much as a kind of post-coital exhaustion: having found he could get laid without writing new poems, he stopped writing them. This is probably a too-unkind characterization. Nevertheless.

God love you, Uncle Lenny, you've got a place in our hearts. But I don't see you in Stockholm.

I was on a plane going to a big book industry-conference-type do in Toronto and got sat, coincidentally, with someone from another company going to the same do. I asked her what she was reading. She held up some Oprah book or other. "How is it?" I of course asked. "It's pretty terrible," she said. By this time I was crediting her with more taste than I had initially thought she had. Until she followed up with "The last three books she had in her book club were awful, too." All I could do was sit there blinking. What do you say to the guy who, having walked into the glass patio door, shakes his head and does it again? And again.

It would be lovely if all books were wonderful. They are not all wonderful. Most of them are disappointing in myriad ways. If we desire not to be complicit in the conspiracy to pretend that simply because someone's sweat and tears (presumably) went into the writing of something, it deserves a place on our shelves — a proposition that has dangerous implications for the structural integrity of all but the sturdiest houses, even if it would mean a boom in Ikea's "Billy" market — then if something truly sucks we are obligated to say: This sucks.

I swear to God, the next time I open up a book of poetry and see the phrase "the syntax of" in relation to, say, nature, or traffic, or the sound of a violin, I'm gonna do physical violence to the poet in question.

News flash, kids! It's not original, or clever, or ... or ... moving – or anything good at all – to use language metaphors to describe things that aren't themselves language. Give it a fucking rest already, Junior Derrida Appreciation Society.

... syntax of green
syzygy of blossoms ...

"Whort the hell's thuh 'Man Booker Prize,' Martha?"
"Ah dunno, Clete. Ev'ybuddy knows it's called thuh Prestigious Booker Prize'."

Doug Bennett is dead.

I never knew him; never even saw him perform live, though I had the opportunity a few times. Usually there were other things to do. More than that, though, the Slugs were such an institution that it never occurred to me that there would come a time when they'd never be around for one more two-nighter at the Shamrock Hotel.

I've had a bee in my bonnet about Doug for years. My band plays some Slugs covers. I'm in the middle of writing a song about him that now seems absurd and off-target (it was a "get up, champ!"-type number). Basically (as I'd tell anyone who'd listen) Bennett was a really, really good songwriter who got pegged as a has-been goofball rocker by the press and by radio staion programme managers. I blamed the Canadian music industry establishment. I blamed Glass Tiger. I blamed the Tragically Hip. (I blamed DB himself, for naming his band "the Slugs.") I thought that, given half a chance and the right spin, Doug could rise again like Johnny Cash and take the world by storm (or at least by sunny-with-cloudy-periods). And get some goddamned respect for once.

My big plan, once I had a few other things out of the way, was to be his Rick Rubin. I wanted to sit him down in some living room, set up recording equipment, and have him sing some of his best old songs and whatever new ones he had. Showcase the real goods outside of the party-in-a-dive atmosphere he and his band had cultivated since the beginning.

(I guess the lesson here, folks, is carpe diem.)

Because if you listen to the records, when you strip away the zippy guitar and crash-hot New Wave rhythm section (on the early albums) or the turgid, try-hard production (on the later ones), what you've got is a guy with a great ear for melody, a sharp-ass wit, and a whole lotta soul. He was as good as anyone in this fucking country ever was.

And we made him play the Red Deer Rollerdome and the Estevan Motor Inn for fifteen years until he died of it.

As a book reviewer for a reasonably major paper (feh), one of the perks is the big box of books that arrives, unannounced, on the doorstep every few weeks.

As the designated poetry reviewer (Christ, and I'm underqualified), I like to play this game: I close my eyes, reach into the box, pull out a book, open it somewhere in the middle, and try to guess where the poet's from simply by the way he or she writes.

It shouldn't be as easy as it is.

This last batch I correctly divined (or guessed) seven of ten books. I was marking myself easy, but still. Why should our poets be so regionally identifiable?

Take Calgary poets. They are easily spotted by their tortured syntax, their "free ludic play of language" rendered funereal by trying too hard. I'd feel it unfair to single out a particular poet at the moment, so here's a pastiche:

Gods and sausages, we took
not nearly enough, she said
for the alley, gulls nervous and cranky-
panky, busting ourselves laughing at the honourable
workers in the dark, $23.42 an hour, not bad
even if the sky is rendering itself pink ...

The poets of the West Coast are often just as easy to peg. The Kootenay Twit can be distinguished from its close transmontane cousin by its predilection for six-dollar words. The pall of theory hangs even more heavily over this flock. To wit:

Theology of kielbasa, corvus corax luminoklept
she coruscating but the hegemony of brick
canyons necessitates guerilla epigraphs ...

That's enough of that. This kind of pseudepigrapha is no more fun to write than it is to read.

Laisha Rosnau's new book, which looks pretty good, actually, announced itself as a product of Lotusland by a single word, the first on which my eye alit: "salmon." Not fair, really, but score one for me anyhow.

The Ontario poets I had a little more difficulty with. One stumped me completely (I think I guessed Winnipeg out of desperation), and the two others, while sharing a certain aloofness, a sense of looking over the shoulder to check who's looking, I only really distinguished as Southern Ontario writers by their mentioning of the early-summer caravan "north." This year's motif, and a dead giveaway.

Patrick Lane fooled me as well. Those whacking long lines trailing out like freight trains across the page, with their hobo residents of drunk fathers and hulls of rusted cars said "Saskatchewan" to me.

Two of the books opened easily in the hand and stayed open. These couldn't have been published in North America, where trade editions of poetry are perfectbound, parsimonious little lockboxes that snap shut if you don't grip them whip-tight. Furthermore, their covers were graced with the texture of the paper they were printed on, whereas most North American books are laminated to within an inch of their lives, like placemats in a family restaurant, designed to withstand abuse from hideous kids. Who's this, then? Faber & Faber. Bound in quires. Why can't we do this?

"How can a young poet know if his work is any good?"

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. But if it doesn't, he shouldn't be discouraged. I mean, in the seventeenth century every man could turn a verse and play the lute. Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn't make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.

-- from "An Interview with The Paris Review, Required Writing

I have a longish essay to come, but until that's ready, here's something by Philip Larkin by way of introduction that explains part of what I want to say better than I can.

"The … danger awaits the poet on the campus. If literature is a good thing, then exegesis and analysis can only demonstrate its goodness, and lead to fresher and deeper ways of enjoying it. But if the poet engages in this exegesis and analysis by becoming a university teacher, the danger is that he will begin to assume unconsciously that the more a poem can be analysed - and therefore the more it needs to be analysed - the better poem it is, and he may in consequence, again unconsciously, start to write the kind of poem that is earning him a living."

-- from "Subsidizing Poetry," Requred Writing