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Well Read: Encountering Stark Brillance
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by
Pulse Team
November 20 - 26, 2008 |
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When I read poems I am drawn into a world that is familiar and strange. Poems are familiar insofar as there is a tradition they react to and participate within. In this sense, to some degree we know what to expect. At the same time, the strange component emerges as we read and are presented with the singularity of vision that is created in a good poem. The use of words to create a unique and fascinating world can be disconcerting as well as engaging and satisfying. Recently, I had the strangely familiar pleasure of being inexorably drawn into Karen Solie’s poetic world to discover a beautiful, powerful, and complex understanding. In my estimation, she is an extraordinarily insightful and talented poet.
Solie’s debut collection, Short Haul Engine, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, while her second book, Modern and Normal, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She has also served on the Griffin Poetry Prize committee and is a member of the faculty at the prestigious Banff Centre for the Arts and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. She has been writer–in–residence at both the University of New Brunswick and the University of Alberta. Her third book, Pigeon, is scheduled for release in April, 2009.
Solie’s poetry is a series of linguistic gestures. Her struggle to let questions remain unanswered and reside in uncertainty allows her to point out the limitations of words. Her poems indicate the edges of people, emotions, places, and things and, at the same time, show that these distinctions are fleeting and illusory. She writes in “The Vandal Confesses,”
There is a tenderness in things. In things,
ruined. As if, freed from functions we bend
them to, they are newborn to the prime
unalphabeted world. As though this were possible.
The depth of Solie’s verse emerges in how she conveys the complexity of living in an infinite world with a finite number of words. In her collections, Solie gestures toward the space between what can be written and what exists with tenacity and tenderness. Her poems unfold the complexity of living in a world that does not provide any simple or easy answers.
In speaking with Solie about her poetic practice, I discovered an individual who was intensely aware of choosing the right word and how often that right word was not enough. When asked about the importance of poetry today, she replied, “In a very concrete way, I think that, as any art does, it has literally given some people a reason to continue living, but it also keeps us alive in the sense that it keeps our eyes open, reaffirms for us the importance of paying attention and thinking about things in a sustained and concentrated way, and [it allows us] to notice things and to think about their complications and their implications.”
In the Online Encyclopedia Britannica, her work is characterized as focused on “physics, fractals, and landscapes.” As I explored her poetry, I became fascinated by how she realized a world poetically through relations of presence, absence, and time. This tendency prompted me to ask why she was interested in possible connections, either realized or lost. She indicated that she has “been fascinated for a long time with the intersections and the grey areas of probability, determinism, and fate.” In exploring the (in her mind) artificial distinction between free will and determinism, she has discovered the “fractal repetition of possibilities” in the world. The infinity of these possibilities also suggests a sublime gravity because all choices have tidal waves of implications.
When asked how her writing deals with the tension between free and determined experience, Solie responded, “I sometimes feel that in making these distinctions, I dig these holes that I then have to crawl out of, or wander around in for awhile.” Being stuck in and exploring a hole becomes part of Solie’s writing “in terms of getting in there and trying to figure out exactly what I mean and exactly what I’m interested in. Sometimes things happen in a poem that I did not set out to have happen. Something occurs to me that might not have occurred had I not started to follow these distinctions into one of these holes.”
This stumbling around in the dark provides a weighty tone in Solie’s poems as she explores the edges of her understanding and gestures toward what she has unearthed.
When I was reading her poems, I was struck by how landscapes, people, animals, and things are embedded in one another. This connectivity creates an energetic force that transmits emotional, intellectual, and spiritual states in a flash. Solie’s ability to conjure up a place, a scene, or a situation emerges from her understanding that “landscape affects everyone” because “it is the lens through which we measure time and space.” The brilliance in Solie’s poetry is how few words she uses to get that glimpse to you as a reader.
Reading Solie’s poems feels like being haunted by memories and experiences that are both yours and not yours. Her writing touches on deep elemental tones of human existence and conveys the complexity and beauty of living with more questions than answers. In elegant and spartan language, her evocations of sadness, anger, tenderness, passion, and love make for extremely potent poetry, but through it all, we are guided with care and attentiveness. Her poems exist at the edge of expression with the uncertain understanding that they can never presume to express more than they do. Uncertainty does not have to be disconcerting because it is purely and simply change. Solie has found a way to create poetry that exists in the moment of change. The last lines of Modern and Normal’s poem, “Everything’s Okay,” are:
You believe one idea,
and then other. That is, in the instant, at the time. P
[JON EBEN FIELD]
Karen Solie (Toronto, ON)
w/David Seymour, Paul Dutton.
The Grey Borders Reading Series:
@ Niagara Artists’s Centre.
354 St. Paul St. St. Catharines.
Tuesday, November 25. 7:30 pm.
greyborders.com
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