A Letter from East Van to Hammertown
(Review of Peter Culley's Hammertown, for the Rain Review)

Dear Pete,

Sylvia and I took a realtor’s tour of Hammertown last spring, beginning with the cheapest single family home listed on the MLS. Even as we pulled up in the driveway it was obvious no sale was forthcoming, but the realtor still insisted on walking us through. I recall a worn linoleum floor, unfinished wooden cupboards, an orange shag carpet in the living room, speckled here and there with grey constellations of ash, and, racked upside-down in a drain tray by the sink, pebbled plastic drinking glasses. The owner, a paunchy, middle-aged European, warily trailed us and the realtor through. He’d grown up here. The house had been his mother’s. I glimpsed, embarassed, an older woman’s clothes, protruding like a tongue from a half-open bedroom closet door. Death still a presence, not yet quite gone.

Downstairs, we inspected the basement’s unfinished concrete floor. A door opened out onto the sloping back yard’s gnarled apple trees and rundown greenhouse, its plastic corrugated panes all broken, full of gaping holes. I stopped. Abruptly thought of you. I’m still not sure which detail did it – the scattered black pots, full of woody geraniums and fuchsias? The telephone wires and bare black trees, crisscrossed in the lane, so much like some of the little photographs punctuating Snake Eyes? The pale March light above the islands? Maybe it is more truthful to say it was a conjunction of these things, the informe of the plant pots’ dessicated contents and the distant light inflecting each other, waltzing together like partners at a dance.

We drove around in the realtor’s SUV with her commentary ringing in our ears. That’s a grow-up. That one, too. There, the local Angels club house. And that? A revenue property -- ex-grow-op -- she purchased for her son. We topped a rise and gazed down upon a hollow full of rundown homes, a Vancouver Island Arkham. I thought again of you, and that E.J. Hughes Cowichan Valley landscape we both admire. & too – your Guston epigraph. “[A] sort of scrimmage is taking place – arms, discs, etc., the abstract forces are trying to pile themselves up into a permananent mound – BUT – a hammer looming in from the top-side is definitely hitting this structure, making it seem as if it is crumbling, collapsing.” The vista spread before us looked to me like Guston had gotten hold of that Hughes landscape and aggressively reworked it, canting the roofs and chimney pots in at weird, non-Euclidian angles. For a moment I was unsure of what I was really seeing, old suburban Nanaimo, or Hammertown’s strange streets. A full-scale ontological breakdown, precipitated by you. Thanks!

So, no structures then, or only provisional ones. Nothing really surprising there, just orthodox modernism ticking quietly along. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. But that’s not quite right either. Your quotations are way too abrupt for high modernism, eg., the snippet of Shelley's Epipsychidion dropped abruptly into Greetings From Hammertown. The sample? source? retains its own integrity, is not absorbed into the structure of the whole. The “permanent mound” of the poem is indivisible from the units that constitute it, the sample sources laid one atop the other, the heaved and twisted strata of history, politics, and other people’s texts. Style as geologic upheaval, or continental drift. Bob Smithson would be proud.

Your contexts, regional or otherwise? Smithson certainly, Blaser, Spicer, Stanley & their antecedents: Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn. Maybe Avison. Basil B. Wee bits of the tish gang too, mainly Marlatt and Bowering, and even then present not so much in poetic structure as in tone, like those supercompressed tag lines Davis played live at the Plugged Nickel.

As for some of your local contemporaries, a phrase of David Mamet’s comes to mind: “A generation that would like to stay in school.” I have never understood why so many intellectually accomplished members of the working class would want to organize – even temporarily – as a school or movement. Bad memories of reading groups at UBC, little clusters of folks trying to puzzle out poems with the help of lots of dope and wine, the genteel what-is-this-guy-trying-to-say equanimity that eventually drove me right out of academia all together. All through my chequered grad school career I felt like the guy in Gin & Lime: “Throw off / like dirty clothes / this useless life / I’ve come to love, seeing / how / for so long / I’ve avoided / the inability / to say anything / that does not add to confusion.”

I’m old enough now to no longer want to read academic papers about poems, or to write them, or to convene seminars and conferences to discuss them. Old enough and foolish enough to believe that poetry principally composed as an object of analysis is ethically suspect, and that a real test of a poem's worth resides in its dailiness, the ways it speaks outside the confines of purely aesthetic or critical inquiry. & because of this, your poems have been valuable to me.

Valuable how? Start with that index, the big one that overshadows everything else in A Letter From Hammertown, “a kind of recording scrim, on which / the successive domed apprehensions / of the April sky, the / broiling surface tension of Dodd Narrows, etc. / can be decelerated and examined –“ A structure patterned on Richter’s Atlas or Perec’s User’s Manual, an form big enough to frame the world, but not to mirror it, not exactly. “I’m lining things up / all in a little row / so that the real image of spring / and the mental image of spring / can be made to somehow agree –“ But they never do. Poems and music arise from the tricky slippages between nature and its representations. Miles’ birdcalls, Delia Darbyshire’s unearthly hoots and whistles, DJ Theo Parrish’s repeat excursions into BIG and WIDE – all structures that are like, but not quite, nature. Include Hammertown in their company, too, with all its emulation strategies –- the endless catalogs, taxonomies, and samples. Not a conventional poetic voice but something else entirely, a modest, temporary structure like a tent, something to be erected and disassembled and moved again. A made thing, “not really a holler as much as a bowl, into which sounds enter or leave only with difficulty.”

- posted by cjb @ 1:00 PM