Excalibur of Spirit by Robert McAlpine

        There’s a special kind of sadness I have reserved for obscure poetry collections. Excalibur of Spirit by Robert McAlpine is one such example, since I received it in a giant box of poetry books that was gifted to me by a retiring teacher, and I can only imagine the book being untouched in a classroom for years, lumped in with others, and then given away. In the acknowledgements section that starts the collection, McAlpine expresses deep appreciation for his mentor, Dr. Kenneth George Mills, who he hails as better than Shakespeare and who inspired him to pursue writing after he retired from teaching high school. Alas, I’ve never heard of either Mills or McAlpine before and there’s that creeping worry that my fate runs too closely: a long career of teaching and publishing some forgotten, mostly bad poems.

Optimistically, though, I will say that I felt compelled to research McAlpine and I found he’s still writing and performing. Excalibur of Spirit was released in 2000, and I discovered he had a book launch in 2020, and even just a year ago was publishing videos of him reading some poems on Youtube. I’m really glad to see that he’s still pursuing his passion with such liveliness. 

As an aesthetic object, I have to say I didn’t find much enjoyment or enrichment from Excalibur of Spirit. The book’s arrangement is mostly cohesive, with different “chapters” of poems linked by some common motifs. The first seems to deal largely with inspiration and attention, while the second deals more with knowledge and mentorship. Chapter three is more pastoral in nature, focusing primarily on the environment and world around us. Chapter four and five are more or less tapping into your individuality and travel metaphors for life. Interspersed throughout the poems are artworks and photographs by a handful of artists, though I don’t think that they add much value or elevate the poetry. Rather than being in conversation with one another, the different mediums echo more than add to each other.

Even when a book does not bring much enjoyment, though, it can still prove instructive. McAlpine’s work taught me; it gave me examples that will allow me to articulate some tell-tale features of amateur poetry that hold it back from being great. I’ve documented the failings of Instagram poetry elsewhere, and while there is some overlap, emerging poets striving for literary greatness have a particular flavour worth deconstructing.

1. Emerging authors tend to personify abstract and capitalized concepts without fully embodying them or giving them physical being. There’s an ambitious engagement with High Concepts that are so awe-inspiring that it’s difficult to give them voice. For McAlpine, this comes up several times, including in the poem “The King and the Pool” that describes how “Awareness breathes an opening” and “Intuition stands behind him / And whispers softly in his ear” (7). It’s not the most egregious feature of the poetry, but it nonetheless is a trend in inexperienced poets: to think that their big feelings are transferable by simply giving them a name.

2. Young poets, including retired men just beginning to write, tend to ask questions instead of answering them. In my view, this writing approach is more indicative of brainstorming rather than a final product. Generally, I want poets to show me what they’ve found, not tell me what they wonder. I want them to do the mining and then bring me the jewels. Questions abound in Excalibur of Spirit, like in the poem “Connection”: the first stanza asks, “God speaks to me / But do I listen? / He sings to me / But do I hear?” and the third stanza asks, “What is this strange connection / Between that flower and me? / Why do I find myself engaging / Its beauty so adoringly?” (17). As I mentioned, asking what the connection between the self and the flower are is worthwhile, but the answer should be presented to us so that we, too, can share in the insights.

3. Awkward grammatical constructions and rearrangements often appear in amateur poetry, generally to preserve the metre of the line and, I suspect, appear to be more “deep.” More precisely, these poets often use passive voice. They use commas inconsistently, leaving them absent where they ought to be or using them unnecessarily in others; the strange use of commas is somewhat ironic, given that McAlpine praises Angela Wingfield for showing him the “delight to see how a well positioned comma or semi-colon can accent and underline the meaning which sometimes hovers mystically somewhere between the printed word and the awareness of the reader” (iv). There are sometimes inversions of past tense. For instance, in “Light Man,” “The electric air did burn the skin” (35)---it would be simpler to say “burned the skin.” There’s also a preponderance of what I’d refer to as blank of blank constructions. Think: “trees of green” rather than saying green trees. In one stanza, McAlpine writes “Nature’s all creative force / Bubbling in my garden / Flowing in my view / Rippling through the seeing / Of a Creation ever new?” (“Rain” 46).

4. Often poets use these strange constructions to better prioritize metre, but I would say that the rhythm of the lines is not necessarily consistent, regardless. I’ll give an example from the poem “The Beach.” The poem starts, “The whisper of love / Washes over the land / On the beach of the flat white waiting sand / Filling each pore, surrounding each grain / Parched soil absorbing the falling rain” (61). The metre is a little wonky but generally acceptable (though I’d personally switch to ‘the waiting flat white sand’). In the following stanza, he writes, “The wave recedes / Each glistening speck of sand breathes free / Joined in its warming wetness / With the beach, the sun, and the sea” (61). Something to note is that the metre changes between stanzas. The inconsistency is somewhat jarring. I’d also cut out “and” in the final line; it would flow so much better: “With the beach, the sun, the sea.” With the inconsistency of the melodiousness, I feel like the awkward grammatical structures are unwarranted.

5. New poets often like to give advice, which run perilously close to platitudes. In a poem about rowboats, McAlpine spells out the message (which was already inferrable) for the audience in the final stanza: “So don’t compare yourself with others / With whom you have been raised; / Unfurl your sails and catch the wind / Then find how you’ll be praised. / But even if you’re still in doubt / I can guarantee you’ll be amazed” (“Rowboat” 27). It’s pretty on-the-nose and it’s characteristic of poets that don’t trust their own skill to craft a message without stating it explicitly nor trust the audience enough to “get it.” That said, poets do have some wisdom to share and when McAlpine shows restraint, an appropriate truism can sneak in: “You are chosen by what you choose” (“The Invisible” 13).

All of these impulses are potentially branches of a love of obscurity. There’s a poem called “The Paragraph” that seems to be indicative of what McAlpine cherishes about writing. He appreciates challenge, as do I, and the joy of working your way through a hard piece of writing is a particular kind of thrill, but I think McAlpine betrays a misguided view. “The Paragraph” is a response poem to a piece by McAlpine’s mentor, Dr. Kenneth G. Mills. In a short preface to the poem, he writes that “It is a testimonial to the difficulty which arises when the intellect is confronted with a wisdom originating beyond its domain” (33). The poem, though, when examined, seems not to confront sense so much as form. All of the challenges he points to are grammatical in nature: “The paragraph / Contained one single sentence. / So elusive was its explication / It taunted my analysis” (33). He talks about going to University and learning to parse sentence structures, and then continues, “I took a breath / And dove right in, / That pearl that lay so hidden / My sharp mind was about to win.” He talks about modifying clauses “in a breathless syntax ride” and “hurtling through its scratching clauses” (33). The focus is consistently on the style of the writing. To me, it is not worth valuing writing by virtue of its being obscure. I like to puzzle over the meaning, the intention, the implications, not over which dependent clause successfully elaborates on the promise of an independent clause. This love of obscurity is what feeds into the points above, I think: the obscurity of High Thoughts and Feelings and the obscurity of inverted grammatical structures in particular. Reading this way gives some insight into McAlpine’s priorities as a writer, and I think we just have a different approach.

        There’s a phenomenon happening right now surrounding “lost media.”  As sad as it is sometimes, there’s also something special about it—the fact that maybe nobody else will get to see this also gives it an elevated status. So, if you’re asking whether I liked Excalibur of Spirit, the short answer is: not particularly. But it’s still nice knowing I read it.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

  It’s a little presumptuous for an author to position himself as a prophet or messiah, but such is Richard Bach’s ambition in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. The slim volume has essentially three threads, each with the core focus on freedom, spirituality, and imagination. The first part of the book is a hand-written allegory where creatures cling to the bottom of a flowing river and one decides to let go and is swept away; other creatures see this creature flying by and see it as a miracle. The second narrative is a straightforward story of the main character, Richard Bach himself, as he flies from various towns and offers $3 plane rides to the citizens. He then meets Dan Shimoda, a man involved in the same project, but doing so after quitting his job as a messiah. Within the book, there are a number of excerpts from a messiah manual that serve as a complimentary set of aphorisms that lends the other sections an allegorical quality.

The central narrative focuses on Bach and Shimoda’s philosophical discussions and Bach trying to learn how to perform miracles like walking on water, swimming in land, making wrenches float, flying planes without having to refuel, and so on. One particularly strange event is when Shimoda conjures a vampire to scare Bach to force Bach to recognize that he should stand up for what he wants and not do anything he doesn’t feel like doing (i.e. give up his blood). Towards the end of the book, there’s a particularly polarizing conversation where Shimoda goes on the radio and insists that people don’t die unless they consent to dying (I can understand the outrage—try telling anyone being starved or bombed right now that they are only dying because they choose to). Then, Shimoda is murdered by an angry townsperson who shoots him with a shotgun. It’s implied that he can save himself but chooses not to.

I think the book is going to be controversial for its philosophical stances either way. There’s a deeply idealistic approach rather than a materialist one. Essentially, the book posits the idea that the entire world is an illusion and that we can manifest anything we want by thinking it. It’s similar to Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, but it’s much less obnoxious. Anything we want, we have. Any time we think we have problems, we do. As an example of one of the messiah handbook’s aphorisms reads as follows: “You are / never given a wish / without also being given the / power to make it true” (92). Another: “Your / conscience is / the measure of the / honesty of your selfishness. / Listen to it / carefully” (104). Bach’s book positions itself as a kind of guidebook, of course, but I think where things are controversial is that so much of the ‘manifestation’ philosophy of the book is individualistic and it doesn’t necessarily ring true—but of course, I’m a cynic. I just find it hard to believe that when there’s all the systemic issues that serve to disadvantage people that we can “imagine” our way out of it [Bach replaces the word “faith” with “imagination”]. There’s climate change, but we can just imagine the world is perfect and it is—and of course it is, because the world is an illusion.

One idea that is particularly hard to argue with is when Bach asks Shimoda why they go see a movie. Through a Socratic conversation, Shimoda guides Bach to the realization that for whatever justifications we have for doing things, it all comes down to either 1) having fun 2) learning things or 3) both. It’s reasonably persuasive that all of our actions fit into those categories.

In terms of style, the book is fine. The sentence construction is consistently clear and direct. The tone is somewhat aggrandizing, of course, given that the story focuses on two messiahs. There are actually a few moments of humour that land pretty well. There are some sarcastic comments that the central characters share that are nice touches, and as a huge fan of Arrested Development, there was a moment in the text that had a funny echo—certainly not one that Bach could have anticipated, but amusing nonetheless. When witnessing a miracle, Bach reflects on a moment where he interacted with a magician: “when I was a kid, learning magic – magicians say that! They carefully tell us, ‘Look, this is not a miracle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an effect, it is the illusion of magic” (56). It reminds me of Gob constantly correcting people on calling magic tricks illusions: Illusion, Michael! or Illusions, dad! You don’t have time for my illusions.

Books serve different purposes. This book is more of a spiritual exercise than an aesthetic / literary venture, at least in my mind. The emphasis is predominantly on ideas presenting those ideas in little allegories, like when a wheelchair-bound man gets out of his chair and runs to the aeroplane because problems are only in our minds. As a result, I don’t have a ton of additional comments. I apologize if this review comes across as a little thin, but in my defence, the book is similarly thin.

It was okay. Will it revolutionalize my life? I’ll have to overcome my grounded realism and perpetually think about how the world is an illusion. I’ll just have to say: I’m no messiah and not likely to become one anytime soon.

Monoculture by Sue Goyette

    If I were smart, I would have taken a photo of this book in the beautiful vistas of Whistler, B.C., where I purchased it. It wouldn’t have been entirely accurate, since Sue Goyette’s Monoculture takes place in Nova Scotia—but the sheer magnificence of the trees would have justified it, I assure you.

    Monoculture is a rare occurrence of a book. It’s an inventive project that blurs the line between narrative and poetry. The atmosphere of the text is masterful and the sense of reverence it inspires is unparalleled by anything in my recent memory. It’s a book that reaches into your heart and forces it to pump, a book that breaks your heart like a twig, a book that makes you feel the bittersweet sap of the universe on your tongue.

    To be more precise, Monoculture is a work of speculative almost-non-fiction. The book is a compilation of comments left on the website for Nova Scotia’s final surviving forest. Interspersed in the onslaught of comments are a few more standard poems that serve as a kind of chapter break. Admittedly, you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit because nobody online is nearly as poetic or articulate as the people in this comments section. 

    Goyette’s project is perfectly wrought. Consider how the book is about a vast forest where the visitors routinely get lost. Forests are comprised of all the individual trees; you only see fragments of the forest and not the full picture. Setting up the book as a comment section emulates that same idea: you get an idea of the vastness of the forest, but only get these brief glimpses into human experience.

    The structure of the book helps to enhance the atmosphere of the text, which continually shifts. The opening section of the book offers a haunting and ominous kind of tone. There are references to the trees speaking and moving, leaning in to hear you better. I’m paraphrasing, but one of the reviewers says that the trees breathe along with you. It’s almost like the haunted house of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, unsettling you as if it were alive.

    Incidentally, while I read the first section, I had a thought that the forest is described like a living being. The irony of the phrase should be immediately recognizable: forests are alive. But we forget. Goyette does something truly special where she defamiliarizes trees; yet, in becoming less familiar to us, they become more alive. There’s a moment where Goyette makes this a little more explicit. One of the commenters notes how “it seems the birds are the fire alarms. Or the ‘canaries,’ if you know what I mean” (30). It’s a strange inversal where we co-opted the idea of canaries as a tool and here birds reclaim the shorthand. 

    The first part of the book balances a sense of dread with a sense of wonder. That manifests itself with respect to peoples’ identities. Consider, for example, the way people carve their initials into trees. One of Goyette’s commenters says, “There’s no way I’m carving anything but maybe an anchor just to show I’d been there and that I’m solid. That tree would snap my initials like chicken bones” (11). The simile here presents the fragility of identity. Trees have the power to destroy you; you’re adrift and just trying to hang on to your solidity in the face of their majesty. Almost in response to this post, another commenter says, “I didn’t appreciate losing my name. None of us did” (11). There’s a loss of identity in the face of the forest, and the visitors could only remember their names by “think[ing] in rhymes. Caravan, strawberry jam, flan. When they all yelled Dan, [he] nearly lost [his] shit” (11). In that sentence, the pronoun “they” is ambiguous. It might be the people visiting the forest together, but to me it is far more likely that it is the trees themselves yelling back.

    When the trees yell back, the humans respond by “los[ing] [their] shit.” In fact, there’s a motif in the book where the trees are treated like drugs. People have these phenomenal experiences by touching their tongue to sap or breathing the air. It elevates the experience to a spiritual one. In one scene, a commenter narrates the following:

“There was definitely a colour code but we couldn’t crack it. My friend ate a red leaf to taste its spine. He said its blood is a direct descendent of impermanence which freaked him out. He’d never heard that word before and it was hard to explain it to him without getting too dark about death, you know? He had to eat two yellow leaves and some pine toothpicks to calm down. It was the most intense Saturday afternoon I’ve had in years. Won’t be imbibing in forest for a while, that’s for sure. Shit gets real in there.” (29).

First of all, “my friend ate a red leaf to taste its spine”---what a turn of phrase!! We then see the destabilizing impact of consuming the forest. The lack of an article for “imbibing in forest” extends the drug-like metaphor that many of the narrators find resonant.

    Whether drug-metaphor-induced or not, though, the forest routinely prompts deep thinking and existential considerations from its visitors. Some of my favourite moments are the poetic reflections people have following quiet moments that fill and break your heart at the same time. There are a few people that admit to taking things from the forest and their insecurities about it are incredibly touching. For instance, one narrator says, “I stole some leaves and an acorn but felt so bad that I brought them back. Now I’m worried that I left them in the wrong place and they don’t know how to find their way home” (29). That sense of tenderness the forest inspires is what this book aims to cultivate.

    I’ll mention just a few more moments here to illustrate the power of this book. A commenter explains his daughter’s experience as follows: “My daughter found this tree with one leaf just hanging on for dear life. She stayed with it for a couple of hours. She said she sang to it. That makes me so proud. Anyway, she’s going to do a project about it and asked me what the name of that moment is when it finally broke away. I still get choked up thinking about it” (34). That dug deep inside me. I have a soft spot for trying to find a word for particular minutiae. I don’t know if Goyette invented this moment, but it feels so genuine, so authentic to a childhood experience and it just crushes me. In another scene, a man sings to a porcupine as it dies in the road. The wife leaves the comment describing it and notes how he rarely opens up at all and to witness this tenderness is such a rare moment. Rarely, commenters respond to one another in the book, but this one is given special attention—someone later comments on it.

    The voice of the text is deeply poetic. Of course, you might expect lush imagery for describing the forest. Several passages describe the scenes beautifully: “It was the accessories that got me. The tiny stones and those white flowers, perfectly strewn: a deserted photo shoot. Or a meditation on décor” (36). The way the humans interact with the forest is equally poetic, and the lack of backstory adds to the beauty. For instance, we don’t know the backstory here, but one narrator says, “I had brought a lock of her hair. I don’t know what possessed me but someone had told me that birds like our hair for their nests. It’s still so soft and curls perfectly for a small egg. I left it for them to find, with a pink-flecked rock to guard it” (36). We can only imagine what has prompted this moment, and that brief glimpse is beautiful.

    Actually there’s a poem from pages 23-24. It’s a kind of list poem that hints at a series of narratives. Each line begins “The last thing she said was” and what follows is crushing. Some are beautiful, and some are devastating: “The last thing she said was just for a couple of hours, so I can hear myself think” (24), “The last thing she said was that blue looks really good on you” (24), “The last thing she said was I’m so sorry I’m not better at this” (24). I can’t articulate just how powerful it is to read a full poem that begins every line with this. The intimation of narrative is so alluring, so beautifully tender.

    Alongside the tenderness, there’s also an impulse towards the political. Partway through, there’s a lot of discussion surrounding the normalization of clearcutting. The lattermost section of the book is most explicitly political, lamenting the loss of the trees at the hands of greedy industrialists. There’s a kind of anger in the book that emerges between moments of quiet reflection and the magnificence of the beauty.

    I like the way that people find themselves more connected to nature throughout the book. There are several moments where people take on tree-like qualities. Now that I think of it, there are several sections where trees remind people of photographs of their loved ones and wonder how the trees can capture their essence so well. That in itself is pretty beautiful, but I think the most beautiful example of reverse-personification is as follows: “My voice hibernates in my hands mostly” (135). Simply gorgeous.

    As you’ve likely inferred at this point, Monoculture has a grip on me. It’s one of the most stunning books I’ve read this year. There’s a sensation that cannot be put into words. The book is a seed in the core of my heart bursting open. It’s a painful, gorgeous, tender, dreadful, magnificent work that actually makes me emotional to think about. I don’t know how it has had that effect.

    That last paragraph might well have been a comment on the last forest in Nova Scotia. Sue Goyette really got it right.

    I can’t recommend this enough.