aguments with gravity by Michael Crummey

        I’m going to begin with a flashback to my Canadian Literature course in University. I was amused by the fact that I was reading a short story called “Bread” by Michael Crummey. It just seemed so à propos. Until now, that had been the entirety of my experience reading Crummey. Perhaps it’s because of that context I think about Crummey’s work relative to the “question” of Canadian Literature we spent so much time on back then. I remember the debate raging on about what defined CanLit and a theory emerged (I think originally posited by Margaret Atwood? Or Northrop Frye?) that CanLit was primarily about the challenges of conquering the wilderness.

Nearly two decades since, I’ve read my fair share of Canadian poets. Sometimes they fall into that us-vs-wilderness trope, but more often I see Canadian poets exploring family histories or looking outward toward broader social issues—and I’d place Crummey within this rubric. arguments with gravity is divided into the following sections: 1) The Air Around Their Bodies, 2) One of The Lives I Have Not Lived, 3) Part of It, 4) Redefining the Kiss and 5) The River You Remember.

The first section deals with family histories and nature, including the poem “Apprenticeships,” that depicts the speaker learning—or trying to learn—drawing by sketching his father’s hands while he guts fish. Another short work in the collection, “Near Jack’s Pond Park,” we are offered a vignette of a pond—far from trying to conquer the wilderness and instead simply observing it:

The water is placid

ego-less

the perfect contemplation of the surface

mirrors blue sky

a stand of spruce trees on the shore.

A single loon moves toward

the water’s centre

a fluid ripple-less motion —

only the bird’s voice

makes it real

Diving, it disappears into

its own reflection

into the silence of the water’s forest

the strange depth of the dark boughs

waving below the surface (14)

It’s a quiet moment. I particularly like the quietness necessary for the single loon to move through ripple-less motion. The idea of the dark boughs waving below the surface is also a lovely image to document. Another beautiful poem in the collection offers some reflections on winter. Crummey focuses on some winter imagery that is beautiful, but which has a hint of an edge:

Frost laces the window
with white,
winter’s elegant geometry.
Fingernail traces
a crystal line,
ice crawling down the spine
like panic;
my mother’s voice on the telephone,
words falling like intricate
stars of snow,
spelling out
another human accident in
the green mathematics
of a Labrador forest.

Lost for days, probably,
trudging through the
emptiness of winter
reciting the alphabet
the sanity of the 9X tables
till the frost
bleached his mind clean
till he lay beneath the innocent trees,
his mouth a frozen blue vowel
his eyes sewn shut by
the sharp thread of the cold (79).

By contrast, there’s a poem called “Delayed” that offers some of the most visceral, gruesome imagery I’ve seen in poems lately. The poem starts off rather innocuously: a child being sent across the road for “milk, or bread, or some other necessity” (18). The child “pushed on his father’s over-sized shoes” (18) and “the driver of the Coca Cola truck / didn’t see him when he fell beneath the wheels, / only felt the boy’s presence there, the fragile skull / collapsing like a small unimportant star” (18). The simplicity of the delivery makes it all the more gruesome. The perspective then shifts to a speaker that witnesses the event. The speaker narrates, “I had been sent for milk as well — / a tarp thrown over the accident by then, / the corners held by cases of Cola, / and some of what the boy had been / spilled into the open air on the pavement, / as if still trying to make its way home” (18). The poem offers a dark concealment of the accident, which is so gruesome that it cannot be contained—it seeps into the street, past the tarp. The intimation of his blood spilling into the street contains an eerie parallel to the fragility of the Coca Cola bottles.

The poem continues with an account of the deceased boy’s brother:

A small town crowd had gathered and
his brother was there, crying on
the wooden steps of the store —

older than me, and someone

I had learned to be afraid of,

a fighter, cruel and stupidity fearless,
his twelve year old knuckles
white with scars.
I felt sorry for him then, seeing
what he had lost, watching his body shake
with sobs, as if a man’s fist held his shirt
and would not let go. (18)

I think that this stanza of the poem does a beautiful job of humanizing the characters and offering tenderness in an otherwise bleak scenario. What I find most compelling about the poem’s narrative, though, is what happens after. It seems so accurate to the awkwardness of human interaction in the face of tragedy. When something so horrendous happens, what do you do? How do you deal with it? In the case of the speaker of this poem, he has no other option but to continue his errand:

In the end I went inside to buy the milk,
feeling ridiculous with my handful of coins

and then the wet carton under my arm;
a circle of people surrounded
the yellow rustle of tarp
as if they expected a miracle,
but my mother was waiting at home
and I could not stay. (18)

I really appreciate the cultivation of this awkwardness. The futility of it all seems so true to life, so much so that the final stanza of the poem doesn’t even need to be included: “I climbed the hill toward our street, / the weight of something huge and wordless / in my step. I was late arriving that afternoon / and couldn’t properly explain / why I was delayed, and don’t expect / I’ve properly explained it now” (19).

Crummey’s heart is pretty clear in several of the pieces. Sometimes that heart is evidence through tenderness and tragedy. Sometimes that heart comes through in humour. There’s a poem called “David Donnell’s Schlong.” The poem is provided with an epigraph from Donnell’s collection What Men Have Instead of Skirts: “I’ve got fairly interesting genitals myself” (61). The poem itself is a scathing report on David Donnell’s poems, but what is even better is the note on the poem that appears in the back of the book. Michael Crummey does a statistical breakdown of poems in David Donnell’s Governor General’s Award Winning collection. Those are my italics because it’s so ridiculous. Crummey notes that there are 70 poems in the collection, 12 that reference the poet’s or another man’s penis, 9 that reference male genitalia, 21 that reference sex, 17 not counting the ones above that reference women in some state of undress or nudity. Crummey cheekily references some of the most egregious lines, even if they only appear once. It’s a great bit of culture jamming that critiques some broader issues in CanLit and the publishing industry.

There’s another part of the collection that includes two poems called “Redefining the Kiss: Women” and “Redefining the Kiss: Men.” Crummey is clearly striving for a reconceptualization of intimacy that does not rely on whatever David Donnell is up to. The poems themselves are okay, but what is most enjoyable are the direct parallels between them. Some of the phraseology repeats exactly. In the women version: “Sometimes I think a woman’s body is the only distance between a man and a woman, / sometimes it’s that distance I’m in love with” (57) and in the man version: “A man’s body is the distance / he puts between himself and other men, / and it’s a distance he’s in love with” (58). These reflections on intimacy are not entirely without fault. In the poem “Part of It,” Crummey describes being in love in El Salvador with a woman whom everyone was in love with. Her identity is tied up with the enthusiasm and idealism of revolution. The back half of the poem then recounts how she was arrested as a rebel and he projects the rest of her story from there. The speaker then operates in a confessional mode, noting that he is living comfortably in Kingston and trying to write a poem for “publication credit in a small, respected / Canadian literary journal” (48). There’s a core tension in the poem that is highlighted in the final stanza:

Some people have tried to justify this kind

of exploitation in the name of art

but to me that’s just rhetoric,

propaganda I can’t bring myself to believe in.

There are no excuses for the way we live our lives,

there isn’t even ignorance to cover our heads

with anymore.

I know you are being tortured in
a Salvadoran prison; I know you have been

raped there, and not just because you are
young and beautiful

and this poem is part of that too
somehow (49).

I struggle with that poem. It feels like a misstep. On the one hand it’s trying to disavow the kind of art and politics that borrows trauma for personal gain or artistic vision—and yet, the poem still made it into the collection. How different is it from David Donnell, at its core?

In any case, there is a whole series of poems about El Salvador and Oscar Romero. This is the part of CanLit that looks outward. Not interesting enough as a country of our own, presumably, I think there’s a trend of looking globally for inspiration and for political action. I can’t really fault Crummey for that; his passion for the subject is evident and far be it from me to suggest that we always have to look for issues at home when we are sometimes called elsewhere.

All things considered, I’m glad to have finally read Crummey’s poetry. It wasn’t the most memorable collection I’ve read—particularly because I can’t seem to help reading it through the lens of CanLit—but it wasn’t bad and if you don’t like it, hey—it’s only like 100 pages.

Happy reading, everyone!

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin

        Nonfiction sometimes serves to inform, sometimes to persuade—but rarely does it serve to excite. In the opening pages of Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, you can feel the energy and the push to take action. The doom and gloom despair of statistical realities have their place, but Benjamin’s focus is on creating a vision for what might be otherwise, which seems to be confirmed in the excellent supplementary interview between her and Ibrahim X. Kendi that is added as an appendix to the book.

        Viral Justice is the kind of book we need: a book that looks backward to explain, but looks forward to empower. The book is about social justice advocacy, particularly as it pertains to race, in the wake of the Covid pandemic. In the introduction to the text, Benjamin offers an excellent outline of the project. She begins with the following reflection: “Racism, inequality, and indifference are a juvenile rebellion against the reality of this interconnection, microscopically, and sociopolitically.” Citing from James Baldwin’s address at the National Press Club on December 10th, 1986, she writes, “I want to grow up and so should you.” She then sees the Covid-19 pandemic as “perhaps [...] forcing us all to grow up, exposing that vulnerability and interdependence are our lot, whether we like it or not.” As an aside, there’s an excellent Propagandhi song that expresses a similar sentiment: “There is no me / there is no you / there is all. / There is no you. / There is no me. / And that is all. / A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. / A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of / the Universe is love” (“Duplicate Keys Icaro (An Interim Report)”).

Anyway, Benjamin suggests that “Covid-19 is a social disease” and draws from the work of sociologist Eric Klinenberg, to note that “solidarity is an essential tool for combatting infectious disease and other collective threats. Solidarity motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security.” She then notes that he cautious: “It’s an open question whether Americans have enough social solidarity to stave off the worst possibilities of the coronavirus pandemic.” If I retain one essential element of Viral Justice, it is that the myth of independence is seriously overblown and politically precarious. At every turn, collective action and solidarity are required. Even “vaccines” (both literally and metaphorically) “are no magical fix for the kind of pathological self-interest that masquerades as independence.” Benjamin explains, “When we look worldwide, access to a Covid-19 vaccine has widened the gap between those whose lives matter and those deemed disposable” and then notes that “we don’t have to resign ourselves to this infantile individualism-cum-vaccine-nationalism.”

The questions that guide the text are as follows: “What if instead we reimagined virality as something we might learn from? What if the virus is not something simply to be feared and eliminated, but a microscopic model of what it could look like to spread justice and joy in small but perceptible ways? Little by little, day-by-day, starting in our own backyards? Let’s identify our plots, get to the root cause of what’s ailing us, accept our interconnectedness, and finally grow the fuck up.” This passage gives an example of Benjamin’s inviting and direct tone. I appreciate the humour and emotion in her strategic use of expletives as we embark on her vision of a “microvision of social change.”

Essentially, Benjamin brands the text as a selection of lessons we can learn by modelling action after the virality of Covid and crafts the text with a blend of autobiography, statistics, anecdotes, and academic studies. That said, she very specifically notes in the closing interview that looking at problems academically is a privilege of those who do not need to live the realities; academia diagnoses but does not reimagine. The framework for social change presented as an alternative is drawn from the work of Dean Spade; Benjamin notes that there are three types of movement work:

1. Dismantling harmful systems
2. Providing for people’s immediate needs
3. Creating alternative structures that can meet those needs based on values of care, democratic participation, and solidarity.

One of the highlights of Benjamin’s work, for me, is the way she makes discussions more nuanced and truly progressive rather than replicating models that do not serve us. The point is made clear when discussing the carceral systems in an early chapter of the book. A few quick reminders: the prison system is harmful for inmates, but also for the families of inmates—of which there are many in the United States. The impact of that system is far-reaching, including the innocent families of incarcerated people. Benjamin notes that when we see people doing wrong, our knee-jerk reaction is often to want to see them punished or imprisoned. Benjamin notes, though, that this model is fallacious, since it replicates ideas of carceral justice rather than reforming it to better serve us.

As a point of contrast, take the example of Ecuador. Benjamin explains how in 2007, they “began a bold experiment that didn’t cost a lot of money.” She notes that “rather than continuing to criminalize street gangs, the country legalized them, and as sociologist David Brotherton documents, gangs were able to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else. Some members went to school, started businesses like catering and graphic design companies, or took advantage of grants for job training or setting up community centres. As a result, homicide rates dropped dramatically and gangs began operating more like social movements, even collaborating with their rivals on cultural events.” The approach is simply a reworking of policy in the same way that legalizing drugs is simply a shift in policy that changes policing practices and allows people to seek help and addiction resources. The notion is that over years, “trust and long term relationships had a chance to build up. It wasn’t the policy alone, but how people used the legalization of gangs as an opportunity to transform how they related to one another.”         From the opening chapters, Benjamin then transitions into a discussion of inequities in education. I value those conversations, of course, given my profession. There’s some excellent discussion of hiring practices, the impact of suspensions, the idea of segregated schools (either directly or indirectly), and some of the grassroots initiatives that were supportive of true social change (cf. Cultivating Genius by Gholdy E. Muhammad). In a tangentially connected passage, Benjamin discusses how job descriptions can be rewritten in order to be more inclusive and facilitate more diverse applicants. This, I think, is especially needed for a school system that is significantly, homogeneously White.         I can hear the objections of people who will say “but jobs should go to the most qualified applicants!” I’ll counter that with a fantastic passage from Viral Justice. Benjamin recounts being at a conference and presenting in a majestic place and when they are being praised for their distinction, her fellow panellist interrupts: “Yes, you are worthy—but you are also very lucky.” The conversation Benjamin offers about luck is incredibly poignant. I believe this is a blend of her fellow panellist’s commentary and her own: “Lucky. Not a word one hears often enough in elite spaces. Being lucky doesn’t mean you are not qualified, it just means many others could have been in your shoes, but they were not chosen, and there are many more besides who might have qualified if given the same opportunities.” Summed up in one glorious sentence, Benjamin offers this line: “Luckiness does not negate worthiness, it negates entitlement” and continues that “Luck is the kryptonite of elitist delusions of specialness. And even then, the language of luck doesn’t do justice to the sheer organisation of selectivity, a key dimension of elite spaces, as a process [...] These processes are more often than not obscured.” These kinds of insights allow us to reconceptualize our relationship to power and privilege. Being aware in this way is necessary to take action for change.         Alas, I feel like I’m always waiting for a book that offers a list of ten ways to make the world perfect. That never happens here or anywhere—I guess you could count something like 12 Rules for Life if you want something by an opportunistic hack and political lunatic, but I don’t and I don’t. Viral Justice gives a guideline for making small changes to create opportunities for others, provide for peoples’ needs, and develop new systems. It makes the idea of change manageable and thus offers an optimistic outlook for the world. In short, it embodies that phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” It’s the small actions that matter.         I admit that between finishing Viral Justice and writing this review, I’ve started reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and some of the core concepts are getting jumbled in my head. That in itself is illustrative of Benjamin’s point: we are all connected. These texts are connected. No one is in isolation, for better and for worse.         In this case, I’d really like to think that it’s for the better.               Happy reading!

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

        The golden rule of show business is to always leave your audience wanting more. David Mitchell is a bad boy who continually breaks this rule. I’ve read two other of David Mitchell’s novels, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, after which I had written off its author as a meandering hack. At the behest of a colleague whose taste I trust, I decided to give Mitchell another chance by reading Black Swan Green. Now, having finished it, I think it is largely like his other novels: it has some merits, it’s too long by half, it succumbs to bloat, and feels adrift. Mitchell seems to have some great ideas but just can’t bring them all together into a cohesive story.

Black Swan Green is probably the most focused of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read. It’s a Bildungsroman about Jason Taylor, a young British boy with a speech impediment that dabbles in poetry. Each chapter deals with a kind of formative moment in his life, ranging from being bullied by his classmates to having his poetry edited by an elderly woman to being supervised by his dad’s subordinate to his first kiss to his parents’ failing marriage. The novel reads as, mostly, episodic. There are through-lines and characters that pop-up repeatedly, but a lot of the chapters could be read in isolation.

To be clear, I have no issue with “slice of life” fiction. It gives Mitchell the freedom to deal with a range of experiences and offer insights into the psychology of youth and beyond. A number of the lessons that Jason learns are poignant, especially when viewed through the lens of a child. However, I kept expecting there to be a conflict that developed in a cohesive way. There’s some hint of that with Jason’s speech impediment and how he deals with bullies, but some chapters felt superfluous to the grander vision of the book. The last few chapters seem to tie details together and bring threads to a close, but it didn’t feel earned in the same way that a continuous story does. It shoehorns in lessons about secrecy and guilt, which, on their own, are great, but feel underdeveloped in Jason’s inner conflict and quickly resolved with the aim to give the book a ‘point.’ 

That’s not to say I didn’t like the concept. There’s a great chapter where Jason finds a bully’s wallet, replete with six hundred pounds, and debates with himself what to do with it. That’s the most finely wrought guilt sub-plot in the book, in my opinion, because it also leads to other layers of guilt: the boy whose wallet was lost fights his girlfriend; Jason finds out that the bully’s dad will likely beat him and decides to give the wallet back; the bully finds his girlfriend to make up and finds her hooking up with someone else; he gets angry and steals a motorbike, gets in an accident, and loses his leg. All this for a lost wallet. It’s the kind of turn-of-the-screw that captures the absurdity of how life actually is.

Mitchell sometimes gets things so right that it’s hard to resist the book’s charm. In one chapter, Jason’s aunt, uncle, and cousins come to visit. The tension and one-upmanship of his family is uncomfortable. In particular, Jason’s mom tries to leverage his poetry to gain points with the extended family, not realizing how negatively this would be received. Of course, it goes over like a lead balloon—until his older cousin Hugo comes to his defence. The chapter is beautifully done: Hugo is a charmer who wins Jason’s confidence before they retreat to play some darts, during which Hugo tears into his younger brother and then denies that he made him cry. He later shoplifts and forces Jason into being an accomplice. The journey of the chapter is excellent, since Hugo is presented in such a positive light before the curtain gets pulled back—we’re right alongside Jason’s experience of learning about Hugo. I love that tension and nuance of Hugo’s character development.

Later, there’s a scene that reads as both true to life and pleasantly mischievous. Jason is searching for a secret tunnel alongside his friend, though the two get separated. Jason then comes across Dawn Madden, a girl with dark honey eyes. There’s a kind of ambiguous flirtation where she makes him act like a dog and offers him a snack. The scene perfectly captures that awkward but exciting temptation of youth. The girl’s flirtations are cruel but hard to resist—except, of course, at that age, boys often don’t pick up on what these interactions mean. Jason botches the flirtation and is sent away with threats of Dawn’s dad’s shotgun. I loved that scene.

Other areas of the book are relatable, too, sure. When Jason is becoming a budding poet and trying to get a grasp on the craft, I can see some of the pitfalls I’ve experienced reflected in Jason’s early works, too. That said, there are some surprisingly poetic descriptions in the book: “Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It’s ace. Petaled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. Moran and I got to the barn at the far side, dizzy with intergalactic travel. I was laughing more than Moran ‘cause Moran’s dry trainer wasn’t dry anymore, it was glistening in cow shit” (80).

In fact, there are a number of lines in the book about the writing process and love of the written word that I quite enjoyed. For instance, Jason describes how arranging words together speeds up time. In a different section, Jason is referring to metronomes, and notes that “Metro Gnomes’re in rain and poems too, and breathing, not just tocks of clocks” (34). The significance of writing to the main character shines through.

In fact, what Mitchell does well is ‘voice.’ He’s great at taking on a particular voice in his writing and sustaining a commitment to that style. This is true in the diverse time periods and styles in Cloud Atlas, and is thoroughly developed in Jason’s internal monologue. In many cases, Jason sounds like the youth he is, and the narrational style perpetually keeps in mind the fact that the narrator has a speech impediment. He interrupts ideas because “Hangman” (the metaphor for his speech impediment) stands in the way. Intrusive thoughts are attributed to Jason’s Unborn Twin. The kinds of logic and calculations that Jason engages in feel authentic for a young man trying to find his place in the world. Even the rumination of who is called what is compelling: you can sort the popularity of the children based on who calls each other by last names, first names, or nicknames. It feels accurate, even if I can’t recall an example from my own experience at this exact moment.

The more I write about Black Swan Green, the more I think of moments in the text I found touching. Even the understated moment of Jason’s older sister Julia moving away is handled with beautiful tact. If you think of the book as a collection of moments, it’s pretty good. If you go in expecting an actual novel, I think the continuousness of the story is lacking. It’s actually a little like To Kill a Mockingbird—lots of moments that are loosely tied together. In particular, there’s a town hall meeting where the villagers are up in arms about a group of nomadic people in the area (they use the G word, if that helps contextualize what I’m referring to). Jason Taylor is essentially Scout Finch in this scene, witnessing first hand the racism in his community. Then, he ends up falling into a pit where they are staying and is forced to see first hand that they are not so bad and, in fact, the prejudice against them is actually more relatable than he had thought. Again, the scene works reasonably well on its own as a lesson in not judging others. The conflict is then essentially dropped, with the only callback being that the nomadic people run the county fair and one of the boys from the encampment comes to Jason’s aid.

All things considered, it’s a reasonably good book. Shave off a hundred pages and it might even be great. Prior to Black Swan Green, I was almost certain I would never read another David Mitchell book. After reading Black Swan Green, I still don’t feel inclined to read David Mitchell, but I’ll bump him up from “never again” to “maybe in a decade if I run out of other books.”

Happy reading!