“Skrag” and “Flicker and Hawk”

Both David Arnason and Patrick Friesen make ruse their guiding rule. They may write in different poetic manners, but they share a common ease in the way they choose and treat their subjects. Neither is uncertain of his craft, even though both make uncertainty one of their major themes.

Arnason has written two highly acclaimed collections of short stories, Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice and The Circus Performers Bar, and has written three plays, each one different in genre. Friesen, besides his previous poetry collections, has written a play, a poetic adaptation of his long poem, The Shunning, and Anna: Stolen Together from Various This and Thats, a text for a music and dance performance. Both writers reside in Winnipeg, and both deal with the Manitoba countryside and cityscape. But the similarities end here. Skrag and Flicker and Hawk may share the same landscape, but it is a landscape that inspires the two poets with different visions.

Skrag consists of four parts: two long poems, the opening title poem and the closing “Descartes & Dick.” Most of the poems could be called descriptions in different modes—lyrical, parodic, meditative. But to refer, say, to his “Cottage Poems” as lyrics describing idyllic and rustic moments of cottage life, one would have first to redefine description. In Arnason’s case, it becomes description, a process that follows the deconstructive method of revealing the contradictions inherent in all works of art. Hence the delight he takes in uncovering the uncertainties lurking beneath the deceptively clear surfaces of things and words, a pleasure that becomes the reader’s, too.

Arnason is a lover of language and of its ambiguities.

My aunt said, David, our car is in the garage. I wonder if you could whip me home? I went to get my whip, but by the time I got back she was gone.

And just in case this kind of punning sounds trite or too easy, Arnason, elsewhere in his book, provides us with the generative ruse for this play with words, a play equally serious and risky:

I could, of course, tell you
about the roses,
pale pink along the sides of
country roads.
Choosing a single petal, I
might plaster it
on the windshield, an index
to the self
I’d have you know. It’s not
that easy. I am not
the kind of man you might
associate with roses.

or Byron, alive after all and
growing old in Greece.
I make too many people
think of bears. I am always
unprepared, always surprised,
taken unawares
by what’s already common
knowledge. You want
to snap
your fingers at me…

Here, roses are not merely a point of reference and a point of departure. Arnason’s poetic method relies on his knowledge, “common knowledge” indeed, that roses are a fitting and conventional part of cottage life, especially of British cottages. Here, though, roses grow not inside gardens but along the sides of country roads, thus becoming markers of a different intention. The casual tone of the poet’s discourse lets the poem curve away from the subject of roses, and makes them the “index” to his self. From roses to bears. From immaculate beauty to awe. This slight swing from the traditional to the unexpected—a single rose petal plastered on the windshield and the literary references to figures in exile—not only alters the balance of the landscape but simultaneously describes what the reader identifies as poetic signs. The metonymic shift from Ulysses to Byron, a shift from the epic to the romantic mode, accomplishes its poetic effect only when we read “bears,” only when we leave behind us the ambiance of literary allusions and enter the unpredictable world of nature. It’s an abrupt but fitting entry.

If this is to be taken as the poet’s attempt at a self-portrait, then the poet, emerging out of the “glare of Winnipeg winter,” can never be portrayed with precision. Evasion of definition, together with the complexities it entails, is one of the main features of Arnason’s work. His writing never pretends to get hold of the universal; instead, it remains proudly localized, inquisitive, enticing.

Arnason constantly doubles his intentions. But this doubling is not merely a matter of technique. It is a matter of ideology, the poet’s worldview expressed in the turns of his language, in his ambiguous use of imagery. This is especially obvious in the long poems of the collection. The lack of decorum in the title poem about Skrag, a vicious and lascivious farm mongrel, may at first repel the reader. Skrag, killing midnight chickens and scratching his itchy flanks, has nothing in common with the friendliness of pet dogs, the kind who inhabit Michael Ondaatje’s poems. Skrag is moved by his animal force, a force similar to the one exuded by the birds and animals in Patrick Lane’s poetry. Violent and uneasily seductive, like the violence and pleasure we find in nature. And so Skrag gradually appeases the reader. After all, who could remain indifferent to a dog which is “slave to unyielding love,” which “climbs / from his bed of straw weighing / the exigencies of lust / against the responsibilities / of state.”?

When we move from Skrag, the “cynic philosopher,” to the poet’s own persona as lover of nature and as lover, a different ethic emerges. Skrag’s cocksureness about the joys of the body is gone. The poet is on the lookout for the miracles of life:

And there were more, more
miracles than I can number,
the pale green of early leaves,
the screaming chorus
of gulls, orange ladybugs
clinging to the rocks
and now you…

Not the Christian kind of miracles that free logic while imprisoning the imagination, but miracles when least expected. The miraculous of the familiar. By assigning names to things he knows, Arnason invites his readers to see with fresh eyes, to create their own miracles:

It is another thing entirely to say
why I should free a dragonfly. Still
since you are here beside me I can say
I love you …

In considering whether or not to free a dragonfly, Arnason doesn’t intend “a moral question.” Quite the contrary. He frees himself from the arbitrary strictures of morality and abides instead in the ethic he sees inscribed in nature. Arnason’s lyric poems offer the reader a litany of natural signs, signs, however, that the poet resists interpreting because he doesn’t want to foreclose on the reader’s own interpretation.

In “Descartes & Dick,” the most whimsical poem in the collection, Arnason outlines the play/ground of his poetry. The Cartesian theories of “man’s” ego-position and of the privileging of culture in the Western tradition are skillfully parodied in a Canadian context. Arnason is a deconstructor, and a humorous one at that. The ethic of these poems, then, derives from articulating his own position in the world. Skrag deliberately resists offering answers to the questions it raises, but it does offer the reader a world of various and unabashed delights.

Patrick Friesen’s Flicker and Hawk suggests a different take on the world. Without being overtly concerned with ideology, Friesen embraces the world fiercely and passionately. In long, complex lines he brings together the lyric tension of love and soul-searching with the narrative unfolding of stories. More open with form and language than in his previous books, Friesen achieves a rhythmical unity in these poems which paradoxically defies anticipation, yet never fails to please the ear. The aesthetic result is utterly satisfying. Flicker and Hawk exudes beauty, the kind that makes you hold your breath because of its ferocity.

Like Arnason, Friesen takes as his subject the ordinary. But it is his originality of perception, the idiosyncrasies of his imagination and the particular angles from which he gazes at the surrounding world that makes these poems ring with freshness.

With the exception of the long poem, “nothing in the mirror,” the collection is composed of lyrics of various lengths. Yet, in spite of this overriding mode, Flicker and Hawk exceeds the self-referentiality of lyricism. It locates the self within a context which itself becomes the centre of these poems, accentuating the poet’s inside and outside. Flicker and Hawk explores the wholeness of selfhood, not only what the self is, but, and more importantly, what it is not. What it seeks to become, its gaps, its paradoxes.

In “sunday afternoon,” the opening poem of the collection, we read of the “fathers in town” sleeping, and of how the poet’s mother spent her own afternoon.

mother slid a fresh matrimonial cake onto potholders on the stove
picked up a book a true book of someone else’s life
sunglasses a pitcher of lemonade and a straw hat
spread a blue blanket in the backyard near the lilac shrubs for shade
lay down one ear hearing children in the garden
she never escaped all the way nor did she want to not quite
this much on a sunday afternoon went a long way

In this poem and throughout Flicker and Hawk, the marriage of simplicity and displacement graces Friesen’s work with an eerie quality that both unsettles and offers the reader the satisfaction of recognition.

Flicker and Hawk reminds the reader that no escape, whatever its intent, is smooth and final. Nor can the poet’s dreams reveal paradise to him. In “one time around,” the last poem in the book, Friesen is still seeking an exit from the space that ties him down. “someplace there’s paradise they say but it’s far away,” Friesen writes, adding “nothing divine cares nothing gets me out of here yet the heart heals.” Behind the darkness of these lines lies, perhaps, the ironic assurance another poet found in his many escapes and discoveries. Ezra Pound’s “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel / but is jagged” comes to mind when we move through the irregular terrain of Friesen’s poetry.

Oratorial or oracular, subdued or plainly narrative, Friesen’s voice sings of life as transgression.

rilla epp’s taken away her heat and john isaacs is long gone
damascus thessalonica such names
gethsemane curled around my tongue in flames
my world was a street and now I am the town

These ballad-like lines, which repeat themselves in reverse fashion at the end of the poem, illustrate the poet’s own reversed epiphany, his recognition that, leave-takings aside, the town lives within and will continue to haunt him. It is not simple destiny that is being addressed here; it is the artist’s recognition that while he does not fit into the world, he still has the responsibility to explain the world to himself and to others. Such a task, of course, leads to failure, but the “failure” Friesen talks about is the one we encounter in Phyllis Webb’s poetry: a series of daring gestures, what she calls the “edited delicacies” of terror. This poetics of failure is an indication of how hard the poet gazes at himself and at his world.

When Friesen focusses on something, he sees and hears beyond the naked eye or the stretched ear. Here is what he saw when his mother took off her wedding ring in order to play the piano: “she swayed toward the music sheet / her fingers descending like snow / I saw the white skin on her finger / where her marriage had been.” Or here is what talk about the Bible reveals:

the bible was a telephone
book
of levites canaanites and
reubenites
it was a television set
my favourite program being
revelation
until someone told me what
it meant

the bible was a whorehouse
leaning at the edge of the
world
I took some pleasure there
had regrets

and though I don’t quite believe it myself
this afternoon while I
was going through
my photographs
I heard the bible laugh

What Friesen’s irreverent parody reveals is ultimately more important than what he intends to parody: the Bible’s textuality—its spelling out of where the world came from and where it’s heading—overtakes its own sacredness. But no matter how profane Friesen becomes, he never loses sight of religion. When on a Tuesday he puts “God out / with the cat,” he does so not only knowingly making a fool of himself but also challenging what normally frames spirituality. “there is a lie I need to know,” Friesen says, playing with and against the norms of poetic discourse.

In exploring himself, Friesen does not draw a self-portrait. What emerges from his search is an emptiness full of intimations. While the poet’s body aches from love or while it disappears in sand and in water, his language helps him surface again:

I am myself when I write I know I’ve got the glory it spreads like heat from the heart sometimes I’m standing on my chair downstairs singing harmony or slow-shuffling around the room with smooth rhythm
it happens the lord’s there no question and I take the words I’m hungry for the words there’s love there someplace between the words
and I say them and sing them you can see the red and blue in the room
and I know where I am it feels clean no clothes no dreams I feel you my heart’s open come on come on whoever you are

While there is despair in these poems, there is also invocation and incantation, words giving Friesen “something other than rhetoric or ritual maybe a gesture.”

Flicker and Hawk is a collage of gestures, those gestures of love that undo soul and body. “she knows I am an animal of temptations / that I want to disappear / at the hem of her flesh.” Friesen’s treatment of the erotic is at once sensuous and ethereal. Desire in these poems is always marked by layers of dreams and personal histories, love verging on the edge of adoration and on the resistance such an emotion demands.

lord I’m coming apart this is the time of my evisceration this is when my singing ceases and something almost silent begins
I have danced and slipped I have fallen I have been cruel and I have lain in the arms of betrayal
I’m bereft of love and sense I’m stupid in my collapse no one hears me I’m not saying the words that could make anyone see or know my descent
I’m bereft of words but not the need to find them
I fear my love will not reveal its true face I fear what I am in the night and what I conceal all day
lord I fear each breath I fear this paradise I do not fear death it will catch my fall

Love-song and prayer, this and other poems echo The Song of Songs in their psalmodic rhythms, only they do so with the full knowledge of loss. There are echoes, too, of Dylan Thomas’ sensuous religiosity, the paradisal dream of love stained by the vigour of desire.

Friesen’s Flicker and Hawk is a tour de farce. It delves deeply into the “archive” of love; it unfolds the body’s memory; it speaks the silence of desire, the weight of faith. And it does all this with eloquence. ♦

Smaro Kamboureli, formerly from Winnipeg, recently has accepted a teaching position at the University of Victoria.