Hearts Amok: a memoir in verse
Kevin Spenst
Anvil Press, 2020
(Buy here)

One of the first featured questions that pops up on Google when you search "memoir" is: What exactly makes a memoir a memoir? You probably have an answer swelling in your head already, something about truth, real-life stories, and autobiography. This is mostly correct, in my experience. But in the case of Hearts Amok, the newest book of poetry from Kevin Spenst, a memoir in verse is another thing entirely. It would be a mistake to assume the speaker in these poems is 100% the author. Spenst's choice of the sonnet is interesting as a historical touchstone. He contrasts demanding structures with lexical exuberance, almost daring the words to bust apart the metre that contains them. This is familiar terrain for those who have heard Spenst perform, his whisper to operatic vibrato likely to scare the unprepared out of their folding chairs, no microphone required. The book is as much a memoir in the voice of the sonnet as it is a memoir in the voice of "Kevin Spenst." And this is to say nothing of the tendency in both memoir and poetry to creatively edit facts in an attempt to make them better suit constructed narratives. Or how the act of metaphor fundamentally alters the sense of what "truth" is.

For the poet as reader (as I am), it's the fantastic collection that prompts not a thought in the mode of prose, but the thought as a poem. In that spirit I offer:

​​​Hearts Amok: a book review in verse
                      for Kevin Spenst

Is that you in the poems, hobo for love?
Memoir peeks from behind the sonnet.
Take the poet out of Surrey, tho
still hear Fraser Highway on their tongue.
How much Spenst in the character “Kevin”?
I couldn’t translate the tramp at first read –
stitches sew fragments into verse heart, 
Dedalus super-form of walking thot.
Are we doomed? Every speaker is a flight
story, winged bard in blood and feather.
This lonely job here carving windchimes
knee-deep in the emotional rushes.
Let movies shoot the sentimental stuff.
Metaphor is a price deferred with honey.

beholden: a poem as long as the river
rita wong & fred wah
Talonbooks, 2019
​

In this collaborative text from former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah and poet-activist Rita Wong, the Columbia River is given a voice to express its complicated life as breathing waterway and hydroelectric conduit. Wah and Wong each compose a single poem and entwine these lines with a complete topographical map of the river from headwaters to ocean. While Wah’s attention centres on what he calls the "isness" of the water body (“The thing that exists is itself. That’s what we need to pay attention to”), Wong’s poem is preoccupied with a full account of the river and the life which so intimately depends on it (“Catfish in the reach & leak of radioactive Hanford bumping up cancer counts alongside and downstream the news that travels through”). Each page has only a portion of words from each poem alongside the map and so reading can feel a bit like how you experience the river itself, in small sections, listening to what it can teach. This is a stunning book that reminds us the Columbia has a “dignity that cannot be taken away, not by the buzz of wires, not by the hum of highway, not by induced amnesia, because water remembers.”

Released in 1956, Rythmetic by Evelyn Lambert & Norman McLaren is frequently misinterpreted as a one-dimensional educational film with a bit of humour to keep things entertaining. Numerals and mathematical shapes move in controlled, lyric gestures upon a crisp blue background. Spreading across the screen in geometric patterns, the numbers bump and chafe, spawn anew, and add and subtract themselves in the dance of arithmetic operations. Writing in 1976 for the Canadian Film Institute, Maynard Collins described the film thusly:
 
“Following the heels of a teaching assignment in India for UNESCO, this amusing non-verbal lecture on the subject of mathematics reveals…feelings about the inadequacies of communication between peoples of different cultures and languages. After toying with several ideas for making a truly international film, [McLaren & Lambert] settled on Arabic numerals as probably the most understood method of communication, far more so than any other alphabet.”
 
It may be comforting to a viewer grasping at meaning to place such autobiographical motives at the heart of the film, but a serious question arises: would two visionary animators put their talents toward an aim so plain, so didactic?
 
To attempt to answer the question, we must discard the impulse to place such importance on the life of the artist as source of inspiration, for there are many ways of reading this film. One possible avenue is found in the work of another often misinterpreted Canadian artist, the poet bpNichol.
 
To scholar Kit Dobson, “the best thing about reading bpNichol is the impossibility of reading bpNichol,” arguing that attempting to read his poems through the lens of personality and personal relationships has “limited how his work might be understood.”
 
When I first watched Rythmetic, I was instantly struck by the similarity to Nichol’s series of poems “probable systems” that uses cryptarithms (mathematical games with arithmetical operations where numbers are substituted for letters or other symbols) in an attempt to quantify the ephemeral. Take this example from 1974:
 
probable systems 4
this one’s for james joyce in his worst bummer
 
faith
= 6 + 1 + 9 + 20 + 8
= 44
= 8 + 15 + 16 + 5
= hope
 
We are shown the work of his process and gain access to what Paul Dutton has described as the satisfaction we get from watching someone else’s original thinking. Having proved faith equals hope (literally and not by metaphor), Nichol cleverly illustrates the expressiveness of mathematics for speaking directly to the human experience.
 
The same emotion is at the heart of Rythmetic. The shapes don’t always follow the rules: they jump, bounce, dart across the screen, and, only after significant effort, settle. At one point, a mutating zero explodes the arithmetic attempting to contain its energy. The symbols police the numerals while the numerals bristle against the strict control.
 
This is no artless arithmetic. This is the lyric struggle of a life: to define yourself against the rules of a society that you could not help being born into, sometimes with success and sometimes not. Like Nichol’s “probable systems,” Rythmetic “analyses and expresses the unfolding of its own creative process” and invites the viewer to participate in meaning.
 
Really, though, when has math (or life) ever been simple?
 
 
Works Cited:
 
J. A. Brown, T. Trowbridge and J. Szabó, "The poetic metrics of bpNichol," 2009 IEEE Toronto International Conference Science and Technology for Humanity (TIC-STH), Toronto, ON, 2009, pg. 933-938.

Dobson, Kit, "Openings: bpNichol's Ephemera," Open Letter 13, No.8, Ed. Lori Emerson, 2009, pg 9-18.

Nichol, bp, a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts, ed by Stephen Voyce, Coach House Books, Toronto, ON, 2013, pg 176.
 
Utako, Kurihara, “Norman McLaren’s Animated Film Rythmetic as Temporal Art,” Bigaku (Aesthetics), No. 15, The Japanese Society for Aesthetics, Tokyo, 2011, pg 116-124.

PRISM international recently published my review of Placeholder by Charmaine Cadeau from London, Ontario's Brick Books. 

"The future is elusive and uncertain. The past is exact, a known experience that marks like “road salt from the side of the car / sticks to your jacket, tells where you’ve been.” (49) Placeholder, the second book of poems from Charmaine Cadeau, takes residence in the moments between these opposing abstracts of time."

To read the entire review, please visit the PRISM website.