Zachary Thompson Reviews Carl Watts' I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago
I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago. Carl Watts. Gordon Hill Press. $22.00 CDN, 212 pp., ISBN 9781774220542
In an age in which book reviews can sometimes read like peace negotiations, Carl Watts is coming to both sides of the battle in good faith, carefully-worded conditions for a ceasefire in hand. His new book, I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (Gordon Hill Press, 2022), takes the tough conversations many of us are having about poetry in private and brings them before the public in the form of twelve essays. Like a good diplomat, Watts tries to remain as judicial and coherent as possible, tempering what could be perceived as harsh criticism or snobbish self-assuredness with an earnest desire to understand, appreciate, and learn more about a medium which is notoriously divisive—these days more than ever. The task set before him may be an impossible one, but Watts sojourns on, walking a fine line, taking an approach to writing about poetry that is both educative and not afraid to be critical.
In these essays, Watts addresses various ideological, aesthetic, and political issues as they relate to Canadian poetry, issues which engage both the poets themselves and those writing about poetry within academic and popular publishing spheres. The various positions held by both sides will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in Canadian poetry and its various scenes, cliques, and institutions: Are reviews which assess a poem’s value in terms of craft ethically feasible in a medium so clearly in recovery from class, gender, and racial gatekeeping? Are we as writers and thinkers better served to discuss what a poem actually does, as opposed to whether we find it well composed or not? And, the issue Watts must and does address most delicately: if we do away with any notions of qualitative assessment, are we not just cynically downplaying the value of poetry itself?
These topics have dominated much popular discourse on poetry (and the arts more broadly) for decades, the debate becoming especially public during the notorious ‘canon wars’ of the early 1990s and not letting up since. Competing sides have long since stated and re-stated their opinions (often, as Watts explains, in the form of venomous tweets), and nuanced stances have rarely factored into what was, and continues to be, a highly contentious rift. Watts has rendered us a commendable service just by undertaking these essays without asserting anything needlessly provocative or incendiary. If anything, one senses him often biting his tongue in the name of altruism when his own, subjective feelings might be more barbed—only Donato Mancini, whose antagonistic You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is discussed in one piece, receives what Watts himself admits to being “mildly personal redress.”
I Just Wrote This… is structured into two parts, containing six essays each. The first half approaches Canadian poetry through the lens of labour, assessing the ways in which poetry (and writing about poetry) intersects with more conventional notions of ‘work’, and how work and poetry may or not be one and the same thing. The second set of essays looks at various notions of an avant-garde within Canadian poetry, exploring what that distinction even means within 21st century Canadian society, and showcasing which poets or schools of poets may or may not be currently practicing so-called ‘avant-garde poetry’. The avant-garde historically has referred to art that is radical in either (not necessarily both) its political content or its structure and form, so the term itself offers a duality with which Watts eagerly engages. Two poets he focuses on in particular, and which serve as useful examples of the careful work being performed by Watts in these essays, happen to be as widely-read as they are maligned in populist and specialist circles alike: Al Purdy and Rupi Kaur.
In Purdy, Watts finds a visceral, working class poetics (an “elemental duality”), churning away behind the chauvinist bluster and haphazard free verse for which Purdy is often criticized. “Poetic language itself,” Watts writes, “construes authenticity as artifice.” He elaborates that “[a]rtifice is at the heart of Purdy’s workmanlike persona,” and that by incorporating both his labour within the workplace and his creative labour as a poet into his poems, Purdy becomes “an example of a poet whose writing refers to and is at times structured by the labours of his day-to-day life.” Watts convincingly illustrates this point by examining Purdy’s poem ‘Piling Blood’, in which the cadences of each line invoke the huff and puff of Purdy’s breath as he manually piles sacks of powdered blood at a mattress factory. It’s a compelling and recuperative reading of Purdy, showcasing the poet’s gifts not just for crafting rustic images of working class existence, but for transfiguring those images into a poetics which is proletarian in its class values, but also (perhaps surprisingly) challenging in its conceptual framework.
Rupi Kaur, likewise, is presented here in a refreshingly affirming light, though one distinct from what Watts accurately describes as the “predictable scholarly calls to destabilize twentieth-century notions of literariness, defined both stylistically and demographically.” Instead, Watts approaches Kaur on the basis of her aesthetic choices, a formalist approach which is out of step with the ideological, perhaps somewhat idealistic, arguments that defend Kaur in the interests of a kind of populist earnestness. For Watts, Kaur’s poems carry great power that is distinct from the poet’s autobiographical context. “What seems a more likely reason for her success,” he writes, “is her verse’s unpretentious, social-media-oriented forms of address, as well as her arrangement of these elements into book-length offerings that beckon to prospective readers and writers of poetry.”
Watts also finds much of interest in Kaur’s stylistic innovations, particularly her use of ‘signatures' for her poems as opposed to titles. “At once title, signature, and caption,” Watts observes, “the device appears to fumble with the idea of what a good title is, in the process gently deconstructing the convention even as it becomes a more or less consistent part of the book’s formatting.” What’s more, in her direct and conversational verse style, Watts finds that Kaur opens up new possibilities for aspiring poets who may be put off by some of the more esoteric (and thus often less emotionally immediate) aspects of the medium’s craft, stating that “it is perhaps heartening that, as Kaur shows us, a new generation of readers have come to envision the heartening as synonymous with the heartfelt.” In much the same ways that Watts finds subversively high-concept elements to Purdy’s working class persona, he finds in Kaur a dedication to form and structure, which is often overlooked in favour of her raw melancholia.
Throughout his essays, Watts highlights common ground between seemingly disparate concepts, as he does with Kaur and Purdy. He is able to find the blurred lines, if not the outright shared space, between conservative formalism and wildly singular free verse, and in doing so, addresses the fact that differing approaches to poetry remain just that: different approaches to a shared endeavour, as opposed to the two distinct practices we sometimes mistake them to be. “The two,” he states, “fit together in a paradox that would be self-defeating, except for the fact that each does the work of making clear to us just how discomforting that work of disruption needs to be.” Acknowledging the discomfort of these contradictions in poetic practice is easy enough; Carl Watts is doing the hard work of actually trying to make sense of them.
Zachary Thompson (he/him) is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from York University, as well as a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He has read from his fiction at the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton, and recently participated in a presentation at the 2021 Conference of the Comics Studies Society.