Earle Birney (1904–1995)

Well, this was a random thing to pick up - helped along though I suppose I was by the slimness in the half-hour I still had to kill before fleeing this reading room and by the glorious, sixties overexposed green and yellowgreen of the cover, the gabba gabba hey of the inside art - what would they have actual called it in the actual sixties? Technicolor? Wavy gravy?

And why does that stuff appeal so much to me, but when we make the big cross over into text, and it's all characteristic tics of the era like "&" and spelling Celts with a K, why is that so monumentally lame? I guess visual people see visual cliches.

Anyway, if you can ignore the fact that Birney's all Canada Counciling around the world feeling sad and mad and bad about nuclear subs and the like, and calling Vancouver a carcinoma (compared to Cleveland? Like, we're supposed to exist back east and walk really fast and say "Have I gotta deal for you!" but as soon as we come out west THAT's when we're killing the Indians? Colonial dilettante), and then all on about his friend's (Australian) aboriginal maid and "a bachelor's cuisine" and all this TV dinner junk - I guess you can't expect people to be better than they are, but the sixties literary counterculture was sure self-righteous based on not more than the slightest deviation from prime - Ifff, I say, you can ignore all that there's obvs some talent here. I like it when he gets weird, not all "let me evoke this place, let me describe landscape and end my poem "Perth, 1968," because that's what poets do I've heard, let me rail against a timid WASPy Canada that is already dead dead dead if only I could see it - nottt that, but a poem about the poles that hold up mannequins so they don't shudder when you brush them like the real boys. That is practically Max Cannon shit, right there. Like how peole in the sixties talked about sex - and Birney do too - like it was a physical creature separate from the people you're doing it with. Sex is in the room! like the Cohen poem about cancer, only sex is better and isn't it fine to be youngish and poetish and pissedoffish and openish to an understanding of life's beauties in an era where Sex can take solid form and a trip to Australia is still something. We're more civilized now, but also jaded, and going back a ways with a guide committed to the resolute urgency of now, which is to say then, is a minor history lesson and an invigorating splash with the cold water of our ancestry. Nice to be able to look back and see Birney and "Beowulf" in the same frame like that. Every moment is subtly different, and it's not that time repeats as farce (or at all) - it's that the tragedy is always the present and the farce is when you try to make the present the past.

NB Not the real cover - just a image that vaguely evokes the same sensations, because I don't have a camera these days to take a picture of the real one.… (altro)