noise & silence: April 2014

Welcome to Episode 2 of Poetry? I Just Don’t Get It. A series where I post a poem or group of poems by one author, followed by anything the author wants to say about the work. It’s my small attempt to bridge what I see as a huge gap between readers (who are not poets themselves) and great contemporary poetry.

In this episode I am posting a suite of poems by Canadian poet Erling Friis-Baastad.

Erling was born in Norway, raised in the US, and has spent most of his adult life in the Yukon Territory, Canada. I first encountered his work in the early 90’s, in a magazine published out of Montreal called Alpha Beat Soup. His poem, The Exile House, leapt right into me. Back then I had a small poetry press called BEgiNNer’s MIND, publishing poetry chapbooks and broadsides alongside art, so I immediately sent a letter to him through the magazine asking if I could publish The Exile House as a broadside (The Exile House ended up as the title of his first collection from Salmon Poetry in 2001). When he wrote back I discovered he lived in the Yukon. Wait…the Yukon? Like, up by the Arctic Circle? The Exile House is still one of my favorite poems.

He is a poet of the far north, but this particular suite of poems is from Spain; specifically, Andalusia. It was written while he was in residence at Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain.The distance and closeness he felt in writing in a region so different than the Yukon he addresses in the mini-essay that follows the poems.

His most recent collection is Wood Spoken: New & Selected Poems (Harbour Publishing, 2005).

The Andalusia poems were previously published in Errant. They will be part of a new collection entitled Fossil Light.

Andalusia

Erling Friis-Baastad

for Giuliano Capecelatro

ANDALUSIA

Do not rush

into a desert night

Shield your eyes

against these stars

Recall the North—

decades demanded

simply to hint

at spruce or ice

Move a hand slowly here

The wide-eyed lizard

beside your pen

has seen a ghost

GENIUS LOCI

I have packed

the wrong books

into this desert—

of northern gods

who rage and sweat

in their dark fur

Here, a languid demon

only nods

toward the courtyard

and the smallest of ants

silently removes

a dying cricket

from the hot

white stone

DESERT PROPHECY

As the shard

works its way

through stone

up into the sun

you will rise

from night’s matrix

Today, you will brush

centuries of earth

from a fragment

of thought, reveal

an ancient potter’s

perfect green and blue

Later, in the heat

you will obsess

over white,

then sleep

without closing your eyes

SURVIVAL

I would never thrive here

but I might survive

as a fragment, of course,

as a shard

something once fashioned

by a strong brown hand

then aged in sand,

sturdy and simple—

or as a scavenger

whose rare cry

might be heard at dusk

in deference, in homage, to all

something that small: the slave

of a slave, shadow of a shadow

who worships among cactus

trusts to thorns

and begins each night with please

LEARNING LORCA

Too much history here

I cannot sleep

Cold lightning

to the west

over the Sierra Nevada

tonight

startles the centuries

awake and back

into hunger—

Huge black horses

trample winter’s

garden again

laughing

outriders

dark matter

made flesh

THE VOTIVE FIGURE

Awakened

by some fierce new god

striking the old mountains

exhumed by his storm

I sit up

after centuries

abraded but amazed

to feel

desert wind again

I have survived all

I was meant

to placate or reveal

And am now pure—

art and in anyone’s service

Fundación Valparaíso, Mojacar, Spain/Erling Friis-Baastad

A PLACE CAN BE A LOVING BUT STRICT EDITOR
Erling Friis-Baastad

I first stepped off the Alaska Highway, travel-worn but expectant, into the Yukon Territory in 1974. After years in cities like Toronto and New York and their suburbs, I felt propelled by heroes of the San Francisco Renaissance, poets like Lew Welch, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth, to explore a western wilderness.

I found myself, that first summer, in a tiny cabin on a lake. There, I imitated those California artists, imposing their interpretations of their coastal stomping grounds on my new boreal landscape. It took years of writing in and from the Yukon to produce a poem that actually sounded like it had been written among black spruce, not under an arbutus, and further years to develop upon that discovery. It also took a stay in Andalusian Spain.

Since before the time of Homer, poets have been created by landscapes every bit as often as they sought to portray and respond to them. And that’s fine, as far as it goes, but as a northern poet it is possible to get very stuck in one place and never get to draw parallels to, or explore differences with, other regions.

Time and again, we poets of the North, as infatuated by our boreal or Arctic identities as by our home, are called upon by editors to contribute work to special “northern issues” of magazines. We comply, being both understandably proud of where we live, and eager to be included among our northern neighbours. Some marvellous publications have resulted. But a steady diet of that editorial preference can lead to parochialism and severe artistic malnutrition. We become complacent, endlessly rework expected myths and legends and allow northern lights and moose to do the heavy lifting. Time spent elsewhere revitalizes one’s art, even if the quotidian home is as exotic as the Far North.

I was accepted as a fellow at Fundación Valparaíso in Andalusia more than seven years ago, and during my month on the southeastern coast of Spain I was given time to explore a new place, made more vivid for me by some surprising similarities to my Yukon home. I sensed a haunting, just beneath the obvious, but by new ghosts from other histories.

Both the desert and the boreal hills allowed the small and elemental to break through humanity’s current burst of desperate territorial chatter. As a result I discovered that the spare poem is best suited to translating rocks, bones, birds, shrubs, worked chert, and ceramic shards into art, while recalling the dreams and chaos played out by humanity among them.

I brought my new, pared-down poetry back from Spain to the Yukon. The handful of Andalusian poems may well be my favourite of all my work, in part because they return me to such an absorbing time and place among new friends, living and dead, and in part because of what those small songs taught me about individual words and the spaces between them. A desert landscape released the power concentrated in the smallest things: lizards, ants, feathers, thorns, photons...

I recently completed a 200-poem manuscript of even leaner work, The Pencil Poems, mostly set in Yukon mountains and on the coast of British Columbia, poems of flower petals, spider webs, snow crystals, and drops of rain. The six poems of the Andalusia suite were the slightly more wordy progenitors of that collection.

Old

poets

are

some

times

given

such

simple

poems

write

their

young