Gary Geddes
Gary Geddes
Biography
Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics and 70 Canadian Poets (both from Oxford Canada), and been the recipient of more than a dozen national and international literary awards, including the National Magazine Gold Award, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the Government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti. His work has been translated six languages and he has performed and lectured at universities, libraries and festivals worldwide. His most recent poetry collections are The Resumpton of Play and two forthcoming texts, The Ventriloquist and Reading Between the Lines.
Poetics Statement
“I think of my poetry as a form of rescue work. I’ve spent much of my creative life giving voice to figures from the recent or distant past, silenced by turmoil and time, who clamour to have their stories told. It’s a process that been called the ventriloquism of history, though, in my case, I’m never quite sure if I’m the ventriloquist or the dummy. This has involved investing a lot of time and energy on the long poem and poetic narrative, which provide a broader canvas. I started out with a lot of passion but with a cramped and defcient sense of how to use that passion. Eventually, I found that the persona poem worked best for me, taking me out of, or at least at a more manageable distance from, my own limiting ego. This was quite intoxicating and opened me up to wider possibilities in terms of subject, form and expression. And, of course, I was thrilled to discover other writers who shared this view. One of them is French novelist Patrick Grainville, who said: “There is a certain liberation to be found in bad taste. Art, like life, is a matter of gifts, not refusals.” When you write longer poems, there is always the worry that your attention to the language suffers, that subject matter or content, can overwhelm technique and form. In other words, you can’t burn with intense white heat constantly in the long poem. Eliot reminded us all that to write a good long poem, you have to become a master of the prose connective. Even more useful to me now is the advice provided by the ancient Chinese scribe, whose words lay hidden for centuries in a secret library cave in Dunhuang, on the eastern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, where the various strands of the Silk Road come together. He said: “Sing as if narrating; narrate as if singing.” So, the two competing impulses when I sit down to write—the pull or story and the pull of song, or lyric and narrative—need to come together, a fruitful partnership, despite, and thanks to, the tensions of that marriage.”
Sample of Poet's Work
J-35
Do animals cry? she asks.
I don’t know, I say, but I think
they grieve. I’d read about a camel
that sniffed her dead offspring
for days and wouldn’t move
until they placed its pelt on her
back. Why do you ask? Her hand
on the breakfast counter looks tiny
beside mine. A milk–ring graces
her mouth, a toasted bread-crumb
clings to her cheek. A sympathetic
smile is all I have to offer.
J-35, she says, scarcely audible.
The orca in the news has carried
her dead calf for fourteen days,
trying to keep it above water,
travelling hundreds of miles
as J-pod forages for the scarce
spring salmon. When it isn’t
resting on her head she grips
its tail with her teeth. J-35 knows
her baby’s dead, she whispers;
I think she’s trying to tell us
something. I leave the science
out for now: the most polluted
mammals on earth, the slurry
of toxins female orcas slough off
on their newborns. Extinction
looming, salmon stocks
depleted. Tanker traffic, the
old whale-road the Vikings
celebrated now a web of dirty
shipping lanes, booming
grounds, plastic archipelagos.
I think you’re right, I say,
let’s see what we can do.
What Does a House Want?
A house has no unreasonable expectations
of travel or imperialist ambitions;
A house wants to stay
where it is.
A house does not demonstrate
against partition or harbour
grievances;
a house is a safe
haven, anchorage, place
of rest.
Shut the door on excuses
—greed, political expediency.
A house remembers
its original inhabitants, ventures
comparisons:
the woman
tossing her hair
on a doorstep, the man
bent over his tools and patch
of garden.
What does a house want?
Laughter, sounds
of love-making, to strengthen
the walls;
a house
wants people, a permit
to persevere.
A house has no stones
to spare; no house has ever been convicted
of a felony, unless privacy
be considered a crime in the new
dispensation.
What does a house want?
Firm joints, things on the level, water
rising in pipes.
Put out the eyes, forbid
the drama of exits,
entrances. Somewhere
in the rubble a mechanism
leaks time,
no place
familiar for a fly
to land
on
Sandra Lee Scheuer
(Killed at Kent State University, May 4, 1970
by the Ohio National Guard)
You might have met her on a Saturday night,
cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, or walking with quick step
between the campus and a green two-story house,
where the room was always tidy, the bed made,
the books in confraternity on the shelves.
She did not throw stones, major in philosophy
or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say
she hated war, had heard of Cambodia.
In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,
and could no doubt more easily have married a guardsman
than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.
While the armouries burned, she studied,
bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages
open at sections on impairment, physiology.
And while they milled and shouted on the commons,
she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying
Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That’s it, SSSSSSSS,
tongue well up and back behind your teeth.
Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air
vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?
As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot
at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,
a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,
was going down on one knee, as if he might propose.
His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,
flowered within her, passed through her neck,
severed her trachea, taking her breath away.
Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,
ensure the perilous freedom of his speech;
and who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels
making their countless revolutions on the floor?