Poetry
Defying Obsolescence
Review
by George Sipos

Listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons a few times and you’ve got it for life. There’s not an elevator ride that can throw you.

At least not until you hit Nigel Kennedy’s extraordinary recording. There is a freshness, the electricity of an original mind that makes you hear the work anew. You don’t have to understand what he’s doing differently from other violinists, you just know you are in the presence of something brilliant and exciting.

Poetry works that way too. Once in a while some poems come your way that just ring true, that speak in a voice that is passionate and fiercely original.

That was my experience recently with the work of Cam McAlpine, a Prince George poet I have known for some years, but whose poems I had not seen till he gave me his first manuscript to look at the other day.

Let me show you what I mean. Here is a poem about remembering going to a drive-in movie with a girl:

Magdalena’s Blue Ford Escort

At the drive-in, blue shine in rain on the windshield, the ticket booth, and the car parked on a slope. The sky, a wide-angle lens.
A memory, sure, but enough to hold the shape of two blue eggs?
Still-born hatch.
Squeezed between fingers.
Two hands squeezing for the first time in a small car with a dog in the back. Gently, gently touching. Blood memory. All I have left, and no returning.
Forward by the fates now. No looking back. No dragons, no monsters. Just the scritch-scritch of the windshield wipers, faces on the screen like a funhouse mirror, the silence between us, and the transmission in park.
An odd sort of traffic jam.

The first thing to understand, of course, is that this is all remembered, though that’s not the whole story.

In remembering the two young people holding hands in the small car, the rememberer also remembers what came next, the lives they went on to live, which of course the young people knew nothing about, but which carried them along in its momentum anyway. Inherent in all such tender moments is their impermanence. Life implies a motion "forward by the fates now." To live means that there is "no looking back."

Except of course we do look back. That’s precisely what this poem does. Memory itself is like a drive-in movie, in which what we see is "faces on the screen like a funhouse mirror." Distorted, but a reflection nonetheless.

The irony of all this is interesting, but not perhaps something that hasn’t been pointed out before, and not something the thoughtful reader hasn’t ruminated on if he or she is at all reflective.

What is startling is the last line. The idea of a drive-in as a traffic jam is vastly rich. In a traffic jam people want to get somewhere but can’t - there is the unreleased tension of frustrated motion. At a drive-in movie people have come to park and be still but can’t - there is the forward-moving tension of the film, of their desires, of the agenda of life this whole thing is part of. In memory we want to move back in time to find a moment and park it in permanence, but this also we can’t do.

Think of it: life as a traffic jam in which our desires are caught in the tension between Drive and Park.

But the genius of this poem is that this is not an abstract metaphor. The poem is about a real drive-in theatre. You see all those cars, but your understanding of what you see is radically altered by that last line.

Here’s another poem:

 The Force Of A mysteriously Gentle Yet Irresistible Gale
You almost left me standing there, alone
in an empty parking lot darkened by twilight,
Drumheller, 8:15 Sunday evening, or
I almost drove away, the past forgotten,
almost over before it began. Driving for hours
in straight lines, barely grunting acknowledgment.
I want to scream. And then, nothing. Sediment, tar sands, the Petro Canada gas station where I changed for the ceremony.
If you look carefully at their wedding photo,
you can almost see the Rockies slice the haze
of late afternoon, the tears on her face, the bones
underfoot, fingers barely touching, cotton dress lifting.
We are almost obsolete, you said.

This poem is quite easy to understand. Two people are driving to a wedding in Drumheller. They are not getting on particularly well. The tension in their relationship (perhaps they have been married for some time) acquires a good bit of irony not just because they are going to a wedding, but because Drumheller is a landscape of relics, a place where time has squeezed once-living things into "sediment, tar sands."

What is interesting is that we never see the wedding. We see the wedding photograph, which is itself a relic.

But even in that photograph, notice what we see. We see what is not there: "you can almost see the Rockies slice the haze of late afternoon." This is like Edgar in King Lear conjuring an image of a non-existent bird for the blind Gloucester:

Look up a-height; the shrill-gorged lark so far

cannot be seen or heard. Do but look up.

And what of the other things in the photograph? The passage of time implied by "the bones underfoot," the tenderness of feeling implied by "fingers barely touching," the wind which lifts the cotton dress which no photograph can capture except in its effects - all of these, like the invisible Rockies, are there, but not there.

And then there is the last line: "We are almost obsolete, you said." How are we to take this?

The simplest is to say: "Like the dinosaurs of Drumheller, our relationship is on its way to extinction." But that’s only one reading. Equally, you could say that the consciousness that wants to see through the photograph to what only the eyes of desire can see, a consciousness that belongs to people who have, after all, made a long journey to attend a wedding in the badlands, defines two people who defy obsolescence.

Notice, too, that the line would not work nearly so well if you removed the "you said." Earlier, on the drive, they had "barely grunted acknowledgment." The mere fact that this last line is spoken, itself speaks against the extinction of the relationship.

It is poems like these that make you keep coming back to the genre.

However, if you like these poems, you’re going to have to wait a bit before you can read Cam’s first book. His manuscript is finished, but is looking for a publisher.

Cam McAlpine lives in Prince George where he works as a journalist for the Prince George Free Press. He is a graduate of SFU, has traveled across Canada a couple of times and, in his university days, worked as a tree-planter in the North.

Most importantly, he is an original and exciting voice in Canadian poetry. Keep an eye open for his first book. It won’t be long.

(George Sipos lives in Prince George, where he owns and operates Mosquito Books. Both he and Smithers author Sheila Peters contribute to The Connections Magazine Poetry Review. In our next issue Sheila will be looking at the work of George Loset.)
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