When ‘we cultivate the Lucifer/inside’

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1. Editor’s note: We have received the following comment by email from Art Joyce — Richard Mackie, publisher, The BC Review

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   Rebuttal to Joe Enns’ “Review” of Pole Shift
   Sean Arthur Joyce

   Joe Enns’ hatchet job on my new book, Pole Shift & Other Poems, masquerading as a review, requires some rebuttal. By my inclusion of an Introduction and a “Notes to the Poems” in the appendices to Pole Shift, Enns assumes I have a condescending, “poetsplaining” attitude to the reader. I’ve regularly included such features in my 7 poetry collections, since I’m a lifelong student of mythology and realize that obviously not everyone is reading the same texts I am. I remember as a young man reading—or trying to read—Ezra Pound’s Cantos and being stumped by many of the arcane references. To me it’s more condescending to assume your reader has the same education you do, or throw around references merely to make yourself appear erudite. It’s a form of elitism in literature—something I’ve fought against my entire career.
   Here’s what Tom Wayman has to say about the mainstream academic bias against writing Introductions for poetry collections: “My (new) poetry book sections have prose intros—I know the ‘pure’ poets don’t like that, because in making poetry accessible you implicitly are arguing for poetry with a wide audience, whereas they want poetry to be the preserve of an elite. They have a whole career invested in obscurity.”
   Enns clearly didn’t understand that because I was inspired by certain terrestrial and cosmological events that many readers may not be aware of, I felt I should provide some background context. There are obscure scientific references in Pole Shift, for example, the Laschamps excursion, the use of Beryllium-10 to date magnetite samples, etc. Many readers may also not be aware that we’re currently undergoing a geomagnetic pole reversal. I didn’t want to risk in readers the reaction I had to Pound’s Cantos, giving up in frustration due to its obscure references. And at this stage of the 21st century, I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that in these times of what some have called “functional illiteracy,” what may once have been common cultural references—for example Biblical allegories—are no longer common parlance.
   Further, by his flippant and irrelevant reference to the pink crystal in his doctor’s office, Enns insinuates that I’m indulging in pseudoscience. Not true—this is why all the scientific references are footnoted (Endnotes section), and all are from mainstream scientific publications. He seems to take exception to the one poem that references sacred geometry, but this only betrays his ignorance of history. The principles of sacred geometry were used to build all the great cathedrals in Europe, securing its place in the history of architecture.
   By implication, Enns seems to take exception to the political nature of many of the poems, reflecting a longstanding bias in Canadian creative writing faculties that such poetry is somehow beneath an educated poet. The late Patrick Lane once decried the lack of a tradition of dissent or political satire in Canadian poetry, but this reflects the bias of the academic establishment who would prefer that to be the case, not the reality. Even our rather more sedate Canadian tradition includes political poets such as Irving Layton and Milton Acorn. I would urge Enns and others of his ilk to go back and read Acorn’s “I Shout Love,” which isn’t afraid of strong declarative statements calling out murder and corruption. Irving Layton, in “Whom I Write For,” put it this way:

   When reading me, I want you to feel
   as if I had ripped your skin off;
   Or gouged out your eyes with my fingers;
   Or scalped you, and afterwards burnt your hair
   in the staring sockets…

   The pertinent question here is: Who benefits from discouraging political content in art? It plays nicely into the agenda revealed in Joel Whitney’s exposé, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, in which he revealed that the first Abstract Expressionist exhibitions—and the early postmodernist movement—were funded by that agency as part of its foreign cultural program. “A use for culture had finally been found: it was a weapon… Like the New Critics’ ahistorical approach to a text, the paint splashes of Jackson Pollock did not lend themselves to a Marxist or anti-imperialist narrative the way Diego Rivera’s sweeping murals did.” Incredibly, generations of artists, poets, and university professors were taken in by this deliberate misdirection, which itself had a political motive, as George Orwell wrote: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
   Further, it ignores the wide and deep history of the political in poetry going back 5,000 years to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which satirized the excesses of a Sumerian city-king. This trope resonates right through the classical Greek tradition of poets and playwrights, down through the millennia to the present era. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron satirized the excesses and corruption of the church. Shakespeare, writing during a particularly dangerous period in English politics, had to be more subtle, using earlier monarchs from that history to obliquely comment on the power politics of the Elizabethan age.
   Apparently Enns ignores even more recent examples of this tradition, for example Beat poets Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Levertov and others. In my Introduction to Pole Shift, I quote from Ferlinghetti’s brilliant little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art: “If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.” Ferlinghetti’s political verses were always tempered with love and playfulness.
   Enns seems oddly mystified at the target of my “rants” but the subjects are quite clear, as in the poems “The Screaming Towers” and “Lament for Gaza.” More generally, Pole Shift indicts the alarming shift toward censorship and authoritarianism in the West, particularly since Covid. As the saying goes, if you’re not enraged by this, you’re not paying attention. Gary Geddes, one of the last remaining true gentlemen of literature still capable of entertaining opposing points of view without succumbing to apoplexy, has said of some of my poems that they occasionally lapse into the “voice of an Old Testament prophet.” Fair enough. In my Introduction to Pole Shift I admit: “Is diatribe effective in poetry? Probably not, but then it’s not meant as a rhetorical tool to convince people of anything. It’s a cry from the gut of wild animal rage at atrocity.” Atrocity is not something we ought to respond to politely.
   Enns criticizes the poems in Pole Shift for “always grasping for the profound,” again reflecting the underlying bias of mainstream poetical thought that such an urge is now considered passé, as if only the personal, pedestrian and mundane are apt topics for poetry now. This is a pitiful worldview, a tacit adoption of nihilism—the sense that all in life is essentially meaningless and those who try to create meaning from it are presumptuous. Art is fundamentally a meaning-making activity and always has been. Artists ought not to be dispassionate observers—not scientists—but eloquent, erudite souls driven by love and passion to create art that actually touches people.
   In this context I consider myself a New Romantic. In an essay I published in the peer-reviewed journal Canadian Poetry in 2015, and later in the British journal Acumen, “A New Romanticism for the 21st Century,” I argue that the retrospective condemnation of Romantic poetry is based on the modernist fallacy of progressivism in literature. The fact is, millions of people read and loved the poems of Blake, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth and Tennyson and still do 150 years later. The fact that these poets often “grasped for the profound,” employed aphorism, spiritual abstractions or declarative statements, is hardly a reason to dismiss their work. How many of today’s poets will people be reading and quoting in 150 years?
   This brings me to another of Enns’ criticisms, that much of my poetry in Pole Shift “resists concrete sensory imagery, and relies instead on abstraction and aphorism.” This is pure cherry-picking to support an argument. Certainly, the title sequence is primarily dealing with political and social issues, but even here I’ve woven in concrete imagery: “Lighthouse keepers a damp / imprint of salt on a sea-bashed tower.” (Pole Shift, II) “A lake’s clear / lens stares back at us through blue / remembrance…” (Pole Shift, V) “Time’s red ochre flashbulb / of handprints on a Lascaux / cave wall…” (Pole Shift, VI) And this is just the title sequence. There are plenty more examples throughout the book if Enns had only bothered to notice.
   Tom Wayman once said: “Poetry is a big tent. There’s room for everyone.” Aesthetics in art is just a vehicle for communication. If it fails to communicate to an audience, the motto of the British Columbia Review, “only connect,” is subverted, resulting in alienation. Such poetry becomes a kind of elitist cult only accessible to those initiated in the clique.
   From the beginning of my career as a poet, starting in the late 1980s when I was touring with Chad Norman and other West Coast poets, my goal has been to advocate and write for a “poetry for the people,” just as Layton and Acorn did. As Wayman says, this doesn’t go down well with the poetry elitists. Yet I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had audience members come up to me after one of my readings and say, “Wow—that poem really touched me, thank you.”
   That’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s connection.

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