There’s an exhibit of Jenny Holzer’s sometimes-incendiary conceptual art on view at DHC/ART until November 14. But you needn’t have seen it to attend Early Warning Systems: Inflammatory Poetry by Six Montreal Poets, a poetry reading honouring her work.
Holzer has often used text as images in her art, notably early in her career with Inflammatory Essays from the late 1970s. They weren’t really essays, but rather 100-word blocks of text miming dogma, poetic in their flow and terseness.
On Friday, October 29, five Montreal poets gathered in the Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts to demonstrate the connection between Holzer’s art and poetry.
As the readings progressed, it seemed like the poets were jury-rigging an association. In other words, the connection is too literal, and too obvious for poetry to deal with directly.
As Carmine Starnino, emcee and poet, pointed out, language in Montreal is not stable, and instead teeters on a linguistic seesaw. The purpose of the poetry, he said, would be “to dramatize the invigorating reality of bilingual situations.”
The readings alternated between French- and English-speaking poets, all reading work they had published or were working on. In that way, the dissonance between the themes of their poetry and the theme of the event weakened the emotional weight of the poetry itself.
Anita Lahey, poet and editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, read from her first book, Out to Dry in Cape Breton. During her reading of a poem about boat racing, I couldn’t help wondering how it was inflammatory, not that it had to be. When I started to take the poems as poems, I began to enjoy them more. But that meant I had to abandon the night’s theme.
The best and most effective poems came when the poets were not tiptoeing around the intended meaning of their work to fit some larger, exterior arc of logic.
“This first poem is more about inflammation,” joked poet Asa Boxer, before adopting a thick Scottish brogue and unfurling a humorous tale of sexual gratification and regret, titled “Burns Rimfire.” He reminded the audience how effective a well-read poem can be.
Carmine Starnino’s poems, crisp and clever, rendered the stuff of everyday life mysterious and exciting, with titles like “Our Butcher” and “Smell of Something Bad, Kitchen.”
I’m not quite fluent in French, so I can’t adequately comment on the French poetry. The two Francophone poets in attendance, Thomas Mainguy and Vincent Charles Lambert, both spoke softly, delivering short poems that I could almost understand.
As I leaned forward, trying to translate in my head, I realized that Carmine Starnino might have been right all along, just not in the way I expected. I couldn’t ignore the extent of my misunderstanding. In one poem, Starnino tried solemnly to address the locus of his angst: “Look at me when I talk to you.”
