Bait & Switch by Jim Johnstone | The Miramichi Reader

Do you ever wish poets would include essays to situate their poems? Some frank prose that ponders what their own poetry comes out of or means to do? We can’t follow every crumb trailer life, and not every aesthetic reaches universally. Consequently this book of essays, Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and views on Canadian poetry by Jim Johnstone is a handy guide. Johnstone reflects on poetry from a context of the longitudinal patterns of any given poet and the context of what others are doing in the zeitgeist.

Johnstone mulls what could comprise a modern Canadian poetry and how Canadians could pole vault to the world English stage. Or how science and poetry can intersect. He alerts early in the book that this is no objective definitive list of The Canadian Poets, but what resonates by what he can feel (sometimes characterized in terms of good hits and blows). He likes poets that riff off pop culture, and reference old dead straight white guys, like Browning or Yeats, or Homer, rather
than a poet who writes from a mopey autobiographical vacuum. He likes formal poems that are humble, self-aware but urgent, intensely tethered to the Now. I’m not super keen on those harmonics, but when music plays I may sway.

Weighing in over 200 pages, these appreciative and assessing essays by Johnstone collate responses to a large number of poets who I find hard to access because they are so formal and subtle or simply not centre of my radar such as bill bissett (p. 90). He unpacks the scaffolding of bissett’s driving force: to destabilize hierarchies of people and borders, between meanings and logic, within his phonetic spelling, embracing ambiguity and parallel readings.

Control, restraint, sophistication and cross-ties between ephemeral pop culture and ancient myths, high and low culture, draw Johnstone. It can be hard to tell if that is what he notices or that is what the cited writers primarily do.

His essays give a better vantage point for what I’ve read. I haven’t cultivated hooks to Hitchcock or Mötley Crüe so when Michael Prior uses them, if it had a neon sign arrow pointing to footnotes I wouldn’t catch the references. Which is fine. It’s interesting to read an unpacking of what I missed when reading.

He speaks on poems and poets I caught the edge of, such as Sachiko Murakami’s Project Rebuild or Nyla Matuk’s sumptuary laws, which I read but didn’t have the answering artifacts in my head for movie references. Johnstone calls Matuk’s poetry part of “outsiderism,” which i understand to be very different from outsider poetry of anti-establishment poverty class. To think about worldviews that inform poetics is worthwhile. Everything you learn grows a tighter weave for filter feeding what comes next.

Looking for new understandings, I was surprised to read that Don McKay in Strike/Slip used parody. I didn’t consider that he may be humorous. Johnstone also described how McKay’s poetry moves in focus by decades while I have dipped in and out without any eye to time of writing or any developing patterns. Likewise his active reading of Karen Solie helps as an entry pass for her jump cuts among images and the logic of it, enacting modern and personal anxiety in syntax.

By publishing these essays now Johnstone gives lie to the notion of 6 months relevancy for any given collection until, say, the next season’s release, as he reflects on say 2013 collections as still worth deep reads. He contrasts, for example, how John Reibetsnz wrote in 1986 versus 2013. If you invest time in what you love you can’t hide your bias, and that is brave and good.

Where plain English could be used, in Bait & Switch it is generally upgraded to the like of more objective analytical choices such as legerdemain, rapprochement, apophatic, diction, acumen, duplicitous, bravura. A mark of a love of the right words, it feels like it steps up to speak to academic peers, even if he is not a university professor per se.

He unabashedly calls out what impresses, such as a Carmine Starnino’s poem as one of his “finest efforts.” To say he writes and expounds on those he loves doesn’t mean he only praises. He calls out Bök as conceiving a project of genes that doesn’t get done (the titular “Bait & Switch”), and calls George Elliot Clarke’s books “hastily published” and “ill-conceived” of a “brilliant but inconsistent craftsman” who displays misogynistic vitriol.

Speaking of gender, focal poets are about 2:1 male to female, which is a better rate than some male poets who largely or only cite males. While male poets are praised for contrasts while female poets feel more backhanded: Nash “poems the read like collage,” McFadzean “almost as if she googled her subject,” and Bolster “reads like material from a tourist guidebook.” To be fair he is evenhanded on calling poems that are overwritten, ineffective, overindulgent. To the most arm’s length writer Thammovongsa he offers all laurels. That’s the danger of writing poems or reviews, of self-reveal but if we shy from that we self-isolate and shield to everyone’s detriment.

Johnstone offers dialogue with the wide shapes in this niche of niche of niche of publishing that is “mainstream poetry” and notes a trend of “intensifying self canonization” of selected/collected volumes. Personally I’d account for its uptick in the habit of publishers disappearing and/or pulping their backlist. Income comes from new releases not closet insulation.

The 20-odd pages are devoted to dialogues on poetics among peers which makes for fascinating fly-on-the-wall privilege. He concludes book 4 of the book with views of chapbooks of New Brunswick and overviews of essential reading poets. Whether you dip in and out of the collection or make a study of it, there’s a lot of resources he shares to learn, whether details or the act of attention itself.

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry including Infinity Network, which was shortlisted for the 2023 ReLit Award. He is also the winner of several awards including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry?s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, Johnstone curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry.

Publisher: Porcupine’s Quill (October 1, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 220 pages
ISBN: 9780889844728

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet