Robert Duncan at Disney World by Andy Weaver

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing. For example, on p. 23, he pares a view to:

                                         throughout,
                                                                it did not
drop
         its acorn.
                                   This, perhaps, 
is the emblem
                                    of love
                                                    ——or perhaps
the dog's
                   incessant drive
                                                             is an equal
example.
                 Perhaps both.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

4.
By day six,         words
                    like winter blight, 
wind chill,               even freezer burn,
    have gone              rogue, tumbling
through thought
                       and memories
                                  of childhood snow
forts to escape             into blazing sunlight,
never      to be recalled           again.
                                                               Abundance
fills in           the gaps              much like the brain
sketches    out       the blind spot       in eyesight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit. See excerpt from page 11:

that Strife,             our dearest       friend, 
will be there            always       to wake us
and guide us        back        through
the years' trance          to the field
where we meet           each other
uncomfortably          alive
and spear       each utterance,
                     each letter,            into each,
pull them         into         the circular dance
where we learn               to avoid violence
by accepting         that certain bounds
of chance      hold us          within chaos, 
we cannibalize          ourselves      over
and over,         life lives     off the wreckage
                    of that life, that words
                                        live on words
                                               live on

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.

Andy Weaver specializes in contemporary Canadian and American poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on formally innovative and experimental texts. Most recently, he has published articles on contemporary visual poetry, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and creative writing pedagogy.

Publisher: above/ground press (January 10, 2025)
Paperback

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's WriteBulb is now available at the Apple store. A prompt app for iOS 15 and up gives writing achievement badges. Pirie’s 4th poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021), minimalist poems, won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. Forthcoming chapbooks from Catkin Press and Turret House. Find more at www.pearlpirie.com or at patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet