Bruce Whiteman, John Climenhage: painter among poets. Peterborough, Ontario: Poets & Painters Press, 2021, 50 copies.

For copies write to the author at: dbrucewhiteman@gmail.com

Bruce Whiteman has been a friend of mine for over forty years.  When we met I was twenty-one and running a little magazine and had accepted two of his poems.  I think it would be fair to say that chapbooks have played a significant role in that friendship.  The first one I ever published was a collection of his poems (The Sun at Your Thighs, the Moon at Your Lips, The Piraeus Press 1978.)    On a trip to Montreal together, we went to the Word bookshop and both bought a chapbook—the first book–by August Kleinzahler (The Sausage Master of Minsk, Villeneuve Press 1977).  Later when I was co-publisher of a new chapbook press he introduced me to Ralph Gustafson so that I might ask for a manuscript (Twelve Landscapes, Shaw Street Press 1985).  Since then Bruce has sent me a good number of chapbooks of his work, published by presses in Canada and the U.S.  And he has become a supporter of the press I’m now involved in (espresso), buying several of our titles and letting me know which ones he likes and which he doesn’t.

His latest chapbook, John Climenhage: Painter Among Poets, has just appeared and I am always pleased to see the form used for something other than poetry.  Climenhage is a Peterborough painter of expressive landscapes, cityscapes, and hockey players (johnclimenage.com) and the essay has been published for a new exhibit of his work at Peterborough’s Sadleir House.  Whiteman (so I will call him from now on) begins his essay on the relationship between poets and artists by invoking Pietro Aretino, who was friends with Titian.  He moves on to Baudelaire (Manet, Delacroix), Pound (Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi), William Carlos Williams (Matisse, Stieglitz), the New York Poets, and Raymond Souster.

Discovering that Ralph Gustason is a friend of John Climenhage allows him to write at some length on the poet, calling him “painterly” in the same way that some painters are called “poetic,” a designation that Whiteman shruggingly admits doesn’t mean very much.  It strikes me as interesting that the writer, obviously a fan of Climenhage’s work, nevertheless expends more words on Gustafson than he does on the painter.  That Whiteman ends not with any remark about Climenhage but with a quotation from William Carlos Williams (“The only realism in art is of the imagination”) is surely deliberate.  Perhaps he is asserting an earlier suggestion in the essay, that writing about painting really is impossible.  Or perhaps his real interest is more subtly personal: to think about his own relationship as a poet to the painters and paintings he so obviously cares about.

In either case, Bruce Whiteman offers the sort of essay that strikes me as unusual these days in its casually elegant erudition and its engagement in some perennial artistic questions.  He doesn’t show much interest in more recent critical theory or social concerns (for example, all the artistic milieus he mentions were dominated by men) and readers might find themselves wanting to interrupt now and then.  Nevertheless, or perhaps also for this reason, I think you’ll find this essay to be stimulating company.

Leona Gom, The Catastrophe of Us. North Vancouver, BC: The Alfred Gustav Press, 2021.

http://d-zieroth.squarespace.com/the-alfred-gustav-press

The Alfred Gustav Press is, for me, a new and welcome discovery.  Published by the poet David Zieroth (and named for his father), the press’ attractive chapbooks are only available by subscription.  Every year those lucky subscribers receive three publications along with bonus chapbooks—new, short works by authors previously published by the press. 

Leona Gom’s The Catastrophe of Us is one heck of a bonus.  A short series of quasi-documentary poems based on reading recent books on history, the Anthropocene, and the universe, they rely on those texts for the information that is then turned into a succinct bulletin of alarm. 

The first poem sets the tone by giving us a thumbnail history of predictions of the end of the world, such as the Pope’s declaration on the Muslim conquest of Constantinople.  All this crying wolf has made it easy to dismiss the next Cassandra who comes along:

Because by now, into the next millennium,

we’ve had too many last days, because

the world has ended again and again,

because we have been hunted and haunted

by all the horsemen and all the prophesies

and all the extinctions and still come back

from them all.  Because we populate the world

again and again with our relentless survival,

doing more of what we’ve always done,

and in spite of all we know and because of it

we still expect the cycles of punishment

and forgiveness, our excuses now

both our knowledge and our ignorance.

Because we have written too often

the history of the future.

But as we all know by now, the (end) times they are a changin’.  The threats are real.  Some are politically created crises (bodies washed ashore in Malta), others more direct extinctions (“We are fierce with our murders and wars and genocides”).  Gom does, however, offer some dubious comfort in offering the fact that we are far less successful killers of humans than mosquitoes.   

Those efficient mosquitoes aside, our species does not come off well:

When told he might have shot

the last wild passenger pigeon,

the man went home and told his wife

that he was overcome with

pride and an unspeakable joy.

The wonder of it is that Gom has made such energetic poems out of her dour reading.  This small chapbook of smart, engaging and engaged poems have the peculiar effect of making you feel better and worse at the same time.  Worth the price of the whole 2021 subscription, I’d say.