Alex: I guess this is a case of being careful what you wish for. I've always been interested in the long poem, and this year there are at least two on the shortlist. I say "at least two" because I'm not sure whether to include Yesno as being the continuation of a long poetic sequence. But there's no doubt about applying the label to Nerve Language and Muybridge's Horse. And what I found remarkable is that two books so alike, at least in terms of conception, made it on to the same shortlist. Both books take a historical narrative documented in previous texts and re-imagine that material in a new form. I'm not sure if we can call this a new trend or not, especially as the original for this kind of thing goes back to the Greatest Generation (stuff like The Journals of Susanna Moodie and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid). I'm also not sure how successful these latest efforts are. But you can't help but notice their similarities. Critics regularly dump on the love affair our fiction prizes have for historical novels. This year we have two historical novels on the poetry shortlist! Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Nerve Language is a poetic memoir distilled from the account a Leipzig judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, wrote of his mental breakdown. Among other things, apparently Schreber thought God spoke to him directly, and that it was his mission to save the universe by becoming a woman. Or something like that. In today's terminology he would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Schreber's book Memoirs of My Mental Illness was published in 1903 and subsequently became grist for Freud's mill, though it's not a particularly well known case. 

This raises an initial point I had some trouble with. Put in general terms: In the case of any book based on or inspired by a specific source, to what extent is knowledge of that source essential? We're not talking about allusion here. This is a book written out of Schreber's book. But without the notes (or the gloss on the back cover), how many people would have known this based on the evidence of the text? Is Nerve Language a book that can only be fully unlocked with the key of Memoirs of My Mental Illness?

Take the idea of entering "the world of female voluptuousness, the feminine" (from the back cover). I have no real idea what any of this meant. I liked the idea of God stretching man on the rack of voluptuousness, or pure soul (or thought), of "God needing us like food." But what this had to do with Schreber being transformed into a woman was beyond me. Maybe I missed something. I also re-read passages and poems that I thought might be specifically directed at supplying some answers, but didn't come up with much. For example, in the section of the book titled "The Glistering of Female Nerves" there's a poem I liked called "One, Crossing"  that suggested, through vaguely classical symbolism, the Gardens of Adonis. At least that's what it suggested to me. What it comes out of in Schreber's memoir is another matter, and something I know nothing about. Nor does the endnote on this poem help. All it says is this: "I know there must be other ways of writing these things, but now, it's as if you had been and I'm undone. Not nearly so easy." Huh? I like a challenge, but this struck me as irretrievably obscure.

The basic premise of the book, that God is communicating to Schreber not through the normal channels but by means of a separate "nerve language," is, obviously enough, something that is kind of hard to relate in print. It's a difficulty he's aware of:

The sun's already awake and full.
The garden if filled with something
they would have called beauty
in the human language
which seems so far from me now.

Whatever that "something" is that fills the garden, it has to be felt rather than expressed. Or else indicated by examples of hyper-sensuality, the sound of

  the mosquito
spitting its juice beneath my skin,
and the morning air thinking about stirring.
Each word spoken across the room
is a thunderclap
a blow on the head.

Or the carefully focused measuring of

the space between breaths,
the coffee stains on the white shirt cuff,
the diagonal sigh
of the bishop across the board

I'm not sure, but my guess is that the "forking lightning of the nerve language" is poetry, which is a form of writing that sets itself "against the crenellating, the constant rustling of the voices, against the forensic languages, and official pronouncements." Judged as poetry - that is, something more than just sensually-charged language used to maintain the narrative scaffolding - I was cool to the finished product. This is a poetry made out of prose, and, as with Muybridge's Horse, it often feels as though it's being dragged back. Indeed there are several prose sections in the book (as there are in Winger). How much of this stuff was coming out of Henderson's source? Was some of the verse supposed to be "found poetry"?

I thought the book as a whole started off with an interesting concept, but it didn't really work for me. It made me curious to read Schreber, but that's about all. The poems I enjoyed the most were the ones that let me forget the back story. I'm sure that wasn't the way it was planned. However I'm open to the suggestion that I missed something. And perhaps a lot. But I still doubt that this, or indeed any book, can live up to Di Brandt's blurb on the back: "It should be required reading for every modern citizen; it might save us from ruin." Puh-lease.

Carmine: GG juries have always had a weakness for book-length poems, be it long narrative or lyric sequence. The ones that come to mind most immediately from the last twenty-five years are Steven Scobie's McAlmon's Chinese Opera (1980), Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta (1988) Patrick Lane's Winter (1990), and Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest (1994). I agree that historical verse-recreations seem a recent phenomenon. Certainly it;s been the case since Stephanie Bolster won the GG in 1998 for her exploration of Lewis Caroll and his real-life Alice in White Stone: The Alice Poems. And let's not forget George Elliott Clark's (also GG-winning) poeticized bio-pic of his cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged for murder in 1949. Book-length poems are, of course, seen as big game projects, so it's no surprise that critics and poets are always eager to buy whatever these books are selling. This is especially so in Canada, where, since the sixties, the long poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists. Perhaps this goes some way in explaining Bök and Dewdney's interest in Nerve Language, as well as Muybridge’s Horse and Yesno. All of these books are, in part, defined by their fight against single-lyric form.

But Nerve Language has more than just its length in common with these books. It also shares with them an interest in the archetypal portrait of the artist as a tortured soul. In fact, all of the books on this year's shortlist echo this theme. Atwood is quite explicit about it, Domanski's shamanistic turns ritualize its priestlier aspects, Lee ties it to ecological guilt, and Winger uses it to define Muybridge’s photographic career (the book jacket makes this very clear: "Charged with murder, accused of neurosis, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act.") And, as I've argued elsewhere, it's also a theme dear to the heart of the Canadian avant-garde, a more nostalgic group than is usually thought.

Perhaps you're right, Alex, that Schreber would today be diagnosed as a "paranoid schizophrenic." But what's more telling, at least for the purposes of this discussion, is that the late nineteenth-century sense of cosmic bereftness that drives Schreber to take dictation from his feminine side makes him the perfect poster child for the postmodern identity crisis. As you mention, the sense-disordering "nerve language" for which Schreber serves as conduit is both a creative force and an agent of destruction. Schreber thus represents not only the extreme version of the existential angst that many still see as symptomatic of artistic self-consciousness but also the anti-establishment art traditionally forged from it. It's precisely this myth that, for someone like Bök, always seems to stand in subliminal shadow to his wished-for iconoclasm. He and his Calgary crew always seem to be pining for an earlier time when the public actually paid attention to such acts. 

That said, it wasn't Schreber that Nerve Language put me in mind of, but Anne Carson. Her fingerprints are all over this book. First there's all the grandiose histrionics about God ("God is the sun, and wants to devour"). Carson did this better in Glass, Irony and God. Next it's the end-stopped lines full of abrupt closures, which we first saw in Carson’s Plainwater and which, in this book,  we can see replicated in poems like "Phantom Mind" and "Ein Bahn Reisee." Then it's the strategic violence of Henderson's vocabulary ("Punishment is the house of gazes / hammered up against the not possible.") This, too, is the sort of thing Carson does all the time (check out the titular "opera" in Decreation). This last tactic has proven to be God's gift to poets looking for easy ways to cook up intellectually theatrical effects.

Schreber's unhinging, of course, seems ripe for these sort of effects, and Henderson does his best to get into the spirit of the thing. But while Carson's coldly ecstatic voice stirs actual ideas into the open, Henderson's descriptions of mental breakdown employ a diction so thick and crabbed it barely opens any aperture of insight into Schreber's experience. "The very first moan is steeped in hungering / for the hymn of God, the her, the whore of the Sun . . . " - lots of this sort of dredged-up blah blah blah wordplay. Sometimes it seems the book is the result of too much homework, so that by the end you feel that Henderson may know everything about Schreber's story but seems to have understood nothing about his suffering. The writing, in other words, is inflamed but isn't particularly deep or probing. A couple of  fascinating and strangely moving payoffs ("Sparta of Childhood" and "The Writing-Down System") give you a sense of where the project could have gone had Henderson not overplayed his hand to score some cheap madhouse typecasting.

Paul: I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book. Is Henderson glorifying Schreber's religious faith, I wondered, or merely pointing up his insanity? Or both? Or neither? I was never convinced. Both are pitiable human failings, but I struggled to locate any central point of view in the collection, something that sought to make sense of it all rather than just making poems, and if this was an attempt to ape the subject's schizophrenia, the wit was lost on me.

And that's too bad, because Henderson certainly has plenty of ability, and there are enough poems in this book that drew me in - I, too, liked "One, Crossing" and "Sparta of Childhood" - to make me want to read more of his work, but this book, as a book, never quite came together for me. Since the book is more-or-less unified in its subject matter, I kept expecting to find that it was unified in other ways, too, but in fact it seemed quite uneven and scattered. On one page I'd find a taut, controlled lyric, like those mentioned above, with plenty of rhythmic verve and imagistic fervour, and then I'd stumble into a couple of pages choked with gormless, rambling prose poems. They didn't seem to "go" with the others, and often they felt like padding, unneeded backstory, or worse, pretty-ish philosophizing.

Now I wonder if the book had been trimmed down to, say, fifty or sixty of the strongest pages, would I have felt differently? Yes, I'm almost certain of I would have, and for the better.

NEXT: Saying Yesno