Saying Yesno: 

Paul: The time has come to talk about Dennis Lee's Yesno, and I feel I should declare any biases, real or perceived, at the outset. Some readers may be aware that I have known Dennis for nearly a decade; he has been not only a friend, but also a kind of artistic mentor and role model to me, though I don't believe too much should be made of this for the purposes of this panel. If I have any praise for Dennis Lee the poet, and I do, it is not because of my affection for Dennis Lee the man. In fact, in the order of things, that would be putting the cart before the horse, as it were - as a young poet new to Toronto, I sought out Dennis precisely because of my admiration for his work. Only later did I discover, after we had got to know one another a little better, that in addition to being a master poet, he is also a swell guy. And so, my honest opinion of Yesno.

First, any discussion of Yesno would be incomplete without at least making mention of its predecessor Un. Yesno is not so much a sequel to Un as it is a continuation of the same literary project, in the same way that The Two Towers is not really a sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring, but rather a continuation of the larger story known as The Lord of the Rings. They are parts of a whole. Lee makes this clear in Yesno's table of contents; the numbering picks up where Un left off. When I first read it, I thought Un was a masterpiece: daring, original, and consummate in its craftsmanship. It demonstrated not only Lee's mastery of poetic meter and natural speech rhythms, but also his acute understanding of English word-sounds, both fragments and phonemes - not only what they mean, but also how they feel. Emotionally charged, abstract, yet still eminently meaningful, Lee managed something akin to a literary equivalent to cubism retooled for the twenty-first century. It manages to be post-modern, but without all that disagreeable jargon malarkey. 

Yesno is a fittingly brilliant continuation of the work begun in Un without being more of the same. Un was a dark and harrowing piece of work, but Yesno at least hints at hope without giving up on Un’s urgent message. Here are the first two lines of "if," the first poem in Yesno:

If it walks like Apocalypse, if it
squawks like Armageddon.

There is both warning and whimsy in this seemingly simple composition. It juxtaposes nothing less than the end of the world – and twice at that – with a happy, lilting rhythm, virtually a metrical "quote" of Rex Harrison’s melodious Dr. Dolittle, while also riffing on 'Hoosier Poet' James Whitcomb Riley’s duck typing maxim: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then I would call it a duck." The rest of the poem, and the book for that matter, confirms our fears – there are dark times ahead, if we're not careful. One could sift through both Un and Yesno with a fine-toothed comb and, page after page, find this level of intricate, sapient detail. It is as though each tiny poem was crafted under a jeweller's loupe. If it's not already apparent, Yesno was my favourite book on this shortlist and the one I would most like to see honoured. But regardless of honours, I hope that I have convinced a few people reading these comments to read Dennis's books at their earliest possible convenience.

Alex: Completely unrelated to the poetry itself, I had two "Wow" moments when I picked up Yesno:

(1) Wow! Civil Elegies came out 40 years ago!

And,

(2) Wow! This little book costs $18.95! That must work out to close to $0.10 a word!

Kudos to Lee for his poetic longevity, but a hostile glare directed at Anansi, not only for their pricing but also for being the first publisher in the history of the Runaway Jury to be unable to provide review copies of their nominated book. Apparently there were inventory problems. They said review copies might be delayed a couple of weeks, but a month later I still hadn't heard back from them. Anansi likes to boast that it isn't a small press any more, so since I've ripped on smaller publishers in the past for less it's only fair I call them out here. 

The pricing is also an indirectly relevant factor because it's part of a more important caveat about this book: That it is only the second part of a two-volume effort. I'm sure there must be plans to re-issue Un and Yesno together sometime in the future, especially given how the chapters are numbered consecutively and how slight the two books are independently. This also plays into how you go about judging Yesno for a prize. I thought it was interesting that you brought up the example of The Lord of the Rings, Paul. The last film in that series, The Return of the King, won a whole pack of Academy Awards, largely, it was assumed, on the basis of the trilogy as a whole. Is that what we're unconsciously or at least silently supposed to be doing with Yesno? You also say that any discussion of Yesno is incomplete without reference to Un. Is Yesno incomplete without Un? Is our judgment of this book supposed to be based solely on a reading of Yesno? Can it be? Or, if we were to give the award to this book would it be understood that we were really recognizing Lee's achievement in the two books together?

Turning to Yesno, we certainly have the most fun book on the list. This is the kind of poetry that forces you to read it out loud. Oral performance is what poems like "tango" were written for. No other nominated poet this year has the same musical effect. And Lee's not afraid to just flat out beat the drum through repetition. But it's not just repetition, with units like "keep keep keep," "debit, debit, debit," and "new by the new by the new by the new by the" all serving real functions in their respective poems.

Another obvious fun factor is the language, the "whacked grammar" and "nuworldspeak." So often with other poets this can just be rhythmic nonsense, but with Lee it carries weight. The "corporate mindmills" and "warmwarning," the "karma oscura" and "fresh necronyms of wild," are freighted puns that have to be unpacked. In some cases they go off in multiple directions at once, like "holes in the wholly." One has the sense of being set a series of word puzzles. And I'm still working on several of them. I think that "ave" maybe goes too far into the "surd."

I did have some reservations about the tone of it all. The lighthearted, playfulness of the poetry was at odds with the message, which has to do with the ruin of the natural environment. It's hard to focus on the death throes of the planet when you're half expecting to see the Jabberwock come whiffling through the wood any second.

This is a good little book, but it is kind of slight and, as noted, incomplete. I also get the feeling that Lee is working a groove here that has become a kind of comfort zone for him. His stuttering switch-a-letter word play ("null again, nil again, knell again," "speakable, ekable, seekable") can seem a little precious after a while, and I'm sure he could come up with it now in his sleep. Nevertheless, it's his zone and I have to say he's damn good at it.

Carmine: I found Yesno intensely fascinating. As with Un, Lee cuts loose ("Giddyap, ganglia"), and takes chances that always run the danger of toppling into silliness. The two books exemplify an excessiveness pursued with total commitment, and I respect that. Indeed, I can't think of many Canadian  poets of Lee's vintage (a circle that would include Atwood, Ondaatje, Musgrave, Borson, and Thesen) who are working as hard to bring their "A" game to their recent work. Crammed, dense, polyrhythmic - there's no let-up here. A lot of wordplay is packed in these small poems, and the best kind of wordplay too: one that captures its music from the air, whose lines feel like just-downloaded snatches of the aural environment we inhabit. Lee has always been a connoisseur of colloquialisms, and the fun in these recent poems is in listening to all the far-fetched ways he samples and remixes his sources. Hybridity is Yesno's true idiom, and part of the book's charm, for me, is the suspicion that each poem is a series of lucky linguistic hi-jinks ("null again, nil again, knell again") that Lee decided to keep. This happens in all poetry, of course, but especially so in Yesno. It's a process Lee calls "heart-/iculate improv" wherein the poems exist in a state of hyperserendipity. And frankly part of the reason I kept turning the pages, even when Lee was pushing things one degree past reductio ad absurdum,  is that I was always curious to see what would he would "improv" next.

In a way, that was problem. I was taking a professional interest in Lee's poems. Unlike Paul, who found them "emotionally charged," I was always forcing myself to be more engaged than I actually was. They might read like nothing else, but they clearly have designs on us. He has put a great deal of thought into why he is writing them. And the why - as Lee might say - is the what. If you buy his why, in other words, then chances are you're also willing to buy his phonetic coincidences as original insights into what Paul calls our "dark times." Words are sound before they are sense, and fans of Yesno seem to regard his complex play with language as generating a profound play with ideas. But Lee's odd conjoinings, wild verbosity and unexpected shifts don't make enough sense to be anything more than sound. Yesno's conceptual dressage gives his tongue-twisting lines a certain galloping excitement, but it's often hard to know what idea is in harness. The idiomatic swervings in a phrase like "craving slop / -stoppage of crash & blurn" add up to nothing, because they give you nothing to keep in your head. As with Un, Yesno puts its hopes in the odds that accessibility lost will be idiosyncrasy gained - but that gain doesn't necessarily mean that poetry is produced.

I don't mean to sound so uncharitable. I admire how Lee's linguistic authority is established freshly in each piece (one of the satisfactions of a well-edited book, even at $18.95). Also noteworthy is that although Lee always tries to pull together his effects using a word or two, his love of language doesn't feel eye-droppered into his lines. But while I sensed their heat, I could never make contact with the nerve endings of Lee's concerns. A line in Othello makes this plain: "I understand a fury in your words / But not the words." Lee has something important to say, so important, in fact, that he wants to say it in a new way. But even newness can be counter-productively achieved. There's a saying I picked up in Virginia a couple of years ago when someone was talking about overdesigned tools: too much intelligence for too simple a use. Sometimes you can try so hard that you get in your own way. Lee's tricksy, triple-talking lines invite the ear but turn away the mind and heart. This is why, for me, the most moving ecological poetry continues to be found in  poets like John Clare, Edward Thomas, Ted Hughes, and Eric Ormsby. Shock of the old, you might call it. As much as I enjoyed them, I have serious concerns about whether Lee's poems will be read after all the trendy eco-philosophical bells and whistles they come with fall silent.

Nonetheless, Lee has a terrific ear, and has written the only book on this shortlist that provides a conflagration of fresh sounds. I'd happy if he walked away with the prize.

NEXT: Riding Muybridge's Horse