Carmine: In 2000 Rob Winger submitted a poetry manuscript to Signal Editions. I was fresh on the job, having recently replaced Michael Harris as series editor. I turned down the submission. What I saw was working within a very narrow range of prosodic effects, and had lots of lapses into flatness to prove it. Among the poems, however, was a piece called "Muybridge's Horse." Winger then resurfaced in EnRoute magazine as a first place winner in the 2003 CBC Literary Competition. He won it with sequence of poems on Muybridge. I pored over the poem for any evidence of freshness and inventiveness. I came up empty. Four years later a review copy of Muybridge's Horse, published by Nightwood, arrived at Books in Canada. I spent a careful half hour flipping through it (Nightwood published Elizabeth Bachinsky's Home of Sudden Service, another first book I turned away, and regretted doing so). But what I read was as uninspiring as I remembered; worse, by fattening the idea to an incredible 189 pages Winger's flatlining language seemed unbearable.

Now it gets a G.G. nomination! Completely baffled, I return to the book. This time I devote an entire afternoon to the task. But by now, my fourth attempt, it's hard to stave off frustration. Winger never stretches himself and his vocabulary to express this story from the inside. I’m not even sure what story he's trying to tell. The book seems well-researched, but Winger is missing so much a good story-teller needs: timing, momentum, an eye for detail, memorable scene-setting. The book is unshaped, even schleppy. Too many dry, essayistic stretches of prose, and I don't understand why so much of the poetry is cast in left-justified lines. One would think a poet would strive to make such material fictionally lively and lyrically vivid. That Winger has no taste for metrical verse is obvious, but he also seems to have no gift for the syntactic, acoustic and rhythmic devices that poets use to structure free-verse. As a result, the book's canvas  is huge but provides the stingiest platform for poetic language. There's very little here that doesn't sounds like something Winger partly cribbed from a reference book. To put it another way, Winger speaks over Muybridge and reduces him to nothing more than function of his own literateness. But what we really have is a category mistake: raw research masquerading as the recreation of lived experience. Winger, in other words, is engaged in the creation of a character who is merely an impersonated expression of all the historical data he has discovered and wants to bring into play.

I love storytelling in poetry, and love narrative poems that try to mix music and metaphor into their design. My own poems show a fondness for such narrative-dramatic forms, and the poets I admire have, throughout their careers, shown an abiding interest in plot and prosody. But if a poet strives to broaden the borders of lyric into the expansiveness of a book-length story, the story still needs to be satisfying as a poem. In other words, there needs to be an uniquely linguistic density to every "novelistic" moment. The test isn’t simply to create psychologically credible characters, but to do so musically, to have that realism sink deep into the sound structures of the narrative itself. Muybridge’s Horse, however, is so overwhelmingly a matter of content that its musical components have been lost. True, the book might, for some readers, be educational in its striving to pin down Muybridge' life and time. But this is a book that knows a thousand different things about its subject but doesn't know anything outside of what can be plotted by its own zeal for information and facts.

Readers will, of course, vary in their readiness to accept certain books, but Winger's success with this dud has me feeling like everybody gets the joke except me. Can you guys help?

Alex: I'm afraid I can't help very much. I give Winger credit for taking on such an ambitious task. But the overall sense I had was that his raw material (research) just hadn't been fully digested. I didn't have the feeling that history was being shaped and turned into something new. Cast into a larger structure, yes. But not transformed into the language - the rhythms and imagery - of poetry

What I mean by lack of digestion can be illustrated by a representative passage:

arriving in the Upper Montane zone of the Sierras
Eadward must have sweated alone through two distinct timberlines,
abandoned groves of ponderosa pine and incense cedar
flanked by unrecorded Douglas fir

he must have passed a three-hundred-foot Sequoia
that's later named the largest living thing on earth
trunk and crown the width of a street or house
          52,599 cubit feet of wood
          ten times heavier than the largest whale

this is long before
the biggest specimens here are named and measured
by governments and tourists
out of respect for survival and fire scars

Eadward pacing this alphabet of grain

There's a lot of information here that I guess has come out of some book, and then you get a final poetic line to round it off. But the information, the names of the trees, their height and comparative size, etc., just seems transcribed. The monotonous tempo you mention Carmine is that of dry, choppy prose. And I have to admit my heart sank when I came to the second part of the book, which is almost entirely written in the same, only without the line breaks. When you're reading it out loud it doesn't seem any different. Sticking with the poetry, I kept wondering over things like why it was essential, for example, to order and split up this list of place names in just this way:

Seward's Folly, Farallone Islands,
Antigua, Nanaimo, Alcatraz,
San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland,
London, New York City.

At times I got the impression that much of the book was perhaps meant to be a compendium of "found poetry." I mentioned that Henderson might have been attempting this at times in Nerve Language, and here I'm sure of it. But what I'm not sure about is whether what Winger has found is poetry. Take this:

Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge Man In Motion.
     Berkely, University of California Press, 1976:

Muybridge fired out of the darkness at Larkyns,
who fell at the base of a huge oak tree
at the entrance to the house,
struck below the heart.

Witnesses later claimed that Larkyns,
reeling back into the house,
had run through the kitchen and sitting room,
and then out the door, to fall by the tree.

But Dr. Reid,
who was summoned that night,
declared that Larkyns must have died instantly from the wound.

I'd maybe give him that first stanza, but after that it's dicey. And I don't know why he had to quote so much (I'm assuming this is all a quote), or why it was necessary to include the bibliographic citation within the poem. This is part of a larger problem I had, which is just how long Muybridge's Horse is. 189 pages! Along with all of the prose and the amount of what I've been calling undigested material, I felt a lack of discrimination on Winger's part. It's like he didn't want to leave anything out. But after a while the sheer amount of information and detail frustrates his purpose, even obscuring his plans for the poem's structure.

I do think there was a vision here and I appreciate that it might have been a large one that needed considerable scope to work out. I just didn't think it came off. I also found it weird that the jury this year included two of these poetic narrative bios. Especially since what I think was a more successful example of the genre, Steven Price's Anatomy of Keys, was published last year and didn't get a nod. Another odd coincidence: All three of the biographical subjects of these books were near contemporaries (Muybridge 1830-1904, Schreber 1842-1911, Houdini 1874-1926). What gives?

Paul: What gives? I'll tell you. Henry McCarty, that's what gives. He lived from 1859 to 1881. And who the hell was Henry McCarty? I'll tell you. He was a punk. A drifter. A criminal. He was also known as William Antrim. He was also known as William Bonney. He was also known as Billy the Kid. 

These attenuated biographical poem sequences set roughly in the late-nineteenth century, whether about a photographer, an escape artist, or a mental patient, all feel like attempts to sidle up next to Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the first, and arguably the best, of this new sub-genre, unless you count Gil Adamson's Ashland - and I suppose one could make an argument that you should, even though it doesn't exactly fit the mould - which blows them all away. 

Winger's book, like Henderson's and many other poetry collections that try to be somewhat true to history, is too long. It has a lot of stuff in it that isn't poetry - it's all junked up with facts and information - and that makes the poetry that is in the book harder to isolate and hold up the light where it sparkles. At 189 pages, it's a big - heck, I'll even say honking - motherfucker of a book, complete with notes, quotes, and the kitchen sink to boot. I've heard Rob read from this book, and when he's forced to be more judicious and give the audience just the essential bits, the results are much better. I wonder how much of this book was read aloud before the final draft. My guess is not very much. If he'd been forced to condense it for audiences more often prior to publication, perhaps more of the reference-book-ish deadweight would have been left behind.   

Okay, so it's big, and there's too much facty stuff, but is that it?

Not by a long shot.

If you go panning for gold in this book, you'll strike it rich soon enough. I'll let Winger speak in his own defence:

my neatly flattened sideburns
soften the black orbits of my eyes

my suits are wings

or this:

he laughs and guzzles a triple shot of liquor
slaps me on the backside and tilts his mouth open,
waiting for me there

the opposite of clocks

or this little gem:

Weight bearing.

 A dozen horses, two mules, a goat
straining against ropes,
human bodies braced diagonal,
leading.
Carts strapped to quadruped backs.

 Men lift colossal boulders across the white grids,
launching ashen shadows in the middle distance.
Triggering.

 A legless amputee swinging himself,
torso hinged against the lower white lines.

 The 340-pound woman whom Eadweard describes
as 20, unmarried,
urging her body up. 

Now, that's some damn fine poem-making there. And I like to keep in mind that this is a first book, and I'm apt to forgive rookie mistakes caused by ambition and eagerness, so I don't like to be too harsh in my criticism when clearly the ability and vision are there. I don't think Winger should take home the prize, but I'm happy to see this book on the shortlist, and I expect we'll be seeing very good things from Winger as his output grows and his willingness to winnow catches up with his materials.

Alex: Billy, eh? I suspected that little shit was involved . . .

Paul, I did think there were some nuggets in this book. I just thought all of the transcribed note-taking crushed the life out of the poetry and frustrated what I sensed was Winger's grand design and theme. The second part in particular I found to be almost unreadable. You suggested cutting Nerve Language to fifty or sixty pages. Ditto here, which would have involved a lot more cutting. 

I like the idea of the GG jury looking for new talent. And congratulations to Nightwood for being recognized two years running (Bachinsky's Home of Sudden Service wasn't a first book, but she was the newcomer on last year's list). I don't think this was a book for the shortlist though.

Paul: I don't disagree at all that Winger's book would be better at sixty pages, but Nerve Language is Henderson's ninth collection, and this is Winger's first. There's a sliding scale for how grumpy I get about bulky, kitchen sink-collections. Given his experience, Henderson is more culpable than Winger, I figure.

Carmine: Forgive me, Paul, but those examples are anything but "damn fine poem-making." The difference between Winger's "ambition and eagerness"  and Lee's ability to  compress idiomatic energies into fierce units, is the difference (to quote Twain) between a lightning bug and lightning. I know you're trying to be a sympathetic, but as you know one of the pitfalls of misplaced sympathy is that in the context of confusion, a reader will respond gratefully to sudden moments of clarity. And I think that's what's happening here - the book was such a slog that you're seizing on those "nuggets" and vastly overrating them. Whatever it is that Winger's book has to offer, the fact is it was very far from being ready for publication. Is it not reasonable, therefore, to expect that the jury for one of Canada's major prizes would make more of such a concern? Are you trying to tell me that the Canada Council convened three seasoned readers of poetry who shut out half-a-dozen excellent books - trim, painstakingly assembled, sophisticated books - for a collection whose best moments are imprisoned inside block after block of complacent, careless writing?  Can I sue for critical malpractice?

Alex: Of course we all think there were better books that didn't make the shortlist, but we could have said the same thing with regard to The Door. I do think Paul's third quote shows Winger at his most effective, with its awkward impressionism suited to the chaos of labour in the scene being described. The other examples, however, seem representative, at least to me, of his shortcomings - in particular his habit of snatching at disjunctive and self-conscious poetic effects.

NEXT: The Jury Deliberates