Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry by Jim Johnstone

Book: Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry
Author: Jim Johnstone
Publisher: The Porcupine’s Quill (2024)

Jim Johnstone is a Canadian poet in his mid-40s who is very much in the tradition of earlier poets like Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Ken Norris and others in that he is not only a writer of poems, but also a devoted book reviewer, an editor, and a publisher. (He is in charge of Anstruther Press, the chapbook offshoot of Palimpsest Press, a literary publisher founded in Windsor, Ontario almost twenty-five years ago.) Norris has borne witness to the charge he received from Dudek in the 1970s, that a poet needs to contribute to the literary community by functioning, even before he is worthy of the name, as a man of letters. By that charge, Dudek meant reviewing, establishing little magazines and presses, organizing readings, and editing anthologies, most especially in the early stages of a poet’s career. All of these roles Johnstone has fulfilled, in addition to undertaking a private course of study meant to ensure that he is familiar with the history of his art, especially in Canada. He writes evocatively of ignoring his responsibilities as a biology grad student at the University of Toronto in favour of reading Canadian poetry books in the Robarts Library, which, as he says with pride and glee, had ‘everything’. Such a knowledge of the poetic tradition in Canada is not very common among the younger poets, a situation that is frankly baffling to older poets like me who, from the beginning, wanted to have an in-depth knowledge of what the forebears had accomplished. Johnstone knows well what the forebears accomplished. He has even edited the selected poems of two of them, Earle Birney (1904-1995) and D.G. (Doug) Jones (1929-2016). One gets the feeling from his new book of essays and reviews that he really did read ‘everything’ during those late grad school nights when he was avoiding studying the Krebs Cycle and DNA.

Apart from the inclusion of his introductions to the Birney and Jones selections, Bait & Switch focuses only on Canadian poetry of the 21st century. A few poets known to many readers – Karen Solie, Don McKay, Christian Bök – appear as the subjects of reprinted book reviews, but the majority of Johnstone’s subjects will be largely unfamiliar even to Canadian readers, much less to an international audience, poetry being a somewhat debased coinage in the Canadian literary economy and mostly unexported. Johnstone is not daunted by that fact. Poetry, he writes in his Introduction, ‘is an irresistible force, a guiding principal [sic] for those to whom it matters’. It certainly matters to him, and it is a pleasure to read reviews and essays by a practising poet who has a good ear, knows poetic history, and cares about such conventional aspects of technique as assonance, rhyme, metre and so on. In building a well-received anthology of younger poets entitled The Next Wave (2018) – a collection with a satisfyingly subtle nod to Raymond Souster’s 1967 anthology New Wave Canada – Johnstone declares that he was looking for poets who demonstrated ‘attention to structure, sonic acuity, and emotional resonance’, though the result, he goes on to suggest, was not at all homogeneous. It revealed Canadian poetry to be ‘a sort of catch all, extemporized medium’. It’s almost as though he is admitting that conventional techniques are not as common as one could wish. Johnstone values ‘musicality’, and is often disappointed not to find it in the poetry of the younger generation.

The heart of Bait & Switch in my view is the extensive series of reprinted book reviews. In recent years there has been some infighting among Canadian poets as to whether poets should even review other poets, and, if they do, whether bad reviews are defensible. Illogical and ahistorical as such a view may seem, it is widely shared. Jim Johnstone, laus Deo, does not share that view, and is willing to criticise what he thinks of as shoddy writing, while naturally praising what he finds accomplished or even superb. I don’t always agree with his judgements, as I find some of the excerpts he cites as laudable lacking in the very musicality that Johnstone prizes. For example, the lines he cites from Michael Prior’s book Swan Dive, while handsome enough, hardly seem to me to demonstrate that Prior has ‘eclipsed much of the Canadian establishment in a single step, regardless of his relatively slight body of work’. Passages cited from poems by Carmine Starnino, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Liz Howard and others sound underwhelming to my ear. By contrast, his rejection of much of Christian Bök’s oeuvre – including Eunoia, which won the Griffin Prize and sold an astounding number of copies – seems absolutely just to me, though I am puzzled about his statement that ‘the level of difficulty in much of Bök’s work demands respect’. David Jones is difficult. Ezra Pound is difficult. Sordello is difficult. But if we admire those poets or that poem, it is surely not because of their difficulty, but for other qualities.

Johnstone is fair-minded and open to a variety of voices; he is also sensitive to both the strengths and weaknesses of a poet’s work. He labels Don McKay (born 1942) ‘the pre-eminent poet of his generation’, a generation that includes Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee and not a few other fine poets; yet he finds McKay’s later work full of ‘familiar platitudes and vague imagery’. In today’s oversensitive literary culture, it takes not a little courage to be so straightforwardly critical of a major figure. He calls Alexandra Oliver (born 1970) ‘one of Canada’s most electrifying new formalists’ – how many writers would use the word ‘electrifying’ where poetry is the subject at hand? – while still recognising that her use of end-rhyme leads to ‘awkward word choices’ and noting that ‘her habit of contrasting high and low culture’ can lead to ‘overblown’ writing. Johnstone can make astonishing statements, such as hearing bill bissett’s ‘sound practice’ as (somehow) similar to Edith Sitwell’s, while also astutely understanding that bissett’s ‘work is weakest at its most traditional’. One may not agree with his contention that the province of New Brunswick, on Canada’s east coast, ‘has consistently outwritten its western cousins on a per capita basis’, but it is refreshing to find a serious critic giving serious attention to a series of poetry chapbooks, the revived New Brunswick Chapbook Series, a format that is normally ignored by reviewers and critics, rarely carried by bookstores, yet in the current culture one of the liveliest places where new poetry is to be found. Bravo for Jim Johnstone.

Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry can be purchased HERE.

Bruce Whiteman

Bruce Whiteman’s selected essays and reviews, Work to Be Done, was published in 2024.