Review of Satie’s Sad Piano

Satie’s Sad Piano

Carolyn Souaid is a thoroughly serious writer: centric, not eccentric, and eager to confront the key issues of Canadian society. Satie's Sad Piano is a civic elegy in the tradition of Dennis Lee, a poem exploring Canada's uncertain destiny. She begins with the announcement of the death of Pierre Trudeau on September 28, 2000. The broadcast triggers the memories of a failed love affair in the protagonist, Venus, who became involved with a charismatic teacher and poet in 1968, the year of Trudeau's election. The symbolic name given to the protagonist has its source in Romeo and Juliet: "Venus smiles not in a house of tears." The repressions of a Catholic girlhood and adolescence lived just before the Quiet Revolution changed Quebec give a special edginess to venus's rebellious commitment to the body.

Souaid finds tropes as clever as solway's to describe physical desire: "her filly slit weeping/warm champagne." Venus encounters not a true love of her own age but a "Charlie Manson of Letters" who doesn't scruple to become involved with her: abuse of trust we'd call it now Their affair is associated with the outburst of Trudeaumania in teh 1968 election. It was, after all, the 1960s, and a politician with the charisma of a pop star was briefly conceivable. Souaid knows that Trudeau was more than a momentary celebrity, and she captures the power and the flaws of his hubristic personality. The failure of Venus's affair and the abortion of her baby parallel the failure of Trudeau's affair with his country. In both cases, the stormy overture dwindles into the oddities symbolized by Satie's sad little piano pieces. It may seem odd for a poet to use a love affair as an analogue with Trudeau's political career, but then Trudeau's own private life became painfullypublic. Considering that Souaid was about nine when Trudeaumania swet Canada, she has captured the era very accurately. Souaid doesn't rely exclusively on storytelling: she deploys rhyme subtly, her use of alliteration and consonance can be startling, and her images are powerful and original. This is a book that will enage its readers stylistically, emotionally, and perhaps even politically.


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Satie’s Sad Piano

Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist known for his eccentricity and the unusual titles he gave his compositions. Carolyn Marie Souaid aptly evokes Satie in the title of her fourth collection, Satie's Sad Piano.

Right from the beginning of Satie's Sad Piano, the language leaps off the page in exciting, vivacious rhythm and rhyme: "Poinsettias aghast. The children, too / in hats and scarves, skating / clear off the grind, pond crack, / their shrink-wrapped screams" You can hear the assonance in "aghast" and "hats;" then "pond cracked" and "shrink-wrapped" has a metrical parallelism that Souaid uses throughout, giving the collection a riff-like cadence. But more than pop for the ears, this collection of poems, told from several points of view, is a love story set against the backdrop of Trudeaumania. The poems also make use of Catholicism, Greek mythology and literature as points of reference bringing to mind Elizabeth Smart's poetic novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

The lives of the character in Smart's novel and Souaid's character, Venus, parallel each other. Both fall for married men who are poets, both fall pregnant and both are martyrs to their passions and afraid of their lover's wives: "What I mean to write, I won't for fear: / 'She' in hot pursuit of our paper trail. / Darkness bleeding through the clouds. / Even here, in the filtered sunlight / beneath trees, / I speak only in whispers." The poem, in the voice of Mont Royal, that captures Venus's first meeting of her future love, parallels what is going on in the nation with Trudeau; in fact, the male character is a parallel character: "She first spied him at the epicentre, / the sun, in shambles, pivoting/ breathlessly around him / Genius? Philosopher? / Mountains, he'd said, gravitated to him / in dreams. Sermonizing, as always, / in puffed-up tongues. / Je ne reve pas en mots, je reve dans l'abstrait. / Which she interpreted of course, / misinterpreted, as strength." There is a god-like quality to this masculine character with the sun "pivoting breathlessly around him." We can see he is going to take over her world, as Trudeau takes hold of the passions of Canadians, and yet his strength is misinterpreted.

There is a blur between the character of Trudeau and the male character so that Venus is falling not for a specific man, but the passions of the time and the exuberance of the nation. This is a complicated collection of poetry to summarize in a few words, which is one of its strengths. A reader who knows little of Canada's history would still revel in the language, the long-limbed lines, the leaps, strong end-stops and the use of enjambment that creates double-meanings as in "reached deeper still / into the music / of her womb, vibrating / the darkest chords." Though there is a smattering of cliches, some attempt to stretch beyond their all-too-familiar use, as does the language throughout this collection of multi-voiced poems.


— Yvonne Blomer ARC Poetry Magazine

Satie’s Sad Piano

​Taking it to the streets 

While poetry and the poetic spirit can spring up and thrive anywhere, it seems that some fields are more fertile than others.  We don't mean to boast, but clearly Montreal is one such place.  With that in mind, we have given four of the city's most illustrious poets free rein to talk about their work, how it fits into their personal and professional lives, and just what that certain je ne sais quoi about their home might be.  

For one of Quebec's major poets, it's all about connecting

For the past decade or so, I've been sharing my deep dark secret with students across the country: I hated poetry when I was a kid.  I hated it from the time I was in high school right through my undergraduate days in English Literature at McGill.  Poetry, it seemed, was written by a bunch of dead white guys.  It was an animal you had to dissect for marks.  Poetry was a tough nut to crack, if you'll pardon the gratuitous mixing of metaphors.  And you had to get it right. 

This confession seems to have made me a hit among students, even in classrooms where teachers have taken a more enlightened approach to poetry.  It has brought me complicity and the attentive ear of some of the most unmotivated, unenthusiastic students.  By the time the bell rings, I have somehow managed to convince them that poetry, like graffiti, is slightly subversive.  Before they are our the door and back in iPod heaven, they have brought into the idea that they are allowed to enjoy a poem without necessarily being able to articulate why, in the same way I can appreciate Gustav Mahler or John Coltrane without fully processing the subtleties of their music.  

I won't flatter myself by saying these kids will become poetry junkies anytime soon.  The grum truth is that once school is behind us, we adults barely touh it again save for the rare occasion when we want the eloquence to speak out pain or our joy – at a wedding or a funeral, say.  But at least the myth has been shattered.  

In the last two or three years, I have taken to the streets on a similar quest, trying to renew public interest in a genre that is almost unanimously dismissed, if not feared.  These feelings, of course, stem from a schoolkid reticence much like my own, feelings which are subtly reinforced and propagated through public discourse.  It continues to irk me that poetry is considered the poor distant cousin of fiction, even in so-called literary circles.  Until the advent of the Griffin Prize, few prestigious poetry awards even existed in this country.  The media's tendency to glamourize the amply hyped fiction awards doesn't help, either.  Publishers wonder when their poets are "finally going to write that novel." And I have rarely head of a book club studying someone's thin volume of poetry.   

Many critics believe that a poet is one of two breeds.  Either he is a "people's poet" (often branded "accessible" in a patronizing sort of way) or he is a "serious poet," whose sweat and toil to ensure that only an exclusive group of people can break the cody ultimately translates into a plea for posterity.  But this is a simplistic view, one that would make it easy to blame the latter group for scaring the bejesus out of students like me.  It would also seem to explain why I decided to align myself with the guy on the street, in spite of the stigma attached to penning works that are deemed relevant to the masses.  I don't believe it is as black-or-white as all that.   Some poets have played in both fields at different points in their careers.   

In fact, I am a firm believer that one can take poetry off the page and into public spaces without compromising the form.  It is more about broadening the audience base through innovative and exciting projects, and inviting people to rise to the challange.  It is finally about returning poetry to the public, where it began and stil belongs.  

How I ended up here is purely accidental.  In the summer of 2003, after the provincial arts council rejected my grant proposal, I ended up in such a funk that I found myself frantically flipping through my address book, searching for someone who might offer me the right combination of empathy and indignation.  I barely knew Endre Farkas except for the two or three times I had run into him at the International Poetry Festival in Trois-Rivières, and he seemed agreeable enough.  Basically, his email reply was one-quarter consolation, three-quarters kick in the pants.  He wanted help with a project he was trying to get off the ground for spring 2004 – a rekindling of the Poetry on the Buses project, something he had worked on back in the 70s when he ran with Montreal's own "Group of Seven," known as the Véhicule Poets.  Eager to put the grant fiasco behind me, I jumped on board.  

The result of our collaboaration was a moving anthology of the work of 20 contemporary Canadian poets representing official languages.  For the entire month of April, National Poetry Month, 800 Montreal busses crisscrossed the city carrying poems – one French, one English – to commuters.  For me, what was most exciting was the concept of the single ride to work becoming a venue for colliding worlds – the poet's world intersecting with the traveller's world for a brief moment in time.   The thought that poetry could simultaneously be an intimate conversation between writer and reader, and a dynamic and kinetic experience, also intrigued me.  Recaling Wallace Steven's definition of poetry as "that which helps us live," it was my hope that this project would afford Montrealers an opportunity to pause, reflect, take in a little food for the soul.   On a small scale, these bus poems would help them "live." And I believe it worked.   Public support for the project was so overwhelming that the tour was extended beyong April and into May.  

Endre and I were efficient collaborators and it didn't take long to dream up our next gig.  This one would build on the notion of parachuting the poem into public arena; it would showcase the very theatricality of poetry.  We called it Circus of Words/Cirque des mots and worked our tails off to produce what would become a multilingual extravaganza of performance poetry.  The idea was to explode the concept of spoken word, currently considered cutting-edge in poetry, and take it one step beyond.   Each featured artist was invited to create a 15-mintue piece for the show, using poetry as the focal point, but heightening it with music, dance, movement, lighting, visuals, and sound.  We billed it as "The Greatest Show on Earth," and carried out audience to the place "where language leaps off the page and walks along the tracks of solitude, flies through the air with the greatest of ease, becomes poetry in motion and breaks the speed and syntax of sound." For two years in a row, we filled the house at Montreal's trendy Sala Rossa with exciting performances by the acclaimed Hélène Dorion and Jean-Paul Daoust, both winners of the Governor General's Award, maudit-poet Lucien Francoeur, and the politically engaged Chilean poet Elias Letelier, among others. What is the most remarkable about what we accomplished relates to demographics. The show managed to attract people of all ages and backgrounds, and all of them – paying customers – were there for poetry, of all things.  

One of the most off-beat, in-your-face experiences I have had delivering poetry on public turf is called Random Acts of Poetry, the brainchild of Victoria poet Wendy Morton, who recognized the restorative powers of poetry after she was stopped for speeding and managed to persuade the cop to rip up her ticket by reading him a poem.   In October 2004, after Wendy found sponsors in Abebooks and the Victoria Read Society, and talked up an anonymous doner for funding, 27 Canadian poets, including me, hit the streets of our respective cities for a week-long love-in with the public, during which time we read our poetry to complete strangers and gave away free copies of our books.  The project cleverly combined poetry and the element of surprise, and proved to be a good blood-rush way to meet and connect with readers.  Public displays of lunacy?  Admittedly, some of the people I encountered reacted as though I were the female clone of Arthur Rimbaud, a raving mad poet lost in her crazy illuminations.  A bewildered few shook their heads, uninterested in "buying anything." But most were more than willing to give up a minute or two of their busy day.  It seemed they wanted an excuse to find their way back to their imagination.   I could go on, except none of this really answers the one burning question in your mind – how someone like me went from hating poetry to loving it to publishing four books of it.  And how, exactly, I'm able to convince the most tight-lipped, skeptical adolecent that a poem is not a stodgy impenetrable beast but an "act of mischeif," as Theodore Roethke once argued.  Alas, to answer this would be divulging the biggest secret of all, something akin to removing tbe surprise toy from the Crackerjacks box. 

I'll give you a hint, though.  It has a little something to do with distilling the pure joy of living – even in its darkest, bleakest moments.  


Montreal Review of Books

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