Review of Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem

Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem

For some time now I’d been looking forward to Toronto poet Emily Izsak’s first trade poetry collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial PoemWhistle Stops is constructed out of an extended sequence, with a shorter sequence included as a kind of coda. The poems in the title section run from the end of August to the middle of April, utilizing notation-as-title, specifying destination and time of each trip, alternating “London” and Toronto’s “Union Station.” The specificity of her titles are reminiscent, slightly, of the day book poems of Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days,” as he too titles his poems with a precise date (via the Julian Day calendar; given so few are aware of the workings of the calendar, the specifics might be there, but the effect is obviously and deliberately softened) and composing a poem using details in such a way as to work against precise description and narrative, instead focusing on sound, shape and language. As she writes to open the poem “MAR 1ST 74 TO UNION STATION  07:35”: “Distance seeks luxury / among the cedars / offstage decoys // guide our larvae / to a pagan grasp / of self portraiture [.]” Most of the poems in the first section have the effect of short, sketched meditations, but also allow for the possibility of other formal and informal intention and invention, and even allowing for the possibility of poems constructed out of anything and everything, while still connecting to the other pieces via the open-ended structure. Each poem might exist on its own (presumably composed during the train jaunt referenced in each poem’s title), but each live in conjunction with every other poem in the collection.

There have been numerous books composed on trains (I’ve even done my own, more than once), and the extended travel of trains somehow lends itself well to the composition of longer works, whether long poems, sequences or suites. In so many ways, the hours of rattle and rail can’t help it. Curiously, the effect of such poems-in-transit suggest that each piece is composed in the same “place,” writing out both the samenessess and differences of a new day along the same track (much like Auggie’s photographs in the 1995 movie Smoke, or Frank O’Hara’s infamous 1964 collection, Lunch Poems). The samenessess allow for structure, but the differences, however slight, contain multitudes.
 


— Rob McLennan Rob McLennan's blog

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Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem

This year, due to the vicissitudes of which box was opened when, I began with four first books from Signature Editions, a press I hadn’t perused a lot. They were all good though quite different. It is nice when a press comes out bold with lots of debuts – you get the anticipatory excitement of watching a draft class form, a cohort you can follow. These four are strange bedfellows – and speaking of that, there are lots and lots of bedfellows (or fellows bedded) in Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems, my starting point of the four. Every poem has a number for a title and is about a different nameless guy (well, some have nicknames) that the poet has known – you know, “known” in the old-fashioned sense. This was my first encounter with a hashtag-titled book and it was invigorating and somewhat scary to cross such forbidden boundaries. It felt a little like becoming the môniyas numbered “#782,” the one with “white guilt and privilege/narrow in your eyes[.]” It would be better to be like “#438,” “my first/môniyas/[who] was everything a/môniyas should be[.]” There are plenty of men from the rainbow of flavours to be had here, all numbered, some loved, none spared. There is “#92,” whose post-coital presence leads Campbell to “[ponder]/the age old question//how the fuck/do i get him out of here?” There is “#2001,” “my gifted Cree man [. . .]//make me/speak pleasure/once again[.]” There is “#32,” “warrior to my maiden/the one who makes me victory cry/as we ride to freedom//he speaks low and rough/nêhiyawêwin/run down my spine//my dene tongue licks/my thick lips kiss/a body that once/would have been/banned from mine[.]” One hesitates to quote the juiciest parts out of regard for the propriety of the UTQ readership, but there are lots of juicy parts. Having been tepidly if briefly promiscuous in my youth, and being a good moralist in public today, I am obliged to remark that such behaviour doesn’t always spring from the happiest of places or result in the most propitious of outcomes – and then there are the problems of voyeurism, objectification, stereotyping that might arise. “[J]udge me/i dare you[,]” Campbell warns at one point, a dare this critic is not brave enough to take. Noting at another moment that “this is dating/in 2017[,]” she paces the selection, so that the reader is all the more pleased at the pleasant (or mind-altering) encounters precisely because not all of them are. So, after all, are there sad or troubling or troublingly charged aspects of an honest book about sex, how one person (a very specific person, with an identity of interest) does it and imagines it and describes it? Yes, which is why it is good, because it is honest and unafraid; there is also its tactility, its debauchery, its wistfulness, and its sense of humour to recommend it.
With that, Cityscapes in Mating Season by Lise Gaston, Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems by Ted Landrum, and Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem by Emily Izsak (the rest of the quartet) cannot compete. As they say on draft night, their “skill set” is different – but not totally incompatible. One thing that caught my eye (or ear) in Gaston’s book was the diction. You could feel her rolling words around, especially in a section called “bonescapes,” where some of the freshness of the vocabulary is because it is fresh to the poet, although the occasion is a clinical one: “This doctor gives me sickness, pronounces its/polysyllabic name. I offer him glances,//teeth bared in a grin. He says chronic,/progressive. My blouse is open/just enough. He prescribes. Vocabularies slip/from his parted lips to mine.” The poet has something badly wrong with her back, her spine, and much of the book is dedicated to trying to find out what is causing pain and how to name it. The final series of poems titled “Silence” uses the relative blankness of the whole page nicely; but then Cityscapes in Mating Season is stably architectured and ably textured throughout. Ted Landrum’s book, on the other hand, is less textured but more memorably architectured. The Archi-Poems of his title are short for “architecture poems” (among other things) and the author himself is an architect (among other things). The use of erasure and negative space is indicative of talent. His “Eiffel Tower” poem (or his Roland Barthes poems) is (are) exquisite (superb). His “Fly-Trap Poem” is a concrete chuckle.
Izsak’s Whistle Stops is what its subtitle says it is, namely a serial poem on the move, on a commuter train back and forth between Toronto and London, Ontario. It is not all a waste of time, commuting: “Weather bastes our/latest interval with/sky lard and/crystal regimens of three/secret Kegels/per round trip[.]” The titles are the times and train numbers of each day’s trips, which are stultifyingly similar and sensorally and meditatively different. (This aspect of Whistle Stops is also similar to and different from #IndianLovePoems, with its numbered lovers, and which is, in its own way, also a serial poem.) “Oh train/it is strange for your shape/that I/am inside you[,]” she writes, flipping the phallic script, but also acknowledging a phenomenology of trains that has always made them good figures for simultaneous movement (what passes outside) and stasis (as you sit in your seat).


— Andrew Dubois University of Toronto Quarterly

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