An academic poem in the sense that it takes or rather took place in a graduate seminar in comparative literature, and in a specific time and place, 1969 in the Old Power Plant at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. The professor was my eventual Doctorvater, Juan Ferraté.
It was mid-winter and the steam rising up from the operational part of building itself into a pure blue winter sky was buffeted about by breezes, alternatively casting the second floor seminar room into shade and letting in bright shafts of sun.
*
Steam from the power plant, vapourising
at twenty below, casts turbulent shadows
into the seminar, obscuring smoke
swirling from the tips of Gitanes bleues.
Things to hold in abeyance, the better
to compose. As here in the text beneath
the fluff, tenuous tokens on a vacant
cerulean sphere whose grand nebulous
mesh’s measure cannot be captured in
integers, the fugitive traces thought leaves.
Bitter chill, numbing smell, sharpens sound,
deprives us of dimension, laying space bare.
And bareness is all we need, the scarce coin
of our rich empty inner kingdom.
*
Making Nothing Happen – See Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen ….”
Vapourising – Note the Canadian spelling. In 1969 Canadian English was more distinct from American spelling and especially pronunciation norms than today.
Twenty below – At the time of writing, this would have meant -20 Farenheit, not celsius. Roughly -29 c. Canada did not go metric until 1974.
Seminar – a loaded word in this context, given Plato’s position that perceptual realities are like shadows cast on the wall of essences which lie behind our backs, as it were.
Gitanes bleues – Professor Ferraté would work his way through at least one flat pack of these French cigarettes per three hour seminar. There were ashtrays in all classrooms. There were thus parallel swirls of smoke inside and steam outside.
Hold in abeyance – a nuance of Roman Jakobson’s poetic theory, which defines literariness as the temporary suspension of reference to the content of words in order to appreciate the their arrangement. In this sense, all poetry is concrete poetry.
As here in the text – reference back to the text before the reader’s own eyes, which is likened to evaporating puffs of steam against an azure sky, itself an allusion to Mallarmé’s poem on the difficulties of poetry, L’azur.
Grand nebulous / mesh’s measure – De Saussure’s grande nébuleuse referred to the absolute infinity of meaning in the total world of signs (tokens).
Cannot be captured in integers – A hint of chaos theory, in terms of which dimensions are fractal, fractions rather than whole numbers.
Deprives us of dimension, laying space bare – Can there be space without dimension or dimension without space?
The scarce coin of our rich empty inner kingdom – Can the kingdom within a poem be thought of as rich and empty at the same time?
This is what I call a mute sonnet, fourteen unrhymed lines more or less respecting the structure of a sonnet.
There is a background blog piece (Edmonton is Fun After All) which might shed more light on the poem.