The House that Rhyme Stilted:

​On Rhymetime and Biblioasis’s Poetry Line

Review Essay by Shane Neilson

Biblioasis has a mighty reputation as a publisher of short fiction, but its track record in poetry has been, with only a few exceptions, underwhelming[i]. Congealing this reputation has been a baffling habit over the past decade of focusing on light verse as its chief product. This review-essay considers the recent offerings of Michael Lista and Jason Guriel from Biblioasis, and then reaches back in time to explain the precedents that led to the current conditions of the perfect rhyme mission. I will conclude this review-essay by considering the best recent offering by the press.

Part I
 
The Masta of Basta[ii]:
​Michael Lista’s Barfly and Other Poems (Biblioasis, 2024)

For the Youngs unfamiliar with Michael Lista’s toxification of Canadian poetry discourse in the early 10’s, perhaps the short version is: both frame poems in Barfly and Other Poems involve actual anatomical assholes; as in, the ass aperture. Further, the ‘asshole’ epithet reappears throughout the book as a kind of return of the repressed, Lista’s sublimated identity manifesting unconsciously during descriptions of others. Alas, I must digress for a moment to fill in the hole under review adequately, performing a kind of literary colonoscopy such that the reader unfamiliar with Lista’s poetic soul hole-where-the-sun-don’t-shine can be appreciated in full.
 
Lista’s place in Canadian poetry became so fraught, he quit. He said he’d not write another book of Canadian poetry in Nigel Beale’s podcast from 2018; in a follow up interview from 2024, he acknowledged to Beale that he said he was “done with poetry.”  Here’s how he put the matter in Strike Anywhere, his premature poetry criticism volume from PQL: “Lots of these essays and reviews got me into all kinds of fire and brimstone type shit, and helped put the torch to what had been, in the halcyon days before my self-immolation, the beginning of a nice little career in Canadian poetry.”[iii] Note Lista’s constitutive scatology, as if he’s a child who likes to repeat the word ‘poo’ around adults. I write ‘premature’ (as opposed to immature; as in, diapers required) for reasons I will develop soon in the poetry context, but in terms of this prose context, take Lista’s own word when referring to his poetry criticism position at the National Post:

​The truth was I didn’t deserve those [criticism] gigs when I got them. I landed them because I’d just published a book of poems that some people were talking about, and capitalized on the attention by making the right friends in the Toronto literary and journalism scenes. With the column, I didn’t know what I was doing. There were a bunch of poetry critics who deserved the job before I did, but I was drinking with the right people and they weren’t. 

Just eight years after Strike Anywhere was published, a self-described book of “arsons”, I cringe at the character on offer here – climber, careerist, callow. Check, check, and check. Lista is correct in terms of his skill assessment, skills which were provocative in nature and not seriously contextual or even mildly perceptive. The ‘criticism’ contained in the book was either derivative (the pieces on Tim Lilburn and Anne Carson are remixes of a much finer critic’s takes, specifically Carmine Starnino, one of Lista’s aforementioned ‘right friends’), dismissive (“Don McKay”), or vengeful (“The Shock Absorber”)[iv]. Almost every piece is slight, the majority just three pages each. To listen to Lista explain the decision not to thicken his analyses is to experience the proverbial dog discourse on why it ate homework.  Lista polished his newspaper columns instead – a fatal error for a book, one he curiously acknowledges in his quintessentially Listerian fashion: “Putting together a book of your literary journalism is an exercise in being an asshole , in many ways. To be like, read 80 short essays that I wrote over 5 years, I mean, fuck you, that’s a terrible thing to ask as a reader.” As he himself knew, the challenge for any book-length critic is to do extensive research that informs interesting arguments . . . to be an actual critic. Strike Anywhere is quite obviously a record of apprenticeship in criticism that never should have been collected between covers. Lista deserved better from his literary sponsor and editor Starnino, for paragraphs like the one transcribed above seal one’s fate going forward.
 
Full disclosure: I have a history with Lista. Albeit carefully unnamed, I happen to make the introduction to Strike Anywhere, which in an act of fateful (for the purposes of this review) butthole spelunking, writes, “One of my most vociferous and assholic critics used to call my column – which was named On Poetry – ‘On Myself.’ He’d tweet that mercilessly, and intended it to wound, but it didn’t; he was absolutely right.” Reader: but of course I was right. Columns so short were disproportionately about Lista the man, and the prose I’ve quoted already explains the reason: Lista, filled with the arrogance of youth, acted as a holy fool. His callow, careerist, climber behaviour (vended as self-destructive “truth telling” conducted all the way to the New Yorker, no less) understandably antagonized the poetry community, though I also acknowledge that, in part, his willingness to write evaluative criticism was responsible for the reaction he received.
 
I wish to make an intervention by relying upon a mode of analysis from yesteryear, channeling my inner F.R. Leavis. I shall engage in moral criticism, for on the evidence of Barfly, I think my Lista-acknowledged rightness (in the moral criticism sense, of course) might be of assistance to Lista the poet. For Barfly continues to vend an immature, private schoolboy masculinity. Reading it, one wonders: when will this grown-ass sad-sack ever assume some responsibility? I ask because I happen to think that character is (qua Heraclitus) destiny, and on the evidence of his writing, it is likely character that holds Lista back. Having aged beyond Bloom, a promising book of intentional mimicry derivative of his betters, and The Scarborough, a disaster of a book because of its mis-centred morality[v], Barfly exhibits a slew of embarrassments that are occasionally interspersed with insightful and elegant snippets.
 
To begin with character: as it happens, this book makes me fear for Lista’s mental health. Of course there is the speaker convention operative in most books of poetry, save those cases when para-material has the poet equating themselves with the voice on offer. Yet there are so many gestures in the book that seem biographical – such as these lines attesting to the Eternal Linkage of the Three Amibros that appear in “Dealing With Fans”, “And as the two readers of my poems know / (Sorry to out you, Jason // And Carmine)” – I can’t help but wonder if Lista is okay. Barfly is sundry with bars and drinking, on theme with the title. These lines from “Auld Lang Syne” are emblematic of the book’s mood and content, a mood and content which appears with distressing frequency:

My favourite bar
Didn’t even get to drink itself to death.
 
It died of thirst
And loneliness, and didn’t even wait
 
For me to go first.         

​I’ll add just one more example of the kind of mental distress on offer, this time from “Mum”:
“So, finger across my throat as a sad white writer dude in 2021 /  – Kckkk – with some hesitance // I worry I very well may be done.” The reason for such suicidality-in-verse, whether tacit or explicit in the respective cases above, is obvious on the evidence of Barfly itself: speaker/Lista lives a depressing life of meaningless sex (“Nose Beers”, “Merkins”, and “My Love” as three examples, though there are many more). Further, he has apparently doomed a good number of relationships because of his desire to not have children (“Kids”, “Booze”) and regrets the fact in fashion that remains ambivalent, ie. when lonely, he texts ex-girlfriend after drinking too much and reflects on what was, once. When Lista pokes fun at Jordan Peterson in “On the Disappearance of Roughly Eleven Billion Crabs and the Cessation of Alaska’s Fishery,” one wonders if actually adopting Peterson’s rules might improve Lista’s health, if not his poetry.
Perhaps relations with women might improve also, though I hesitate to focus on just this animus; at least the general misanthropy on offer in Barfly is intentional and crafted, albeit unoriginal. On this note, I’ll now leave content (the speaker’s dissolute life) and turn to style.
 
Lista outrageously cribs from the work of Frederick Seidel, a fact that comes across in every one of his lines. I’ll provide the necessary proof now. Consider the end-stopped perfect-rhyming “Drinking in the Daytime”, replete with: (1) an anus “I’m in such a state of Haut-Brion I can’t resist. / fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist”; (2) misogyny (“A naked woman my age is a total nightmare. / A woman my age naked is a nightmare. It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t care.”); and, of course, the drinking (“I dedicate red wine to that today.” Perhaps a whole stanza from the poem is required to evoke the scale of style copycatting:

​Anything is better than this
Bliss.
Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.
I’m sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol
To get a bullet to my brain.
I’m gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain. 

​Now, Lista:

​I’m only screwing chicks from Parkdale now,
They’re bad, show up two at a time, and how,
 
Live down the street, and get kicked onto it
By that dick bartender who’s had enough of their shit.
 
No one in Toronto has a sense of humour
Except these birds, who can make you a rumour,
 
Fuck you properly,
Then steal your property,
 
And talk the sort of shit about you
That, even at your own expense, you’re kind of into. 

This must strike any reader of contemporary poetry as straight-up style plaigarism. It is hard for me to fathom the back cover bumpf, which maintains that “Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry.” What reinvention is meant, exactly? The “Canadian Seidel”? Perhaps ‘reinvention’ was the press’s polite synonym for cloning. Furthermore, the back cover itself identifies Byron and Auden as his influences (like them, Lista also writes in perfect rhyme and regular metres) as addled by Twitter. This formulation is also hardly a ‘reinvention,’ it being a mode of Canadian poetry practiced the entirety of the time Lista went into self-imposed poetry exile. Remember Jeramy Dodds and his long list of Coach House clones? (If I had to come up with a Canadian comparator, though, the closest antecedent is Bruce Taylor, albeit a Taylor who’s far meaner and evil.)  
 
There is one important difference between Seidel and Lista, however. In Barfly, the speaker is a loser who fucks. Seidel, love him or hate him, is a winner who fucks. Consider this paragraph from The Nation on Seidel’s Selected Poems: 

​Frederick Seidel is the poet laureate of the enlarged prostate. Most likely he would freely admit it, as the unruly gland appears more than once in the poet’s new Selected Poems, which distills 40 years of appetites shored against the indignities of age. If the lyric poet is traditionally working to “find his voice,” the volume outlines the trajectory of a poet who, with some effort, found his as the bard of perpetual midlife crisis. Seidel’s subjects are his lust for life and our disgust at his lust, and he glories in the dirty details: bespoke Caraceni suits from Milan, Patek Philippe watches, and the Ducati motorcycles that have become his signature. Above all, though, is his lust for lust. Intercourse is Seidel’s inexhaustible subject . . . No opportunity has been spared to remind you that this guy—this guy fucks.

As prostates are to assholes, as midlife crises are to a midlife crisis, as lust is to lust . . . it is as if the same poet is under review until we get to the part about Seidel’s luxury lifestyle and the clear best-life glee represented in his poetry.
 
Let me now turn to the horrible rhymetime Lista delivers in bulk, but which – out of compassion for the reader – I shall only sample. Consider this terrible bit from “Able Archer”: 

​Flight 007 – lol –
Was shaken, not stirred, from the Soviet skies
 
Because they thought the passengers were spies.
When Reagan branded them the Evil Empire
 
He had such great hair
When talking to the press and said: beware
 
Of Star Wars – lol – which the Reds thought was unfair
Because it could blow their missiles from the air
 
Such that we couldn’t kill each other equally
And every other living thing, fair and square. 

​I am reminded of part of the chorus from the Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z banger “Holy Grail”: “One day you're here, one day you're there / One day you care, you're so unfair.” Also this lyric from the song “Heffalumps and Woozles” included in the original Winnie The Pooh animated feature: “They're far, they're near, they're gone, they're here / They're quick and slick, they're insincere / Beware, Beware, Be a very wary bear.”
 
To make matters worse, the same rhymes recur throughout the book. JT, if you’re reading beware, beware, be a very wary bear when encountering “Hungover”:

​Who’s there?
Me, what’s left of my hair
 
And more than my fair share,
The scare
 
I put in the people who care,
That I would dare
 
Be so unfair.
My chair
 
Glazed in moonlight that swims in the air
Where I can work, where I can bear
 
To keep my vigil of the world, to stare
At all its brokenness, its ready snare,
 
And dare do what it would dare. 

Sippin’ till my cup runneth over, uh uh, holy grail . . . I kid, of course. Similarity is inevitable when using rhyme in cramped quarters. Barfly would be a total fail, super stale, stiff as a winter haybale, if it were not for the poems where Lista momentarily drops the Seidel vampire act and gets real. “Mum” is perhaps the emotional core of the book, and that it makes me worry about the speaker’s health is a testament to its power. Poems like “The Bill” have, again, a self-awareness that allows for no projection. Instead, they reflect a perceived, as opposed to a reader-inferred, loneliness, one possibly resulting from shitty life choices. Glimmeringly, tentatively, the speaker has insight. The book’s best moments arrive when such poems find their expression in a pithy epigrammatic habit. Some phrases that I think will last: “The scary thing about literature / Is that its dangerously close // To talking to yourself.” And on snow: “It makes me feel like someone’s up above. / It falls like drunks down a fire escape. // It’s like love – Pretty as hell and hard to navigate.” These lines try to say something, as opposed to spin their wheels in the dissolute, cosplaying as Seidel in a hotel listening to K-Tel and banging a belle until she yells. Etcetera.  
 
It amazes me to say so, but based on the fact that he’s writing at least a few good lines that add up to memorable epigrams, Lista currently seems to be the most talented of the Three Amibros of Canadian Poetry.[vi] If his ‘speaker’ got a bit more serious about his moral development, then I think ‘Lista’ might actually someday write a whole poem uniquely, like himself, on himself, rather than imitating Seidel, a superior asshole.

Part II
 
Bad Moon Rising Soon Unless Up There in The Sky It’s A Big Pizza Pie, or a Doubloon:
Jason Guriel’s The Full Moon Whaling Chronicles (Biblioasis, 2023) and Forgotten Work (Biblioasis, 2020)

​A critic I always find reasonable, and whose verdicts are quite often in alignment with my own taste, is Nick Bradley, who is on record as deeming Guriel’s first verse novel, Forgotten Work, as “among the year’s best books of poetry.” Bradley was similarly positive about The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, although when reading between the lines, one gets the sense that Bradley might be wising up to the game on offer in Guriel’s long books driven by perfect-rhyming heroic couplets. The closest I can get to a pull quote from Bradley’s take on Full Moon is: “Guriel is plainly a talented versifier.” Which is to say, Guriel writes light verse. After reflecting on that faint praise, a descriptor most poets would abhor, consider the larger concluding paragraph from whence it comes: 

​Silly, unabashedly committed to charming their audience, his novels are works of whimsy that make no great pronouncement about our world. Does a burning planet need such follies? That’s the wrong question. His yarns are testaments to the value of l’art pour l’art even in troubled times. Not all art is of a piece, of course, and writers engagés and otherwise engaged find their respective niches in the cultural ecosystem. If Guriel seems to be pulling our collective leg or even wasting our time — not that we mind — such is one function of art. His books are not good for us, although they do drive off the spleen. Instead they’re diversions, entertainments, a very specific type of fun. And that is all ye need to know.

Another way of putting this is: Guriel’s book is foolish in an amusing way. Like The Three Amibros, Bradley also critiques lyric Canadian poetry’s near-monopoly on production (more than fair) as well as its imposed hegemony of high moral seriousness. I agree with all four poet-critics concerning the suffocating sanctimony of contemporary Canpo, but unlike Bradley, I don’t think it is possible to love this book unless one is a card-carrying Amibro like Starnino, who for his part blurbs both books with this superlative: “a freestanding work of genius.”[vii] No – Whaling is instead a Chevy Chase pratfall masquerading as Jonathan Swift catcall.
 
There are two issues one has to confront if one wants to make it to the end of Full Moon. The first is nested because of the genre (light verse in a narrative poetry mode.) If you are prejudiced against narrative poetry, it being often seen as ye-olde-poetry[viii], then you won’t appreciate the book. And if you’re not in desperate need of esoteric in-joke literary and music deep cut aficionado snickers during your reading experience (perhaps the sole payoff for the labour of reading), then you won’t appreciate the book.
 
The second issue – and for me, the greater problem – is the end-stopped perfect rhyme that makes for an incredible chore to wade through. One whales away at the pages in despair of ever reaching the end. At one point in his piece, Bradley identifies a lack of rhyme originality as a fault in Full Moon. Bradley spots “a couplet whose lines end with ‘look’ and ‘book’ is followed two pages later by one whose lines end with ‘book’ and ‘look.’” I argue instead that the rhymes themselves, coming in bulk, read either as bland or as plain bad. Who cares if Guriel repeats himself? That Lista does this in the lyric mode is a failing. That Guriel does it misses the point: the problem was already a problem the first time around. Moreover, it’s a problem made worse by ponderously detailed, crabbed writing generally. For example:

​She didn’t know the artists on the hi-fi
Either; she was there to poach Poe’s WiFi.
Laptop on her lap, Cat blocked a vital
Traffic artery. You had to sidle
Round the vinyl bin that occupied
Most of the floor, the bin a box inside
A slightly larger box: the disused freight
Container Poe had claimed and christened “crater
Books and Discs.” At one end of the box
Sat Poe, and at the other end, in talks
With someone hawking Something Something’s Greatest
Hits, was Graham, Poe’s part time salesclerk, daised
At the buying counter . . .

​Are you bored? Nevermind who these people are, think about where they are: one can immediately apprehend that a prose strategy here would be more clear and less clogged. Bradley questions why Guriel chose “verse instead of prose” and doesn’t really answer, preferring to validate the choice instead under a logic of formal diversity, an argument I’d be more persuaded by if Whaling netted any catch. (Anyone out there who’s interested in a wicked verse novel: check out Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune.) But in Guriel’s hands, poetry less displays its advantages over prose (music, surprise, etc) but moreso displays its weakness as compared to prose’s advantages (narrative description and dialogue). Guriel is obligated to keep rhyme going, meaning that his scenes can’t be set in a natural fashion. Bradley writes, “It didn’t take long for me to stop noticing — almost — that the novel, like its predecessor, is written in verse.” Really, it’s impossible not to notice because one groans all the way down each page. For example, the werewolf YA aspect of the book is, frankly, stupid: 

​Sharp claws were picking lyres in a tavern
By the shore: The Full-Moon Whaler’s Cavern.
Some nights there were full bands like The La’s,
The local troubadours whose gifted paws
Would bang out “Thar She Blows,” a brilliant tune
The La’s had stolen from their muse, the moon.
Less gifted paws were swabbing tabletops,
Unlocking doors, unshuttering their shops. 

​Time to unlock some definitions. The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms defines light verse as 

a name rather loosely given to a wide variety of types or forms of metrical composition, worldly in character and most often witty, humorous, ingenious, or satirical. Among the kinds of poems that fall into this category are vers de société, occasional verse, satire, burlesque, the mock heroic, nonsense poetry; such brief forms as the epigram, the comic or ironic epitaph, the limerick, and the clerihew; and all types of tricky and ingenious verse as acrostics, shaped or emblematic poems, alliterative or rhyming tours de force, riddles, puns and other forms of versified trivia. Usually a certain standard of excellence, or at least competence, in the handling of verse forms is assumed in the writer of l.v., and a certain finish or polish is characteristic of this kind of poetry no matter how trivial its subject or frivolous its treatment.

John Updike offers a less taxonomic and more analytic view, explaining that light verse “tends the thin flame of formal magic and tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice.” In particular, Updike felt that “by rhyming, language calls attention to its own mechanical nature and relieves the represented reality of seriousness.” Both definitions describe Guriel’s two verse novels, though the “mechanical nature” mentioned by Updike is constitutive in Guriel, not delivering on the Princeton Handbook’s expectation of “competence.” The gears grind, the machine shakes. For example, consider some opening lines of Forgotten Work. Play ALONG with a game of BEER PONG. With each line, throw a PING PONG ball at a cup standing on a table. Each time you miss, you have to PROLONG your WOEBEGONE reading ZUGZWANG: 

Like all young bands, they bandied names about
​All evening. Lou, the lead guitar, liked “Lout,”
A word that clubbed you like a cord of wood.
It’s dumb, said Lou, but arty dumb, like blood-
Smeared dolls deployed as drumsticks – Henry Rollins
Does Dada. Jim, on keys, preferred “The Dolphins,”
After the folk-rock ballad by Fred Neil.
Neil’s was the sort of myth that would appeal
To men like Jim. His lungs were honeycomb,
His low voice, ladled out. A man must roam . . .

After proceeding for just a few pages, it feels like one is bouncing from line to line on a clown’s trampoline. That’s fun for a little while, maybe. But more than five minutes and one’s tummy feels WRONG. Why summarize the PLOTS of either book, when the game’s SHOT by rhyme’s ROT?[ix] 

Part III  

​All’s Punny in Ding-Dong Land:
​Zachariah Wells’ Track and Trace (Biblioasis, 2009) and Sum (Biblioasis, 2015)

If I had to summon a date akin to the birth of Christ in relation to Biblioasis’s adoption of light verse as metier, I’d finger Zachariah Well’s Track and Trace as Anno Domini 1. Exhibit A is the poem “Going Forward”:

Your ambition puts me to shame,
little man: the constant forward
drive despite the pegleg lame-
duck scuffle of your awkward
proto-crawl. And look at me:
unshaven, unemployed and slack,
going nowhere, pushing thirty-three
like a shopping cart heaped with sacks
of cans and bottles. No one’d blink
if all you did was sleep and shit
and smile, but you squirm like a skink,
scoot off in pursuit of that bit
of paper or plastic or fluff
in the corner – which I’ve neglected
to sweep up, stuck here on my duff.
Next thing, you’ll be elected
class president, voted most likely
to go places. I’ll be at home,
contemplating the unlikely
prospects of writing a poem.

To you, on your duffs – and you’re all poets, so I’m addressing you accordingly – an existential aesthetic question presents itself again (for you’ve all had to evolve beyond it, histories of reading poetry being what they are): are you ‘okay’ with end-stopped perfect rhyme like this? Poets either are or aren’t. If one is disinclined to accept that “bit” can be rhymed successfully with “shit”, then you’re a reader who, like me, doesn’t agree, who won’t go forward, who finds this poem both homely and unhomed, stilted, wilted, generated in a pathetic fashion, meaning: reliant on rhyme for its sense to the point that rhyme overdetermines the sense.

If you aren’t falling on my side of the rhymeline, meaning afoul, then I hardly need to keep addressing you, since you’ve already decided that Zach Wells is the shit, that his poetry is lit, that his Dad Rap’s a hit. But aren’t poems like his writ like socks are knit? Can’t we guffaw our way to cliché’s haw-haw (president voted most likely to go places) like we suffer Newton’s law? Dicks, like rocks, fall downward per second squared at .2777 clicks.

Isn’t rhyme more resource than scheme? To my audience, I ask: do you think it lazy, as I do, to rhyme “unlikely” with “likely”? Do you also think it lazy to rhyme “fluff” with “duff”? Do you want to mock such work by communicably rhyming words like “MacDuff”, “gruff”, “stuff”, “bluff”, and “‘nuff”? Maybe you want to mix things up, though, go real crazy, and add an enjambed “truff-le”? If so, be a very wary bear: you’re not hanging with the priapically stiffy who jumps off rhyme’s cliffy for iffy reasons in a jiffy. But even this joke is just a riffy – not following the rules. Because in skools – imagine Biz Markie, beatboxing – you can’t be a fool. You can write “duff” and even rhyme it with “muff” but you can’t make the rhyme ridiculous in itself qua the Princeton Handbook’s recipe for light verse, meaning you can’t satirize, since rhyme like this is, of course, always ridiculous in itself. Poems like “Going Forward” strike a reader as written at a single blow, you know? Hey ho, hey ho, let’s take that puck and really go.

“Going Forward” is merely a pedestrian (and thereby representative) sampling from Track and Trace. The book’s true genesis/negative genius moment comes with such a terrible, egregious, awful perfect rhyme that it must be read to be believed. Consider Part V of “After the Blizzard”:

Weather settles. Heavy scraps, shreds, crumbs, orts
of crumbly snow turned concrete in the cold
and salt-pocked hardpack sparkle like borts
strewn in walkways carved in spall-etched frost-walled . . .

​Nothwithstanding the otherwise meritorious technique on offer here – I admit it, I’m just a sucker for dense jamming of lines with nouns and modifiers – DID A POET JUST END RHYME ORT WITH BORT?

DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG (The door to the Bibliomanse creaks open . . .)

Wells’s sophomore collection may not exactly be that entity known as “light verse”, but the seeds have been sown therein, and the trend continues in Sum, the precise moment where Biblioasis declares itself as a welcome home to our lightest of the light poets, beginning as it does with the epigrammatic/riddleish, polished, and (toot toot toooooot) DING-DONGish “Ego”:

I am a torrent and I am a trickle
I am the treacherous course through a tickle
I am most busy when I am most idle
I am the whip, the bit and the bridle
I am the bolt, the hinge and the knuckle
I am a belt in search of its buckle

​If, like me, you ingest such couplets and feel the need to break out into the sea shanty “I’s de b’y”, well, friend, let’s just give ‘er together:

I's the b'y that builds the boat
And I's the b'y that sails her
I's the b'y that catches the fish
And brings them home to Lizer.

​If, also like me, you think of Tickle-Me-Elmo as you read “trickle” and “tickle” (and naughtily want another line composed thereafter containing “pickle”), then you recognize how “Ego” is pretty terrible light verse.

If, also also like me, you’re happily prancing around the living room by now, then you’re also by now – I’s da b’y now – cackling your own parodies into the windy wind. Parodies like this:   

I am the shit and I am the shitter
I am a browner downtowner terror on Twitter
I am a clown and I am a warlock
I have a big one, a huge one, a giant cock
I am so small a man, I measure myself daily
Call me on my shit dammit and I’ll squealy, I’ll waily
I rhyme shit with bit, ort with bort, ding with dong
I call all my rhymes song, disagree and you’re wrong.

​The second poem in the book, “Broken Arrow,” reads in its entirety:

Only there is Now. There is no
Then and When. How Zen. How then
know We when to show
ourselves? Our Selves: those little Men
inside our Minds machining
Time, fabricating patchwork panes
to stitch and mount in a montage of what We’ve seen –
bad grammar: We see, that should be. Oh, the pains
We take to stage a claim on Space.
Such a queer little race.

​If, like me, you find it impossible not to break into Sun-Ra’s “Space is the Place” when reading this poem, then you also recognize how this is pretty terrible riddlerish/epigrammatic work that aspires to light verse. One way to increase the art of the poem would be to make it more clever. What if the end rhymes formed their own secret-message poem? Imagine if the end rhymes somehow amplified the existential dilemma described therein. What if the poem selected words that shittily-wittily refracted terror and dread, or if they made the poem less an ironic pronouncement and, somehow, sad? 

Part IV

Jokes Folks:
Pino Coluccio’s Class Clown (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2017)

​Wells set the table at Biblioasis, the Canadian Poetry Space that is the Place for bad light verse. Acting as an invitation to other light verse poets, Wells’ example attracted Pino Coluccio’s Class Clown, a peak-silly ding-dong text for any press. Consider Coluccio’s first poem, “Thirsty and Miserable,” which brings the funny via an irreverent take on William Butler Yeats’ canonical “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:

I will arise and ride now, my bike to the LCBO
and a can of lager buy there of malted barley made.
And fill a frosted mug with it and in its golden glow
lie alone with a bit less dread.
And I shall decompress then, by icy ale made warm,
and down a smoked meat sandwich and a second sweaty can.
How utterly the barley and the hops and yeast transform
the unassuming water and the man.
It’s sketchy drinking solo but it is that which it is.
I heard all day and hear now at my liquor store
pulled tabs pop on Stiegl cans and poured out tresses fizz.
I hear it in the dry throat’s core.

To stick with the Princeton Handbook definition, we’re in the realm of the comic and mock-heroic here, with archaic grammar based on the Yeats original largely sealing the deal, though DING-DONG certainly does some of the heavy lifting with can/man and fizz/is. “Thirsty and Miserable” is the kind of stuff that inspired the following Art Bar reading review written by Rachael Masih and published on blog.to on Feb 5, 2018:

Wearing a leather jacket, Coluccio drew laughter from the audience with his poems. Some poems were “Thirsty and Miserable”, “Where has all the Mayo gone?” and “The Finger.” The audience burst into fits of laughter as Coluccio recounted personal anecdotes, like fun poems based on life experiences and the movies he likes to watch. Many of these poems can be found in his new book Class Clown.

“Fits of laughter” are, to my mind, a mite ambitious for any reader to experience in this particular case. The best Class Clown can do is incite a chuckle or two from a page-based encounter featuring obscene jokes about choo-choos with a screw loose in the caboose. What was truly funny about that reported evening, I suspect, is the gist behind Masih’s next sentence: “The evening turned a serious route when the next featured artists, The UTSC Poets, took the stage. . .”.

Colluccio’s “The Office” brings the riddlerish/epigrammatic (but also metrical) flavor, being in its entirety,

1.      
My days are like the invoices,
and here and there a letter,
that cross my desk at work en route
to the maw of the bottomless shredder.


2.      
My job is like the copier
that copies what I feed it:
days and weeks, a life that changes
less the more I lead it.


3.      
I feel like a staple.
The world isn’t kind.
It’s a Swingline and I’m so –
ka-thump – in a bind.

​Just when we were building to some real emotion, we get an onomatopeic (and also punny!) groannnnnnner as self-sabotage. This class clown can’t double as sad clown.

Carmine Starnino, who has taken far too long to reappear in this essay about rhyme that curiously operates within a mutual admiration society, blurbs the book on the back as follows:

Like those comedians who reveal painful family secrets for laughs, you’ll have a hard time catching Pino Coluccio at one of his many rhyming bluffs. With a free-ranging and irreverent mix of high and low, and showing a splendid gift for satire and biting portraiture, Coluccio writes an unflinching, crisply-constructed poetry that wears its sad truths lightly – though they sting no less for it.

​What’s accurate about Starnino’s take is the appearance of the word “lightly.” The rest of the blurb, however, seems to want light verse to accomplish too much. Coluccio’s so-called “sad truths” that are supposedly embedded in his light verse are actually light themselves, too oblique for the deeper register. The unnamed “comedians” Starnino leads off the blurb with don’t kill, as one might expect a stage comedian to do because the pun is a comic’s weakest weapon.

The book contains some adulting disappointment, but that’s it – the ennui of the class clown discharged into the real world, where he must choose to survive or mime. The promise of the rest –  Starnino’s “painful . . . secret” – is never delivered on by Coluccio. If anything, his most successful puns anesthetize rather than tickle.

To be fair, let’s look at Coluccio at his best. Consider “The Incredible Shrinking Man”:

At times I almost see it in her eyes.
My shrunkenness has cut me down to size.
My measurements appal her.
And every day I get a little smaller.
Our happy past in pictures on the walls –
they’re like an accusation, all those smiles.
There’s really no escape,
our destiny is magnitude, is shape.
It happens to us all I guess,
we have ourselves to thank.
We have such giant shoes to fill –
our own before we shrank.

Nevermind the depressingly frequent appearance of cliché (akin to a comedian in a hurry to get to the jokes, e.g. “see it in her eyes” / “cut me down to size” / “happens to us all” / “we have ourselves to thank” / “shoes to fill”). As per the Princeton Handbook, the circular return of the closing qualifies as mildly ingenious. And there is a thematic of sadness on offer – who could not sympathize with the sense of decay at some point in their lives, the idea that one’s own personal promise was betrayed, not lived up to? Yet the cleverness of the end serves to protect against emotion. Like all comedians, Coluccio intellectually transubstantiates pain through wit into laughs. Such is the purpose of his rhymes in partially successful poems. A different poet might put paid to a point by using rhyme to emotionally intensify the proceedings, but that’d be indulging a tragic, not comic, impulse.   

Part V
 
Sound too stupid to overcome:
Alexandra Oliver’s Hail, The Invisible Watchman. (Biblioasis, 2022)

​If Biblioasis had a poet who would challenge the perception that the press is DING DONG Central while defiantly embodying every facet of the Princeton Handbook’s definition of light verse (polish; vers de société,; wit; rhyming tour de force), Oliver is that poet. Indeed, her work is so well-phrased, it reverses the challenge like a judo throw and the interrogator – me – becomes the generic Canadian poet with no musicality, eschewing rhyme and metre. What, you have no game? her work asks the practitioner-reader. But before we get to the fundamental praise one can offer Oliver at the level of technique, we must dispense with the reasons her poems don’t work as well as they otherwise could. These reasons should by now – I’s the b’y now – be familiar.

Oliver writes firmly within the post-Auden British tradition that includes Larkin, Betjeman, and the like, but rather than existing within an autobiographical “I” that these poets were fond of, Oliver writes out character studies that most often indict the motivations of their speakers, bringing to mind another comparator: Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. As with Barfly, the poet she reminds me most of is the Canadian Bruce Taylor, albeit she is even more of a savant than he is when it comes to metre and rhyme. Taylor never went completely straightlaced and buttoned down, preferring to write unshaven, loose tie poems of real wit, whereas Oliver is a perfectly coiffed dame in a ball gown dress who focuses on the pettiness of human nature. Consider the opening poem, “Young Politician At A Rotary Club Tea,”

​There’s that woman running for the council,
eating cake. Her selfie arm is spangled,
tan and toned and perfect as a pencil.
Imagine how the sallow mayor tingled
guiltily, the moment that he met her.
She has a plan to make the city better;
she’s born and bred in Sherbet Lake. She knows
how older noses love an English Rose.
She understands the darkness to the letter.
Her website is explosively sincere
with photos from the cookouts and parades:
her python grip around the engineer
who made it through the marathon, the spades
in suffocating soil, the Wizard’s Ball
(a benefit for the hospital’s new hall)
where, stiff in silk, gripping a flute of cava,
she grins. The posted comments flow like lava;
she lies awake at night. She reads them all.

There’s a whole world conjured here of minor ambition and social relations, and if you sneer at it for its clear strategy of a mix of perfect and slant end rhyme, then try doing this as well as Oliver. The feat is especially tricky based on the flow provided by enjambment, as if she’s dancing the poem through its rhyme-based constraints.

Reams of such technical fluency are found in Hail, The Invisible Watchman, so much so that it’s hard to spot places where her forms are merely being filled out – always the risk when writing resolutely metrical, end-stopped rhyme-driven work, and a usually delivered-upon failing for most critics eager to write about flaws to fill out their reviews in turn. (Ha!) For example, this stanza in “Pierogis” suggests what I nickname as ‘the seventh-inning stretch’:

​But I had a latchkey friend when I was eight
(with glamorous parents whom I’d never seen);
tall, red-headed, cheery as a lark,
she had me over, made me you-know-whats,
using a real microwave (the danger!).
In a kitchen free from adult eyes and anger
(and grandmothers, wilted tea towels, spitting pots),
we scarfed the carbs and, glutted with youth and dark,
locked eyes and licked the heavy flatware clean
as ABBA crooned and the moon replaced the daylight

To my eyes, “you-know-whats” and “pots” seems rather a cheat, since “muffins” or “cookies” makes for a tough rhyme (though perhaps she meant “tarts” which would be an off-rhyme). This kind of infelicity is somewhat compensated by rhymes that come later in the same poem, in which “delights us” is rhymed with “sightless.” Inevitably in resolutely rhyming work, Oliver brings the Ding-Dong sledgehammer, dutifully ringing in the singing in “Seventeen,” whose first four stanzas are worth writing out in full:

Seventeen circle the rim of the gym,
in orbit around the instructor who yells
and yells and yells. They listen to him.
(The fathers, in hopefulness, peer from the halls.)

Seventeen scissor their legs on the mats,
slashing the air, like quick little knives.
They are told to develop their glutes and their lats.
(The fathers remember their whey-coloured wives.)

Seventeen shoulder their bags to the courts –
their elders assure them it’s not about winning –
but wince, as the possible pecks at their hearts.
(The fathers are fat and their forelocks are thinning.)

Seventeen play to the darkening hours,
then peel off in columns, exhausted and little.
They go to the washrooms and tremble in mirrors.
(The fathers bare teeth, lemon-tinted and brittle.)

Let’s see. Gym/him. Mats/lats. Knives/wives. Winning/thinning. Little/brittle. DING-DONG! DING-DONG! DING-DONG! Other elements in the poem are interesting – I think the bracketed echoes on an idea especially winning in this context, and tough to do – but whatever lift the poem might have had is compromised by DING-DONG! DING-DONG! DING-DONG!, a compromise all poets risk with perfect rhyme. Sometimes sound is just too stupid to overcome.  

Though I’ve focused thus far on her occasional hard sell of rhyme, the real problem with Oliver is one more common in prose, and one shared by Guriel. Oliver’s character sketches require quite a lot of linear backfill in order to move to nonlinear poetry, only latently rising into a singing condition speaking of true human nature (often absent of detail and indulgent of abstraction). Let’s consider “The Announcer” in detail as a case study. Focus on the sheer length of the set up:

Our supers once had the brass to boss a helper
into tears, the aptitude for fiction,
the knack of rattling a boardroom sabre
and waving a bad soufflé back to the kitchen.
But Francis sank their money in a Ponzi.
They lost the Jag, the home with twenty rooms,
and went from being Bay Street’s Sid and Nancy
to cursing softly from behind their brooms.
Charred and muted by the ream of changes,
of poking in our washers with a wrench,
of reinstalling cupboards on their hinges,
and scrubbing darker matter off the bench,
Lou fell silent.
                       That was until The Firm
installed the PA speakers in each suite,
democratizing each false fire alarm
that poured befuddled tenants into the street.
She liked to give the drill’s placating coda
in which she chirped the worst of it was over
and felt the old omniscient persona
take hold, the heft of brining doom or closure,
and soon moved on to squeezing in the latest
(parking fees, the closure of the gym)
than what was on her mind – the hidden greatness
of her chiropractor. The quiet scam . . .

​It’s too much, right? One wonders when we’ll finally get past the narrative. Next stanza, Oliver goes full Larkin circa “The Whitsun Weddings”, “Church Going”, and “An Arundel Tomb”:

​Of marriage and the treachery of churches,
the asps of hope that slither through our lives.
she intercommed her wild, despairing purchase
on truth. But, here, no one like that survives.

Though Hemingway’s classic advice to chop the head off a story applies too often to Oliver’s poetry, the point of Oliver’s work – to reassert as virtuoso that end-stopped rhyme and flawless metrical composition can be contemporary – is validated in her execution more than any other Canadian poet alive. DING-DONG may be the chime prevailing at the Bibliomanse, but Oliver is the only guest who should be let in. Like progenitor Bruce Taylor, her verse channels wit more often than beauty, another inevitable consequence of working in relentless rhyme. Though one can use rhyme for dual purposes – tragedy or comedy – the temptation of perfect rhyme in particular is to be foolish with it. One should be careful, else a verse novel might result in which your friends blurb its genius (and you blurb theirs) despite the permanent tinnitus induced by a doorbell gone haywire in a fire, banana-nana-bo-bana . . .

Part VI

Judicious, not Rhymealicious:
​Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations (Biblioasis, 2022)

​Upon the publication of Years, Months, and Days in 2018, his fourth book, Hathaway has been embarking on an unusual poetry project in terms of CanLit. I am unaware of a poet of his skill level publishing devotional work intermingled with an Augustinian self-seeking in poem after poem; the additional valence of work written for chorale and Christian libretto makes for a unicorn. Twin this with exploration of gender transition within a religious context, or perhaps I should say alongside, and I suggest to readers Biblioasis is publishing a poet we’ve yet to see.
 
I wish I had the ability when the book first came out to have pitched Image Magazine in their Culture section on Hathaway’s text; though Americans already know this Canadian fairly well (Hathaway’s been published in Poetry Magazine; Years, Months, and Days was listed as a best book of 2018 by The New York Times), they might know him better. Indeed, they could know a book that I suspect is the best quiet, seekingly-self joyous, and anguish-emerging devotional text ever produced in Canada. And I’d say this knowing the distinction might seem niche, that some might think it faint praise, but the opposite is actually true: sheer ability takes such secular reader-repellent material and makes it must-read. Hathaway’s spiritual journey is riveting because of how it is written. I would like to write more about the religious informants to the text and perform exegesis upon Hathaway’s exegesis of the self – his work seems interrogable in terms of one of his glittering lines (“They are more given / to the enfleshment of a vision / than to the sustenance of belief”) but that will have to happen on some future date. For the purposes of this review essay, I shall focus on Hathaway’s rhyme strategy.
 
To begin: Hathaway is wise enough not to let perfect rhyme overdetermine sense. I defy any poet to compose a book as good as this in perfect rhyme. The only poet that comes to my mind within the ballpark of being able to accomplish such a task is Christian Wiman, and even then I very much doubt it. Rhyme as the other rhymesters at Biblioasis practice it can only ever exist as light verse or as Seidel-esque countertension to DING-DONG through transgression. Seidel knifes his airy-bouncy (and sometimes deliberately lazy) rhymes through repellent subject matter, all the while turning the moral objection outward. His work asks the reader, “What does your objection say about you?” while DING-DONGing with each pelvic thrust. Instead, Hathaway does what any sensible poet – meaning, one not interested in comedy, vicarious Seidel fantasy, or neo-romantic recreation – would do: the rhyme is used for occasional sonic effect, often specifically for emotional emphasis.
 
To start, the rhyme’s almost always slant – thank goodness for sanity. For example:

​If I had your eyes, perhaps
I could better read these tracks –
the coyotes’ new year letters
marked out on the river ice:
how they meander, double back
for no apparent reason, then
go on again, and how they mean
nothing, and are for no one’s eyes. 

​The pairs are perhaps/tracks, ice/eyes, and mean/then. A dash of perfect pepper comes with “tracks/back”. One avoids silliness here. Which is not to say that Hathaway doesn’t sometime succumb to DING-DONGing, meaning sense overdetermined by rhyme. Consider: 

​On a westbound train to Union
Station I have just, like you,
reread Auden’s New Year Letter,
thinking, Who could write a better?,
knowing that Himself now sits
upon the jury with the wits,
the metaphysicists, the liars,
the soothsayers, hanging fire
while I step onto the stand
who would presume to try my hand
at a verse letter to a friend
on the occasion of the end . . .

The temptation of the rhymeflesh is strong. It’s best to go half-way as one’s way of being all-in. 

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[i] I do not include my two (dear) books with Biblioasis, of course, these being Meniscus (2009) and New Brunswick (2019). I’ll omit to mention my shortlist of notable titles, though I shall conclude with the best recent book by the press. 
​
[ii] Yes, he uses this word. 

​[iii] Lista’s diagnosis of On Poetry’s hostile reception in CanLit – widely despised, and accumulatively so – is half-accurate. My sympathy is righteous on this score, having suffered similarly. I’ve written extensively on negative reviewing in Constructive Negativity (Palimpsest Press, 2019).  The half he’s oblivious to, however, is that he lacks curiosity and intellectual seriousness. He shat on things without understanding what they are. This tends to make people irritated.

[iv] I write “vengeful” not for reasons Lista and Beale talk about in the 2018 podcast concerning resentment around a supposed lack of literary awards. Lista’s follow up to Bloom, The Scarborough, was ultimately declined by Anansi (don’t worry, one of Lista’s ‘right friends” – bet you can’t guess who – published it at Vehicule) and it is my opinion that the process of this event was the kindling for an investigative piece that I concede is a major exposure of the hypocrisy of Canadian poetry. That the most progressive Canadian poets still submitted books to the Griffin post-Lista’s essay on Scott Griffin’s support of warmongering regimes would strike me as incredible, if I didn’t already know the singularity that is the hypocrisy of this collective. Lista did end up in the right place on this one, but the project was prose and he had to follow a story.  I do think his poems would improve if he started in the right place.

[v] Read what I mean in my piece “Good Idea Gone Bad” from Constructive Negativity.

[vi] For my take on Starnino’s latest book, see here. 

[vii] Someone has to call the code on this mutual admiration society. Lista refers to Guriel in the Poundian fashion in the acknowledgements to Barfly (“Il migliore fabbro”). Starnino commissioned a review of Barfly for the Walrus. Ad infinitum . . .

[viii] I recommend all who read this piece to check out The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms on “lyric poetry” and “narrative” and “narrative poetry” to learn lovely things. 

​[ix] For his part, Bradley quoted both books’ plot summaries rather than offer his own, which I think above and beyond the call of duty. ​

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Shane Neilson (mad; autistic) is a poet, physician, and critic from New Brunswick. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Literature and Medicine, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. In 2023, he published The Suspect We (Palimpsest Press), a book of poetry concerning disabled lived experience during the pandemic, with fellow disabled poet Roxanna Bennett. Also in 2023, he published Canadian Literature and Medicine: Carelanding with Routledge.