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| Patrick Friesen |
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| Di Brandt |
In my high school English class, my teacher told our class that the best piece of advice he would ever give us was to write what we know. If this is the case, Mennonites know about cows and cousins and cakes. Or pies -- shoofly of course. While the topics of much, if not all, of the poetry we read dealt with land, family, food, and history, I found that the forms that the poems took did contain an element of uniqueness. Sarah Klassen's poem "Making the Rate" takes the form of a series of short journal entries that draw in the reader and break the normality of a stanzaic poem. Patrick Friesen's "Clearing Poems"take on break out of stanzas as well. The lack of capitalization and punctuation gives the poems an interesting rhythm and a distinctive feeling, leading the reader into a more subconscious thought flow. Di Brandt also has a similar format to Friesen's, omitting punctuation and capitalization. Her poems are a bit more terse, but just as compelling. Overall, I really enjoyed learning about the Canadian Mennonite poets. The subjects may not have varied as much as they might've in secular poetry, but I think they all do very well at portraying their culture or their lives, and the variety in form gives the poems a freshness that they might not've had had they stuck to much more traditional forms.
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| Sarah Klassen |
I also liked the lack of capitalization in some of the poems. However, I thought that Di Brandt's poems could have used some periods to separate the thoughts and make the poems easier to read.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your observation about what makes these poets unique despite the similarity of their subject matter.
ReplyDeleteWhether its the terse, unpunctuate style of Di Brandt or the more prosaic style of Friesen, these poets are able to address familiar subjects (especially to MEnnonites) in a fresh way.
Thanks Kate - I hadn't thought of the Canadian poets as exactly limited in material or more experimental with form, but I'll definitely be keeping that in mind next time I dip in A capella.
ReplyDeleteI've heard the "write what you know" quite a lot too, and just like you point out here, it has its limitations : ) . I mean, we wouldn't have Harry Potter if J.K. Rowling had stuck to writing about being English, teaching, motherhood and working for Amnesty International. And many of my favorite poems are about the poet/speaker imagining things. (Ooooh, maybe you could view it like - writers know their imaginations best? heh. yeah...)
All three of these poets grew up on the land in farming communities--this in itself was a powerful shaping force in their lives. It's interesting to realize that in German the first personal singular, ich, or any pronoun for that matter, is not capitalized. So does the lack of capitalization in Brandt and Friesen's poems owe more to e.e. cummings or to a German language heritage?
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