Steven Maye Reviews:

Sharon Thesen, Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems, edited by Erín Moure, Talonbooks, 2023

This past October, CBC Radio discontinued ‘the long dash’—the sound pattern that, for close to 84 years, played once daily at exactly 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, allowing listeners across the country to synchronize their clocks and watches. The long dash was a bit of national infrastructure that arose during the logistical pressures of World War II, and it persisted as an instrument of national connection, logistical and emotional, hooking up urban and rural denizens to the timetable of national industry and action. The beginning of the long dash following ten seconds of silence indicates exactly… with the time then given according to the broadcasting station’s time zone. In British Columbia, where Sharon Thesen wrote her 1987 collection The Beginning of the Long Dash, the long dash indicated exactly 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, intercepting the radio’s listeners amid their morning errands, labours, leisure or chores. Truncating the radio’s phrase to remove its exactness, Thesen unlocked its metaphorical potential: ‘the long dash’ was athletic, a frenzied endurance test that might be life itself. To speak of its ‘beginning’ was to say both that you were already in it, and you should buckle up.

In Thesen’s poetry, ‘The Beginning of the Long Dash’ also names the longest poem in that collection, a poem that is newly available in the recently published Refabulations, edited by fellow poet Erín Moure. Refabulations collects 19 ‘longer’ poems from across nine collections, arranged in pairs or small groups, with nine shorter poems functioning as palate cleansers between those courses. Unlike Thesen’s earlier volumes of selected poems, which reproduced only snatches of her longer works, Refabulations offers complete versions of those sequences, albeit with some revisions—hence the collection’s title. Moure tasked Thesen with typing up the poems herself, to experience their composition anew and to see, while she typed, ‘what her fingers would urge her to do.’ In general, they urged her to pare down some of the earlier poems, and to keep the later poems essentially as they were. Thus her 2006 sequence, ‘The Good Bacteria,’ is trimmed of a single tercet, from the 11th of its 12 parts, while the earlier ‘Being Adults’ (also from Long Dash) is shorn of two whole sections and has one eight-line stanza reduced to a haiku (‘like the cement truck/that shifts gears in vain/when the light goes green.’). Of course, not all the earlier poems are so changed, and—remarkably—even those that are changed preserve what was memorable about them, line for line and word for word. It feels less like the poems have been revised than that they have silently altered their posture, to better suit your memory and expectations.

Thesen herself edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, and she has argued that ‘the only defining feature of a long poem is its length,’ and this in contrast to the shortness readers expect from the lyric. Many of Thesen’s long poems are also serial poems in the Spicerean sense: they use numbering or section breaks to divide a composition into units that resemble individual poems, yet which echo one another’s language, offer variations on their suppositions or suggest different facets of a shared world. ‘Parts of Speech,’ which includes a shout-out to Jack Spicer, is explicitly in this vein, with its sections germinating from a pseudo-taxonomy developed across their titles. But Thesen’s long poems differ widely in method, logic, style and shape. The shortest of these longer poems, ‘I Drive the Car,’ runs a mere two pages. Yet it contains 12 stanzas and starts over and over, ending each stanza in a different place, repeating the eponymous action (and phrase) until it feels practiced, versatile, meaningful in itself. The longest of these poems, ‘Confabulations,’ was first published in 1984 as its own book: an experiment in literary worldbuilding, its component poems elaborate aspects of the life and work of Malcolm Lowry, the English expatriate writer who, like Thesen, lived for much of his writing life in Vancouver. ‘A Pair of Scissors’ combines all three modes: it begins with poems that seem associative, oblique and open-ended. But then it settles into an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and imports that novel’s protagonist and her former suitor into the BC landscape, so that the poem seems by turns fictional, diaristic and a hazily extended metaphor. 

The overall organization of Refabulations is more thematic than chronological, juxtaposing texts from different collections to draw out shared reference points or preoccupations, while casting many of these poems in new light. ‘I Drive the Car,’ which here follows the linguistically minded ‘Parts of Speech,’ now seems to live out the narrative conceits of a grammar lesson, with rote repetitions and uncanny complications mirroring daily life. The surreal ‘The Good Bacteria,’ whose mythological cadences offer characters but no narrative, is more grounded in the contemporary Lower Mainland for appearing after its sister poem from the same collection, ‘The Fire,’ whose narrative of a looming wildfire and evacuation feels more immediate and relevant than ever. Three more poems—‘The Occasions,’ ‘Gala Roses’ and ‘From Toledo,’ published in 1987, 1995 and 2007—form a triptych in which roses and other flowers repeat across sequences, anchoring poems that all touch on connections between occasion, celebration and arts of arrangement. More remarkable still, these three poems have almost nothing in common formally. While ‘The Occasions’ enlivens the situated description of more conventional lyrics through panorama and non sequitur, ‘Gala Roses’ presents unpunctuated single-line stanzas, in which words pile up slowly and only sometimes fall into the rhythm of sentences—a dynamic that recalls the thrill of Language poetry while suggesting a soothing version of the Modernist stream-of-consciousness. ‘From Toledo,’ in turn, uses irregular stanzas and fragmentation to allow ordinary life to lie on the page next to history and ritual, anticipating the kind of feminist ‘poem including history’ that Lisa Robertson would write in 3 Summers, her most lyric book. In short, while these groupings attune us to fixations that persist across Thesen’s poems, they also display her formal inventiveness and the restlessness that sustains her engagement with the long poem as a form.

‘The Beginning of the Long Dash’ uses another structuring device, with each of its 10 segments separated from the previous by a line of bullet points, adding one additional bullet for each new section. The poem, which unfolds in an unremitting in medias res, could be counting up seconds, hours or days. It takes place over a Christmas holiday, a break from work but not from life, where ‘shoppers’ are ‘burdened with menus and occasions,/the obligations of merriment.’ But it also occurs everywhere and, often, in the mind. There are beauty salons and shopping malls but also polar bears, alpine mountains, soldiers, CO₂ molecules, border crossings, ‘a New World post-colonized/beach’ and ‘Nuremberg,/coming over the radio.’ When the pronoun ‘I’ enters the poem in its fourth section (‘I try on clothes,/pose in sunglasses,/keep out from under the thinning ozone’), it is only one channel within the stereoscopic perspective established in earlier sections, one that speaks in the first-person plural or uses no pronoun at all, and which sees both ordinary and imagined life from without. There is an almost Homeric quality to the way matter piles up in lines of unending action, and actions and entities at great physical distance take on an urgent simultaneity.

In the preface to Refabulations, Moure writes of Thesen that ‘her poetry is not autobiographical,’ even as it attunes to ‘the materiality and rhythms of dailiness—cooking for birthdays, driving the car, the dog’s romp, a haircut, a time signal, the natural world or what we call nature.’ This thingly quality, always a hallmark of Thesen’s poems, is particularly evident in ‘Long Dash,’ where synchronizing watches is a metonymy for everything that binds us together in the big world. The natural, the mass-produced, the infrastructural—all these things overlay the specific and the generic, the experience of the individual with that of a crowd, a substrate within the nation. Within those commonplaces, my life and your life can seem to overlap. And even when the details are different, these things can promise that commonality. Thesen’s poems expertly tap into those scenes and situations while leaving them a little uncanny, estranged from even herself, as in this realist-hallucinatory section from ‘A Pair of Scissors’:

Someone had stepped on my glasses, strangers
were somehow not strangers, everyone got drunk,
two deck chairs were fused in the snow. This
was the dream. It takes me a long time to move into
what’s real.

‘Moving into what’s real’ might be the motto for Thesen’s long poems. While they often begin by foregrounding what’s reflexive about her use of language, the poems demonstrate their commitment to reality by serially adapting to its contents and conditions. But they approach the real with the caveat that, in poetry, such movement may be circuitous and unending. The form these poems make, as they evolve to meet the world, is complex enough to unsettle our own prior readings and provides its own reason for encountering these poems anew.

—Steven Maye