Her Finger Jabbing The Air

      Here's another poem I don't quite know whether to like or not, this one by the Canadian poet Lorna Crozier:

I KNOW I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY IT BUT

I miss the smokers, the heavy drinkers
though my eyes burn when someone lights
a cigarette. I miss the poet who drank
a bottle of gin a day and talked to his
parrot in bird-vowels of squeaks and squawks,
its eyes following his big gentle hands
stumbling through the air. I miss the post-coital
smoke of my lover as he raised two fingers
that smelled of me to his mouth and inhaled
again and again. I miss the whiskey priest who danced
wet in his robes in the fountain below the Spanish Steps,
holding a gelato high above his head and
never dropping it. I miss the tin tobacco can
of my sixty-cigarette-a-day mother-in-law who insisted
she didn't inhale. I miss my father who asked me
to smuggle a case of beer into the cancer ward,
who dragged his intravenous stand to the dungeon
smoking room five times a day. I miss the artist
in Zagreb who for over an hour in the bar
tried to touch the mole on my shoulder
and always overshot his mark, his yellow-stained
finger jabbing the air. I miss the beautiful
woman who drank with Dylan Thomas. After three
scotch on ice, she tossed her head all night,
throwing back the long hair she didn't have anymore.
I miss the smokers, the heavy drinkers,
the ones who walked naked through parties,
covered with the host's shaving cream, the ones
who pushed dill pickles into their ears,
who played the harmonica with their noses,
who could aim a smoke ring to settle like a halo
over someone's blessed head. I miss them on the couch
where I covered them with the extra blanket,
where I took the glowing ember from between their fingers.
I miss climbing the stairs to bed, draped in their silky
cape of smoke, their singing and jubilation, the small
bonfires of their bodies burning through
what little was left of the night.

--- from Everything Arrives At The Light (1995)

In many ways, I appreciate the rhythms Crozier establishes (it seems to me to be borrowing from the patterns used in Leonard Cohen's "You Have The Lovers," with the poem's first words echoing Cohen's) and I also appreciate the effectiveness of much of her imagery and phrasing ("the woman who drank with Dylan Thomas" is a nice touch). But for all the poem's supposed lamentations and professed admirations of the smokers and the heavy-drinkers, there's a not-so-latent air judgmentalism about it all, an air of preachy cautionary tale. I mentioned the woman who drank with Dylan Thomas: Crozier undercuts this image with the words "the long hair she didn't have anymore," which is scientifically fair enough but injects an unnecessary patheticness to the image; we get this sort of structure of undermined-image again and again throughout the poem, to the point it reaches overkill-- and I think ultimately that Crozier's lecturing through the backdoor. There's something nobly true about the poem, but there's something rather spiritually untrue about it, as if all these figures that she mourns are little more than examples to say "Pity they did all the bad stuff, even if it was fun." It strikes me in this regard as overly didactic and heavy-handed, even if there's a fineness to the imagery and to some of the generated cadences to seem to counter these qualities.

      I guess it comes down, for me, to a sense of the poem's duplicity, that for its postulations to like and/or to admire the characters that she is figuring, she really doesn't seem to like them very much, and the result is a troubling insincerity, the poem of the backhanded compliment or the Tsk-tsk-tsk-ing elegy. I don't think the title helps, either. Although it does well to set up the first few lines, after the reading of the poem is complete, it seems less like a liberating declaration (breaking from the modes of what is considered socially acceptable) than a pre-emptive apology for posturing (not that different than, say, "I don't want to be telling you what to do but...."). She goes, one might say, all Wilfrid Owen on us when least I think she should-- but while pretending that she's not. The old lie for her is the life of the "hard-drinking, chain-smoking" types, and she makes clear that the bonfires burning in the night aren't at all different from Owen's "incurable sores on innocent tongues." Oh, yes, Lorna, we get the message. I however can't help but feel manipulated by the end of it, and even bitter because of it, perhaps because she seems to be using the dead to stump. It's not so much the message of the poem to which I object, but its methods and its manipulativeness, and the poem's resolution finally seems a betrayal-- souring the finer tonalities with a disingenousness that for me spoils what came before it. That's, of course, a misstating: the poem has been leading to this all along, and that's why it does seem to me such a poetic betrayal. It's not a voltaic turn, like those we become used to seeing in sonnets. No, it's more insidious, the poem seeming to lead toward a unique observation only to end up selling us a trite bill of goods, especially as her attendance upon the characters becomes more and more patronizing (her laying of the blanket, the removal of the cigarette, etc.). And, in a way, I understand her message-- that this is a world from which she had to extricate herself, which she supposedly outgrew-- but her delivery seems a cheat, the poem a lamentation of someone who now knows better.

      No, I guess I don't like this poem, in the end. What starts as a sincere reflection of loss becomes a programme for an insincere implication. In this day and age, we're supposed to admire such poetry, such morally-right poetry, but I read it as rather hypocritical and pretentious. So there it is; I've had my lesson for the day (pardon me while I nod along blankly). This could have been a much better poem if Crozier had kept to trying to understand the figures that she described, but she abandons them for the figuration of her expatriation from them. The poem's message turns out to be very PC after all, very formulaic-- though the morally-superior would call it "instructive." And, in the end, I find myself angry at the poem, angry at its manipulativeness and its insincerities and its betrayal. I know I'm not supposed to say it, but, yes, angry, rather angry indeed.