Sean Howard, overlays

 

PREFACE

Tidelines in &
out of print (the

only ever briefly
laid stress): cloth-

bound back-
wash. So

soon,
the

self’s
worn copy! I

don’t know: gha-
zal? haiku? rain

to snow…Just
gulls, rough

edges

I’mfascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, thedeceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),”with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, byPeter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respondto the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic PeterSanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous StiltJack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by XavierPress in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, thebook is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,”and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s shortwork while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen /knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- //light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negativesleave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over //the wall.”

Onemight say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, setas an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writingon Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s /tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw-/ ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High// Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfullyclipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around theboundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’spoems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive andaccumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display himclearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics.As the poem “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES” begins:

Blackouts: child’s-eye,searchlights…(Everywhere, sold-
iers, compulsoryfigures.) Cold War: atoms, butterflies &

wheels. (Learning class,Manchester’s grammar.) Ill-
fitting, often, sign& sound: after the storm, find-

ing language’s anchor.(On course in the
woods? Trout make themselves

clear?) A while, Dylan
Thompson: double

vision,
loose

locks.

Whereasthe notion of the response or translation is more familiar in other corners ofcontemporary (experimental, avant-garde, what have you) poetics—whether bpNichol’sTranslating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Milwaukee:Membrane Press, 1979), Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (asEirin Moure; Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) or more recent book-length projectsresponding to different poetry books through her own individual poetry-length worksby American poet Laynie Browne [see my review of her latest here; see my interview with her on her ongoing projects here]—it is a form and approach lessvisible across those working more formal lyrics. One can cite poems here andthere, certainly, including the endless array of responses to Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but very few in the way ofbook-length works, making this poetry title a kind of formal outlier (and anabsolutely delightful one).

Echoingthe structure of Sanger’s poem-by-poem critical response, Howard’s overlaysis structured with three opening poems—“PREFACE,” “INTRODUCTION” and “BIOGRAPHICALESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES”—prior to the body of the collection, a sectiontitled “NOTATIONS TO STILT JACK,” made up of the opening poems “EPIGRAPHS”and “THOMPSON’S PREFACE” before launching into thirty-eight Roman Numeralnumbered poems (a la Thompson’s original ghazal-sequence) to close the section withthe poem “CRITICAL ESSAY: JONAH’S ROAD.” The book then ends with Sanger’s own pieceresponding to the response of his response to John Thompson’s infamous ghazals,the short essay “NIJINSKY’S LEAP: AN AFTERWORD,” that opens:

Sean Howard invited me tocomment on his book. He suggested I might respond to his use of Sea Runas framing context for Overlays. I accepted, hoping to say somethinguseful about my intuition that prose commentary, even when as focused as thatof Sea Run, can only be penultimate in nature and can only be completewhen it is renewed in poetry. I connect that intuition with Mandelstam’s remarkin his essay “Conversation about Dante”: “a metaphor can be defined onlymetaphorically.” In other words, it takes a poem to know a poem.

Itcan’t be overstated the effect that Thompson’s original Stilt Jack hadon Canadian writing, introducing the English-language translation of the Urdustructure of the ghazal [see my review of the 2009 issue of Arc PoetryMagazine, “A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson” here], a structure furtheredas well by Phyllis Webb (I think it was Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the forminto the United States). I think it is fair to consider Thompson, and his work,beloved across elements of Canadian poetry, especially upon the east coast,making this a project not just of playful and inventive structure, but inloving homage. It is an absolutely delightful work. And, in a similar spirit,might some further critic attempt to look at the three works in tandem, or evenattempt to respond in some other, further way?