Deceptive Simplicity and David O'Meara
In which I ramble for a while about awards and then eventually review David O'Meara's fifth collection of poems Masses on Radar
Happy New Year!
I had the distinct pleasure (and unenviable task) in 2021 of judging the Governor General's Award in Poetry. In any given year, jurors read upwards of 170 books from which they must choose both a shortlist of five as well as a single winner. I’d done it once before this and it’s basically a crash course in Canadian poetry of a particular year. It’s not easy, by any stretch, but it is rewarding. I mean, in hindsight. In fact, it can sometimes be as exhilarating as it is onerous. Or as depressing.
Exhilarating, because books, poets, and poems cross your radar that might not otherwise have found their way to you and—occasionally—depressing because of the scads of bad books that still manage to find their way to print, muddying the publication pool and making it harder for truly decent work to get the keen attention it deserves. On top of all this, you sometimes come up against friction and roadblocks within the jury itself, finding yourself at loggerheads over a particular book, or in some cases a poet.
I’m going to be honest with you: having judged a bunch of major prizes now, I find these differences within the jury have more often been about politics than taste. A good juror can usually put those political considerations and aesthetic preferences aside in favour of concentrating on the value of the work at hand, but sometimes you come up against the proverbial immoveable rock.
(BTW, I’m not saying this happened, just that it DOES happen based on my own experience and anecdotal info from colleagues and friends. If you’ve ever been on a jury for a grant or award, you know there can be that one juror who just makes everything about them and their concerns without budging in the slightest for others. It would be sort of admirable if it weren’t so frustrating to the task at hand.)
But this is why the Canada Council employs three jurors at a time, so that no one opinion can dominate. And this is also why more jurors is generally better—like five or even seven—building consensus is an exercise in negotiating tricky subjects, and more voices on a jury can ensure you have a wider consensus. (Hell, I’d even go so far as to suggest that a national award like the GGs would be better judged like the Oscars—picked by something akin to the poetry version of an Academy of Motion Picture Sciences. But that will never happen, so you and two others generally find a way through, often agreeing more easily on a winner than a shortlist.)
It’s easy enough for any three people to narrow pool of deserving books down to a long list of about 20, but after that it’s like a race at the Olympics: made or broken by 10ths of a second. 100ths of a second in some cases. That’s where jury composition comes in.
Diverse in as many ways as possible for a three-person group, a good jury can bring the perspective needed to challenge biases, grudges, personal, or even sheer apathy.
This year I was lucky and we were able to settle on a shortlist and winner with a little wrangling, but several very good books were sadly left in the cold. I hope to feature a few of those in the coming months, but for now I want to concentrate on a book that wasn’t eligible for this year’s competition and will be up for the award next year: David O’Meara’s Masses on Radar.
Part of the reason I’m starting this newsletter is to provide at least SOME new attention for poetry in a world where the space for reviewing and talking about writing is slowly being eroded, piece by piece. The Star reviews three or four books twice a year (by far the most consistent of the major papers), the National Post has been a joke since Mark Medley left, and the Globe and Mail doesn’t even have a dedicated book section anymore. The national books magazine, Quill and Quire, has locked itself away behind a paywall and is dwindling into irrelevance because of it, and the literary journals have the same problem they’ve always had: demand and readership.
Even international books coverage is dying. The Guardian has recently lost its books section to a general “Arts”. The Globe did the same a while back, folding books in with everything else. The NYT still stands, but for how long? On the other hand, things like celebrity book clubs, GoodReads, Instagram, and TikTok (and even the lowly Amazon review) are now putting mostly non-literary folk at the wheel, with seriously mixed results. Sure, there are some new faces and talents being discovered, and that is vital, but largely what’s rising to the top is what’s easiest, not what has the most depth. This can make for great sales for these titles, but does it make for a literary canon that a generation will be able to stand by as it matures?
(Tangentially, we shouldn’t really be surprised by this, what with society in general giving up the gatekeeping of educated expertise in favour of a “common” opinion—cf. all those pathologists on your feed who got their degree through the Facebook school of “MyOwnResearch”. But I digress.)
Part of the reason I allowed myself to rant for the first couple pages here is to set up a point—you can still find texts that cater to both popular culture’s desire for accessibility an educated mind’s craving for depth and craft.
Enter Masses on Radar. Whew.
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Having read the breadth and depth of what’s on offer in Canadian poetry for 2020/21, I can say with some assurance that if Masses on Radar had been in one of the piles I received to read for this year’s Governor General’s Award it would have been a contender for not only the shortlist, but for winner.
I first encountered David O’Meara’s work back in 1999 through his debut, Storm Still—after the famous, and relatively rare, stage direction in King Lear that marks the beginning of the Lear’s final decent into madness, as the storm ratchets it up a notch.
At the time, I was a year out from publishing my own first book, and habitually found myself in various bookstores, pinching too many pennies to actually buy books and journals, but standing there in the poetry section, reading them cover to cover. I didn’t know David yet, but I picked the book up like all the others, flipped through a page or two before I went back and started from the beginning.
When I left, I kept thinking about the book, so I returned that week and picked it up again. On second read, I noticed something about the title, which cued me to read the poems differently, and I realized there was more going on than lyrically tight poems that were pleasing to the ear. So, I treated myself and bought the book.
What I’d noticed was how the word “Still” in the title had other meanings floating around the original intentions of Shakespeare—the storm continues, yes, and is in fact heightened, but it can also be read as “pausing” and/or acting as a “still”, distilling the essence of the storm, such that one is cued to watch more closely the moment at hand. This title, Storm Still, was my entry point into how O’Meara plays one angle for the simplicity of a reader’s first pass, and other angles for added layers of meaning should they come back for subsequent readings.
At the time, I thought of it like that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when the trio are at the Art Institute in Chicago looking at the Seurat painting, and the camera keeps getting closer and closer to the canvas until the tiny pointillist daubs are revealed. In this moment, the painting both loses its original image and simultaneously takes on new ones. This tactic of multi-layering experience is one that David O’Meara has employed throughout his career.
David has always been a great organizer and supporter of the poetry scene in Canada (and especially in Ottawa, where he lives), and I had already enjoyed his poetry, but on meeting him, I found myself quite taken with the man himself. Gregarious and knowledgeable, with an extensive travel history, a lean, relaxed form, and an easy smile that hid a hint of mischief—he reminded me of a poetry version of Harrison Ford. I was frankly a little envious. Here was a guy living a “normal” life (holding down a job and relationship, travelling, meeting people) all while making art happen at a very high level. It seemed to me in stark contrast to the theatrical performances of “the artist” that I saw around me all the time—carousing, drink and drugs, womanizing, overperformed scenes of agony and ecstasy. It was refreshing. But it wasn’t until his second book, The Vicinity, with its anchoring long poem “Letter to Auden”, that I realized how refreshing.
“Letter to Auden” was written as an epistle that came across on first read as a chatty letter in nine-line stanzas to the great poet Auden, updating him on the state of the world, but closer look revealed it to be a set of Spenserian stanzas that play cleverly with sound, rhythm, metaphor, and even the form itself. Here was a poem representing everything I was interested in at the time: formally spectacular lines, linguistically pyrotechnic diction, yet a trueness to the vernacular and cadence of the speech around it. All the young poets I knew at the time were talking about it.
In Masses on Radar, O’Meara returns to this epistolary strategy in “The Moirai”—an extraordinarily elegant and poignant crown of sonnets (a 15-sonnet grouping—as opposed to another 26 Spenserian stanzas) delivered as a letter to his late friend and colleague, Canadian poet Elise Partridge. In revisiting this format of posthumous letter, O’Meara simultaneously grieves and venerates his friend, putting her on a level with Auden in his personal canon.
Addressing her final months and the correspondence they shared (Partridge had approached him after her cancer diagnosis and asked him to edit her final volume—she sadly died just before publication), the poem manages to cover an enormous amount of narrative ground while remaining reflective and allusive and infused with a sense of wonder. Centering around their shared love of travel and poetry (and Auden in particular), the crown also acts as a record of two artistic minds at work, with the living reflecting on the dead, and the dead, in the subtext, reflecting on the living.
Like most of his other work, “The Moirai” is somehow both conversational and intricately structured. Each of the couplets of the "prologue" sonnet forms the first and last lines of the following 14 sonnets, creating a sort of call and answer between the poems that also yields a villanelle-like refrain feeling. The overall effect is bracing and lulling at the same time, as though one were being told a fable or sung a lullaby. All of this is accomplished with straightforward, plainspoken language riddled with colloquialisms and informal address.
Cleverness abounds in O’Meara’s work, but it never seeks the limelight—never shows off. Look at this narrative setup of the first sonnet (following the prologue):
Aboard the hydrofoil to Ischia I remembered
Auden had rented rooms for several summers and wrote‘In Praise of Limestone’ there. And, Elise, I thought
of you, in that indirect manner while the local bus lumberedalong its roundabout route through Mezzavia
to Sant’Angelo, bypassing the famed Maronti beacheswhere the morning sun dawdles before it reaches
a scorching apex above Mount Epomeo and the viewwest that spreads with glintings of the day’s turn.
,,,
On first read, we have what seems the opening of a short story or simple narrative piece: place, characters, relationship, action. But look at the slanted, barely-there end rhymes and sight rhymes, the foreshadowing and coupling of the person being addressed with the images of crescendoing greatness, the increasing lyricism, and even the cheeky use of the word “turn” at the sonnet’s volta—the “leap” or turn on which the sonnet form pivots.
For this poem alone, but especially in conjunction with “Letter to Auden”, O’Meara deserves to be thought of as the natural successor to the great Canadian poet Don Coles—a master of deceptive simplicity.
Where Coles gave us brief narratives of place, family, and metaphysical wonder, O’Meara does much the same, but with his own take on each. Like Coles, O’Meara’s lines are clean and mostly gloss narratively on the first read but have a hidden depth that rewards extra study—what sommeliers would call a “backend” in wine—meaning you can read his poems once and walk away with a story or moral or philosophical tidbit to chew on, but that if you go exploring the piece more deeply, it keeps yielding new levels of meaning and emotion. And to my mind, this is one of the most vital aspects of a successful poem—it does its job both in the moment of reading it on the page or hearing it aloud, as well as after, when recollected in tranquility (to knick a bit from Wordsworth).
While “The Moirai” acts as the anchor to Masses on Radar in a way similar to “Letter to Auden” in The Vicinity (and is, in fact, its primary accomplishment), the poem seems more in tune with the other poems around it than “Letter” was in its volume. In Masses, “The Moirai” is surrounded by other sonnets, albeit in a less traditional format and with single word titles that act as conceptual signposts for the poem below, as well as more wandering multi-part pieces with longer, anaphoric titles (starting with "I"), each acting in its own way to fill in the details around the central poem—state of the world, mind of the author, experience of contemporary life and travel. And all of the poems are blissfully accessible.
It would frankly be quite an accomplishment to make even a short poem both readable for its narrative thrust and yet explorable for its technical virtuosity, but to do it over such a long, structured piece as “The Moirai”, and then across the rest of an entire book is truly admirable.
There is much to admire in O’Meara’s work overall, but particularly with Masses on Radar—from the first pass through seemingly chatty, wry, slyly humorous verse chockablock with cultural touchpoints to the more nuanced subtexts stretching out through these same poems’ form, order, diction, and metaphors. What’s even more exciting is how O’Meara has made this “deceptive simplicity” an inadvertent calling card, especially when other poets of his generation strive to loan their work a “deceptive complexity”, or “deceptive learnedness”—jamming allusions to half-read philosophy tomes in with the latest “sciency” thing they clipped from a Discover Magazine.
Where others of his generation are working to confound and shut readers out, O’Meara is inviting them in and offering them a seat and a drink. A deceptively simple strategy. And that’s award worthy to me.