Stephen Henighan has a piece in Geist about Rob Allen, his one-time teacher, my good friend. The direction of the piece is pretty much apparent in the title, “Traitor’s Dirge,” and byline (Henighan’s name has been made less for his literary fiction than for the way, in short essay style, he strafes Can Lit’s no-fly zones.) It’s not that Henighan doesn’t have a point. He does. Rob did love America and pop-culture and he loved a good literary line, however long. At times, the esoteric quality of his writing landed its punches far from the gut. Preferring the eye, say. Or what’s behind it.
For a study in the local, emotional power, and quiet perfection, I’d recommend Henighan play catch up by reading the sonnets in Standing Wave, a collection that’s among Rob’s best.
While Henighan does have his point, it’s trivial and expressed meanly: the form Henighan’s dirge takes is a funnel, and all of the broad and generous observations he has about Rob spiral down into a final dismissal of much of Rob’s work. “Traitor’s Dirge” doesn’t strike me as particularly honest or fair. Reading it, I get the same sense I do when reading much of Henighan’s work. Whatever Henighan looks at is an excuse for him to further elaborate himself.
It’s unfortunate that Rob died early. If he’d lived longer, maybe Henighan would have had the chance, and the grace, to kill his mentor off before the man himself died.
October 7th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Anne, well-expressed, and if I might say so, very restrained on your part! V
October 9th, 2007 at 1:16 am
Each of us chooses or falls, if we’re lucky, into a language, a source of ideas, an engagement with people imaginary and real, which together with our fingers select the words we write and if we’re even luckier a powerful and unique voice is heard which has little, maybe nothing, to do with introducing anything meta, neo, post or sidereal into the Canadian (of all places!) literary landscape, yet which has made this student laugh and weep with the emotion of ideas and craft which in turn started several cosmic rips in the critical categories that used to be interesting to me. I still imagine, as do all good Canadians, the dumb killers in the united america states (and wannabes) tying the feet of their children to the shower head in their tubs and slitting all their throats. To Rob, as I read him, this would be trivial nonsense, and he would say, not in so many words, very politely through the fog of way too much beer, “you can do better.” There was no literary treachery in his work. There is his voice.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
In the Visionary Prelude - (For Robert Allen)
we all arrive at a supernatural place of declining light
over Jimmie Walker swamp where
none of the morning glory in the ditches here
have ever appeared in your dooryard
(among wild roses, ox eyed daisies, buttercups, day lilies),
a mix of things part wild, part planted.
when we alight upon your supernatural space
time itself stops all is light and shadow
words come to you; writing whatever is original
hearing fireworks, motorcycles, summer
You want to see my hands among
the growing things imagining me
at work in your garden
or sitting across talking eye to eye
tipsy on scotch single malt and blended
writing late at night
when i awake grass is wet in
between showers sparkling sun
watching water drip off boughs
becoming aware I’m looking at two
young deer
thirty feet below your window.
until they move slightly i don’t see them. they’re not spooked,
just move off down the ravine in a dignified way.
(there is sun and there is light and you aren’t in them)
“ghoulish and hungry, death invites you absurdly away on a
supernatural voyage of your own.
(My dreams won’t call you back)
I am more myself alone”
Your elegies pass between the living like a newborn.
(text in quotation by Robert Allen)
October 9th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Thank you, Mary. It’s wonderful to see that place, again, and through your eyes. And thanks, too, Grant & Viv. (Grant, these adventures of yours have my interest piqued. Call you soon).
A.