scarf of curling cold,
for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing
that rushes out whimpering
when pain cries the sign writ on it.
I shout love into your pain
when skies crack and fall
like slivers of mirrors,
and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake,
pluck the balled yarn of your brain.
I shout love at petals peeled open
by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun,
terribly like an adhesive bandage,
for love and pain, love and pain
are companions in this age.
-Milton Acorn
This is one of my favourite poems by Milton Acorn though Milton Acorn is not one of my favourite poets. In fairness, I dont know that much about him to really assess the body of his work for its literary merit or, more importantly, to determine my affective attachment to it as I do with other poets. Regardless, this is one of my favourite poems by Milton Acorn.
There are three routes through which I reached Milton Acorn.
One was through Evelyn Lau who I think is one of Canlit's best, and underrated, writers. She won the Miltorn Acorn People's Poetry Prize in 1992 when she was 21. (She was, at 21, also the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the Governor General's Award.)
Another way I got to Milton Acorn was through Gwendolyn MacEwen. She was briefly married (one year, 1962) to Milton Acorn.
The third way I got to Milton Acorn is related to the first though the channel's hazier but it goes something like this. Rosemary Sullivan's biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Shadowmaker) was just published and she was being interviewed on the CBC. I had never heard of Gwendolyn MacEwen so I went to the Scott Library and looked her up. Her poems were direct, declarative sentences. (One went "There is nothing more important than what you are doing right now." I like this line and have lost the title of the poem it comes from but think of it, the line, often. When I think of Gwendolyn MacEwen, I imagine pine trees, like pine trees, and the word "furtive" because of her poem "Dark Pines Under Water" which has the word "furtive" in it and I associate her and that word as most people associate "eggs" with "bacon" or "washer" with "dryer." Regardless...) I found out she was was friends with Margaret Atwood, that she drank herself to death at the age of 46 in 1987 and that she was briefly married (one year, 1962) to Milton Acorn. Encased in the concrete tomb of Tatham Hall and the howling winter winds that rampaged through York University, my friend Alanna and I were talking about poems, poets, Canadian poets and we got on to the topic of Gwendolyn MacEwen. We were probably having coffee or eating clementines. Amongst other things, I told her that she was friends with Margaret Atwood, that she drank herself to death at the age of 46 and that she was briefly married (one year, 1962) to Milton Acorn.
"Gaaaaad. Milton Acorn? That would drive anybody to drink themselves to death." Milton Acorn, she told me, was not an attractive man.
I could very well have been the one who made the comment about Milton Acorn's looks. Regardless, we both laughed. We knew so much back then. I thought I knew so much back then.
What I do know is that I like this Milton Acorn poem very much. "I shout love." I like its insistence, its brazenness about declaring the necessity of love. It's along the lines of, say, Auden's sentiment that "We must love one another or die" in his poem "September 1, 1939":
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
But while there's a real institutional dimension to Auden's poem (references to Thucydides and Democracy, asserting that "There is no State"), I like Acorn's very personal, individual and small declaration of love being shouted against a cold Canadian blizzard and even smaller, into a person and his pain, and even smaller, into a flower, a petal. There's a harshness in both Auden and Acorn's world. Auden's accurate diagnosis that "the error bred in the bone/Of each woman and each man/Craves what it cannot have,/Not universal love/But to be loved alone" is similar to Acorn claiming that "love and pain, love and pain/are companions in this age." Love can be fulfilled but, because we want to be loved alone, it remains unfulfilled. Pain is caused.
So. Only way out that I see is to stop being selfish.
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