What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Poetry to make you think and feel,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

“Art is heart.” My uncle Vince, a photographer, said that once. What he meant is that expression that is not rooted in emotion, or that does not evoke emotion, is not art. Art can of course make one think.  Art that aims to last should do that at least in part, since emotions tend to froth up mightily but then fade, while a thought can calmly stay in the mind for a lifetime. A thought can be fully revived simply by the act of thinking, while an emotion remembered is far more tepid than an emotion felt. A story that is all emotion, a romance, say, may move, but it will be quickly forgotten as it will leave nothing for the mind to mull over. Nonetheless, despite the perishability of emotion and the cool immortality of thought, it is emotion that marks us most. Nothing goes deeper than emotion, and after that, in shallower depths, we think. Thinking that is significant may trigger an emotion. Remember Archimedes shouting “Eureka! (great emotion) after his discovery that a submerged object will displace its equivalent volume of water (great thought). Which do we remember most? I think it’s that cry and that image of the exultant man running down the streets of Syracuse naked after jumping out of his bath.

Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red then. Anne Carson is a Canadian academic. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is a classics scholar who has taught at UC Berkeley, at Princeton, at McGill, among other universities. Which is very impressive—but not, I would argue, an ideal background for a poet. Universities do wonders for dead poets, teaching them and therefore keeping them alive, but they’re deadly for living poets. It’s pretty well impossible to make a living as a poet, so many poets have sought shelter in universities, earning degrees from them and then teaching there. I don’t know why that is so. Why wouldn’t poets seek shelter in plumbing or farming? Whoever determined that poets should have soft, uncallused hands? The damage universities have done to poetry stems from the kind of thinking that thrives in these institutions, and which is indeed necessary if they are to produce quality scholarship: thinking that is rigorous, codified, impersonal. Such hyper-thinking tends to kill the spontaneity, the liveliness of the poetic instinct. Walt Whitman is taught in universities, but Walt Whitman would never have survived university.

Academic cleverness  is on display in Red. The first five sections—Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?; Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros; and then three appendices—and the last section, Interview, are interesting but in a puzzling, cool, clever, archly droll way. You have to know who Stesichoros is. I’d never heard of him. Then you have to care. I didn’t really. Compared to some of the other poetry I’ve sent you—Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters or Gilgamesh, for example—these sections are not memorable. Thank god they’re short.

But then there’s the meat of the book, the Autobiography of Red in question, which is by far the longest section. It’s great. It’s a novel in verse that tells the sad story of Geryon, a red monster, and his unhappy relationship with Herakles (or Hercules, as you might know him better). Geryon loves Herakles, and Herakles loves Geryon too, but in a fickle way, in a way that doesn’t accommodate Geryon’s love. So Geryon loves and suffers, while Herakles loves and cavorts about with Ancash, his Peruvian lover who loves and suffers as much at the hands of Herakles as Geryon does. The names are classical, but the setting is contemporary as is the language and the imagery. And the emotions are there. Take these lines, of Geryon and Herakles lying next to each other:

Not touching
but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

And the story ends with an astonishing image that will stay with you. I won’t ruin it by quoting it out of context. You must earn the image by reading your way to it. Then it will have its emotional impact on you. And you will perhaps be left thinking.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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