Botero’s Beautiful Horses: a few notes on Jan Conn’s new collection of poetry

Jan Conn, poet, biologist.

It is Jan’s biography, I believe, that makes her work completely different from anyone else’s, that gives layers to her words that we can unravel. She writes with the vivid imagery of Latin America fuels Isabel Allende’s genius, yet the fact that she is a scientist drives all of the mysteries within her words. These mysteries meld ancestral spirits into the cells and veins and wings of vines and birds and dust. Conn is a nouveau alchemist of sorts, knowing transformation is indeed the stuff of cellular biology, the very thing that will save ecology if we can. As a scientist, she spends her time chasing mosquitoes, and it is this attention to the smallest of things that brings ours to the big ones. Conn does sweat the small stuff, for it is the very stuff of life.

And if life is made up of atoms and of cells and molecules, literature is made of up of alphabets and words, funny black marks on a page or stone tablet that magically record the way we see the sky, the way we feel anger, the way we make love or go mad. Conn takes us to “the fable of pink, the agony of yellow.” We visit rooms “crammed with blue statuettes of the dead.” We are transported to a world with guavas and saffron and copper-winged chameleons and antelopes and alligator skulls.

“The Henry Moore bronze/resembles a reclining chacmool/ on whose chest fresh hearts were laid.”

The ancient mythology of the Americas, all fury and magic and hotheaded passion and sacrifice, and she brings these potions and powders and temples and mermaids and warriors and virgins and volcanoes into the unruffled cool of Canada. It is strange and sublime to hear a scientist tell us with conviction that the gods are alive.

Jan Conn
Botero’s Beautiful Horses
Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and of Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World). Both are available through amazon, or through her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

U2’s No Line on the Horizon

I’m tired of this art school music these past few years. Nothing against the hipsters but I want some music with blood and guts again. I’ve hummed along at The Social to all these bland generic bands with men in guyliner and skinny jeans. I’ve thumbs-upped the new new waves’ creativity though sometimes I longed for a simple melody instead.

Of course, all great music is built on the music of the past, so the tragically hep who never check out Bach or Loretta Lynn or Bob Seger oughtta be shot. But there’s a time for this new electro-gloom; there’s also a supershiny glow I get from the more buoyant fare on the airwaves. Hell, I’ve really been enjoying the Britney Circus, and I count a total of one in my circle who thought Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind was really rather sweet and inventive.

But I’m sick of all this emptiness, too, this cutesy opera to madness chic. Or to the endless malaise of being born filthy rich. I’m looking for more than a melody, even as I insist on one. I’m looking for meat, for an album that has some weight in my hands. I want poetry, though, not nonsense syllables layered in sync with synth, words that make me feel something spiritual. There will be more time for more disco more pop more more more bubbles in life but right now I need music with real claws, not Lee press-on nails.

I suppose all of this is why I’m so excited about the new U2. I’d never quite relegated them to shark jumpers, and doubtless there were many fans of their last years. But I admit I can’t name their last four albums and don’t own any of them. I have a few songs on iTunes.

But this year is different. No Line on the Horizon is moody, both dark and glorious, with occasional waves of beauty and ecstasy flooding you. There are stories here embedded right into the very notes of the music, into the flawless ultrasleek production of the sound.

Thing is, I think, back when Bono was a young idealist, an offbeat imp, seesawing under spiritual crisis and the cursed caul that turns a man into a poet, we were all drawn into his seductive intensity. Then I kind of lost his beat ‘cause he was too mature, too stable, too smarmy. He had my respect, of course. But all this time I’ve been a hot mess and he’s been changing the world, and I just couldn’t sit still through it all.

There’s more than a glimmer here again, within the soaring melodies and swooping vocals, of faith with torment, a stirring of raw lust just just just underneath, there’s the feeling I should be reading Wilde and Sartre both, at a café watching sad and crazy people go by.

With U2’s newest inspiration, they rock, they roll, they belt out soul, and it’s slick and. thick and rich and never gooey. But there’s a rawness and desolation that’s been missing from their gracious goodwill these past years. It’s the kind of  album that goes well with wine, and lots of it.

Yes, yes, give me wine, I’m tired of measuring wine these days, give me one two three four glasses, five, no eight, give me pale Mozart tapestries on beautiful Laura, give me guitar beside Trout Lake, or better yet, the Mississippi where vampires played with an old mojo man on saxophone. Oh, give me the days when I made love behind dumpsters and pierced my lips and nose, oh, give me neural plasticity, give me back the kind of girl who could drive a stick shift through the desert.

I’m tired of measuring dollars, carbs, of doing everything in my power to be more my age. Oh give me those sunny mojito days laying in the bruising sun atop the boat with Al and the girls, give me endless sunrise serotonin, oh, bring me back from the dead into danger, let me fall in love or feel sick with lust and fear. What has become of me, in early on a Saturday night, drinking tea and watching my cat eat ham?

This new album gives me optimism that the best is yet to come and the stretch ahead is paved with subtle pleasures if not wild ones. It’s sort of a relief, to be honest. But it also feels like a funeral, a tribute album for just how well-adjusted I’ve become. It’s exhausting, careening heedlessly into middle of the road.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.