When I received my review copy of Bill Howell’s The Way Things Are at the Moment—a pdf only, from a small press in Utah—I felt sure I had never heard of him.
Turns out Howell is a well-established Canadian poet now in his late seventies. He was included in Al Purdy’s anthology Storm Warning (1971), which I remember reading as a teen in my high school library. More than 40 years later one of his poems was selected for the first Best Canadian Poetry in English (2008), which is on my shelves. Though I haven’t read his previous books, I have encountered a variety of Howell’s poems over the years in journals. In fact, he and I have appeared virtually side by side in issues of Vallum and Freefall.
Perhaps his work did not make a strong impression. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention. I came to The Way Things Are at the Moment with no preconceptions, at least. If anything, I had a slight bias toward the author because of our ages—Howell is an early Boomer and I’m just a decade or so younger.
Another aspect of Howell’s presence in the culture is his creative work during a long career as a producer/director at CBC radio. I recall being captivated by episodes of both the Nightfall series (1980-1983) and The Mystery Project (1992-2002), for which Howell gets deserved credit. Every short bio accompanying his poetry emphasizes this work at the CBC.
The poetry, though, is not about murder, madness or the supernatural. He doesn’t employ dialogue or character voices either. Nonetheless it’s fair to say that in both radio drama and poetry he is a facilitator of uneasy feelings.
The poems in The Way Things Are at the Moment are competent and varied, sometimes daring, sometimes touching. A handful of the poems do read like mystery plots: a tragic drowning in “Her Ocean Moment,” a comic scheme to steal underwater cable in “End of the Line.” But the majority attempt something more personal. And with these poems I have to say there is something missing, something off.
Howell’s main ingredients are natural observation (often ocean coasts), fantasy or reverie (often clichés enlivened with a personal twist), and attempts at witty or world-weary aphorisms. Many poems move rapidly among all three. They approach, but never quite feel like stream of consciousness or confessional poems. This is in part because artifice interrupts the flow—Howell loves puns, especially alliterative or homonymic—and in part because the aphorisms feel either too ironic (“The first forty years of childhood are the hardest”) or too cryptic (“The future you envision is a shadow version / of the past you might’ve known”).
Take the opening stanzas of “Becoming Our Own Ghosts” for example:
Fresh breezes luff the cedars
over & above the ticking guckiness: a beach
bursting with angry ernes, tacit terns, and hungry gulls.
Each of us hopes to cope with the poppling tide,
almost as if we have a choice.Having found our odyssey wanting, we know the way
we’ve come, if not the anyway back.
Not enough where to keep us there, anyway.
Having opted not to disbelieve, we remake the world
in front of a world left over.
So before we’ve eventually left, we’ve arrived
where we already are.
Description, allusion/wordplay, paradoxical conclusion.
The closing poem of the volume concisely illustrates this favoured trajectory:
Hit & Myth
A rock peaks, peeks out of the water.
After a while it gains a name
it can use to run
headlong into waves arising
from leftover tides.
Bashed awash things cling to it before
actual creatures shuttle ashore.
And here we all still are.
Evolution, from sea to land. Is that it? It’s clever, it’s visual, but does it speak to the issues of loss and memory raised in the book, or just shrug?
A back-cover blurb, adopting some of Howell’s own convoluted ambiguity, suggests the reader needs to get to this final poem for the full effect:
….each poem offers a fractal view of what one cannot really discern until the book’s end—how much our conventions of time, space and memory fail to suppress not so much what we want to say but what we want to feel.
At the last page I felt frustration, not dénouement, as if I’d finished a murder mystery without finding out who did it.
As well as something missing, The Way Things Are at the Moment also has something extra, a pre-occupation that skews the proportions of the whole. Howell’s time at the CBC had effects on his poetry beyond reinforcing a penchant for the mysterious.
Apparently he was laid off without notice in the mid-2000s as part of government cut-backs. Howell published disgruntled poems about this as long ago as 2008 in Rampike, poems which were included in his previous volume Porcupine Archery (2009). You’d think that might be the end of it, but decades afterward he continues to deal.
The opening stanza of “Psychic Housecleaning” has the subtitle “Ghosts of the CBC.” Howell recalls with mixed feelings shredding his files on his last day and reminds his present self that
No matter how well you remember them,
the people who hired you are gone.
The people who fire you are not obliged
to tell the whole truth or look you in the eye.
Note “fire you” in the present tense. He exclaims:
Throw away a keepsake today!
This sounds like closure, but Howell can’t seem to let go.
Another of Howell’s CBC poems in The Way Things Are at the Moment (there are several), “If It’s All the Same to You,” revisits the fateful day:
….
you soldier on for years until they ask you
in for an actual meeting. You arrive
with a thousand small moves to propose
but, before you know it, you discover
seventeen arrows in your back.
….
Howell tries to add humour, but lapses into self-pity:
….
They don’t know who they’re dealing with.
But they obviously have the right person.
You should’ve sent a body double.Too numb to know much more,
you stagger home. Seventeen arrows.
And one of them found your heart.
….
Consolation comes from a combination of cruel nature and easy rationalization:
The sea wins what it needs as always.
Better off fired than retired, anyway.
Intermittently throughout the book you can hear this axe being ground.
The reader (this reader, anyway) starts seeing parallels that are perhaps inadvertent. From the same poem, describing the CBC workplace, Howell offers a diagnosis that could well be applied to his poetry: “Eventually, we forgot if we were going for the jocular or the jugular.” The next line is:
That was the day we called off the search for the truth.
There are other biographical themes in this book, other aspects of the author’s past. Lost friends, a lost spouse. But no injury, indeed no other life event, is more present or more vivid than having been forced out at the CBC.
Which brings me to Howell’s substantial streak of conservative Boomer grumpiness. Or entitlement. Or worse. Consider the off-hand remark camouflaged in this passage from “Subvirtualism in Toronto”—
…. And it just keeps
raining record-breaking multiculturalism. A clearing;
clean slate; respite from more of the same. Eachquestion mark becomes a loose noose?
….
Jump-cuts to non-sequiturs can’t hide it.
There are other disturbing moments of disrespect, or lack of empathy, for others—however imaginary or hyperbolic—among these poems. “Local Illumination” comprises two such moments, bookended by single-line variations on the refrain “What else do they need to know?”—
Just beyond our boxes of light,
….
….Jay Kim, an all too visible witness
who can’t see anything, crouches
behind the front counter following
gunshots across from his corner store.
End of scene.
The only other stanza reads:
Just beyond our cooking fires & torches,
night-blind wolves wait
patiently for chances to turn
elders into ancestors.
An old woman sheds her blanket, walks out
in the strange May snow
to interview the fireflies,
her inner light an incidental miracle.
But the fireflies have long since
forgotten to remind the wolves
to keep their social distance.
End of scene.
Is it just me, or are these deliberate instances of callous othering? Could we say in Howell’s defense that Jay Kim is at least given a name? Yet how else would we be prompted to guess his ethnicity? Could we say that elders and ancestors are just as likely to be white settler folks as Indigenous? That any old woman could “shed a blanket”? That she’s not beyond “our” local illumination? Or that I—as a settler male reader—am not safely within it?
This poem is something of an outlier in The Way Things Are at the Moment. If I’m reading it correctly, though, it resonates with other, subtler notes elsewhere. Readers will need to weigh how much (or if) they admire a writer’s skills, against how much (or if) they share the writer’s attitudes.
I had hoped that “Local Illumination” would prove to be previously unpublished, something edgy the author slipped in, perhaps from years long past. Turns out it has actually appeared four times: in Anti-Heroin Chic, USA, online, in 2020 (when “social distance” was actually topical); in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Canada, online, in 2023; in Stand Magazine, UK, print and online, in 2023; and finally, as recently as 2024 in Literary Review of Canada.
Neither Literary Review of Canada nor any of the earlier venues accept previously published work. Or so their guidelines say. In the meticulous acknowledgements page for The Way Things Are at the Moment, a few other poems are listed as being published twice. But none matches the rule-breaking popularity of “Local Illumination.”
Bill Howell’s original readership may be ageing out with his generation, and his poetry may have moved to smaller presses, but in some quarters his writing retains its appeal. For the rest of us, his poems may be remembered best as a curious appendix to The Mystery Project and to the broader cultural history of the CBC.
Howell’s books are hard to find nowadays. You may be still be able to order Porcupine Archery, and you can certainly order his latest, but you’re unlikely to find any of them on a retail bookstore shelf. The irony is that, judging from the individual poems I’ve been finding online or rereading in journal issues—going back to the year 2000—The Way Things Are at the Moment, for all its quirks and snarks, may be his best book yet.