Book of the Week: Mark McCutcheon reads from Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them

This week’s #AUPBookOfTheWeek is Mark McCutcheon’s debut collection of poetry, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them. In this inventive collection of poems, Mark A. McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.

In 2019, McCutcheon was invited to read at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Below are the videos of this reading with the accompanying poems.

Cash Paradise
A day after our seventeenth anniversary, we sipped coffee on the backyard patio,
my mug the one I’d stolen from work, hers the one she’d designed, quoting the kids.
Above us the high sheltering hands of the elms laced their green fingers together,
magpies whined like machines winding up, and the resident wrens warbled and burbled.
The air above that canopy or bower burned purely cloudlessly azure and
the myriad engines of the neighbours all still slept mute as winter in their garages.
On her phone she pored over the registry for a cousin’s wedding we’re going to. “What
about bed linens?” I said we should get those for the couple if they’d hang them
out the window after the wedding night, “because tradition.” I was puzzling over the
weekend paper’s crossword poetry—girl from Glasgow: lass; psychic glows: aurae;
hearing-based: aural; “haven’t you been listening to me”: hello—but I had been listening,
riffing—as her laughter testified—and recalling Johnny Cash’s answer to Vanity Fair’s
Proustian question—When and where were you happiest?—with six words that described
us just at that sonnet of a post-solstice moment: this morning, having coffee, with her.

Heaven help the roses
For Pauline Davis, a.k.a. “the Peace Lady,” 1943–2017
 
Toronto knew her as the Peace Lady:
For hours she’d stand athwart an overpass
That spanned the Parkway through the Don’s ravine;
On Steeles, on Finch, on Lawrence, Eglinton.
She wore a white robe, her brown hand held high;
Two fingers telegraphing, simply, Peace.
When driving past we’d roll the windows down
And wave Peace back as Dad tapped on the horn.
At school we traded true Peace Lady facts:
She lived near the river, she kept raccoons.
 
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, cold war scares raged.
In Sunday school, we read When the Wind Blows.
Our seventh-grade science teacher confessed
Where he’d wish to be if the bomb got dropped
On Toronto: “Directly beneath it.”
In English we read Wyndham’s Chrysalids.
On TV, Muppets sang “Can’t we be friends?”
Max Headroom unearthed radioactive waste
And several times a day the networks played
Emergency broadcasts, as grey and dark
As Reagan and Chernenko, null and void
As country roads shown in The Day After.
 
One night the evening news displayed how wide
A circle of fallout would spread in case
An ICBM struck the city’s core.
That circle’s edge—that emptied area code—
Engulfed our neighbourhood. Sleepless that night,
I lay and pictured houses on my street
Intact but vacant, windowless, and still,
All marred with carbon shadows, disused toys.
The air a thick green, toxic algae bloom,
Through which survivors shuffled, half melted,
Like plastic action figures burned by kids.
 
Through nervous years she graced our roads with peace,
A figurehead of hope on Toronto’s
Concrete prow; but when the millennium turned,
When cold war turned to market war, and we
Put movie studios in our pockets,
She feared they made her mission a new threat.
She was weaponized as mass distraction,
As drivers courted carnage in pursuit
Of perfect shots. So she stood down, gave up
The call for all to bid farewell to arms.
 
“The ‘state of emergency’ in which we
Live is not the exception but the rule,”
Warned Benjamin, through 1940s storms.
I want the news to tell us Pauline won,
That she got a Nobel or the Order
Of Canada, or has been canonized.
Made statutory. Cast as stone icon
For all guerrilla artists to raise up
On all the city’s bridges and highways,
A figurehead to help us navigate
To any year but 1984:
A year whose end we’re all waiting for, still
As silhouettes burning to windowless walls.
 

In Gwen MacEwen Park
three oaks and three chestnuts sentinel this oasis
kids caper in the nearby schoolyard
sparrows ricochet around Walmer Baptist
an ant traverses my shirt
a robin wades through the unweeded grass
 
women cross the park with varied charges
a baby a baguette a book
they pass the plinth with MacEwen’s head
above an engraved quotation from Afterworlds
—we are still dancing, dancing—
 
in a city forever on fastforward
taxis circle the park’s three stop signs
at the park’s south end stand two new saplings
one a slim magnolia planted last year
in Connie Rooke’s memory
 
the reason I’ve come here
under the magnolia a plaque commemorates
Connie’s open-heart theory
—the act of writing holds out of the promise
of an ever-deepening connection to the heart of life—
 
I splash a dram from my cup onto the sunwarm soil
recall her talk about invoking the you
Connie you were all heart with my writing back then
is it too late to tell you I’ve found it again
to say thank you for the eternal bright light
 
I want to stay in this chestnut shade
let more ants traverse my shirt
but I have to get back to the conference
where new poets sharp as scalpels will be reading
I will try to listen with a heart open as Kahlo’s
 
over the church storm clouds thicken in gridlock
I walk to the subway posting a photo
in my socials a friend who knew Connie too says
that park is like the Secret Garden
surrounded by a wall of city streets

You can download Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them for free on our website.