Adam Sol
Author photo of Adam Sol. Sol is wearing a navy shirt, and his head is tilted slightly toward the camera’s right. He is posed before a gradient black backdrop, with light shining from the camera’s right, growing darker on the other side.
Biography
Adam Sol was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. After earning degrees in various parts of the United States, he and his wife moved to Toronto around the turn of the century. Sol’s fifth collection of poetry, Broken Dawn Blessings, was published in 2021 by ECW Press. His previous collections include Jeremiah, Ohio, a novel in poems that was shortlisted for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry in 2008; and Crowd of Sounds, which won the award in 2004. He has published fiction, scholarly essays, and reviews for a variety of publications, and in 2016 launched a blog called How a Poem Moves (https://howapoemmoves.wordpress.com), which was transformed into a book by ECW Press in 2019. He is the Coordinator of the Creative Expression & Society Program at Victoria College, University of Toronto, and lives in Toronto with his wife, Rabbi Yael Splansky, and their three sons.
Poetics Statement
“My poetics is always in conflict. On the one hand, I’ve had a pretty thorough education in American Modernism, and I work in academia, so I value complexity, allusion, the gaps in meaning that generate mystery and music. On the other hand, I feel a deep conviction that poetry, like all art, is ultimately a kind of conversation with its audience. Admittedly it’s a specific kind of conversation, with special conventions and traditions, and poetry is perhaps at its best when it flouts the conventions of other kinds of language and does things that only poetry can do. But while I like to think of myself as an allusive poet, who leaves hints and trinkets hidden on the trail that might bring pleasure to an astute reader, I do not usually think of myself as a difficult poet, whose work values density or mystery above all. My poems want to be understood, to amuse, to connect. This conflict – between the insider who wants to draw on esoteric knowledge, and to impress his fellow mandarins; and the solo performer whose primary desire is to evoke a genuine response in an open-hearted readership – this conflict, or maybe the effort to resolve this conflict, is a productive problem in all my work, no matter its subject.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Engagement
The young man knows he’s going to die today, but he’s wrong.
The other young man figures the army is the best way to improve his life, but he’s wrong.
They both think their weapons will protect them, but they’re wrong.
They both believe their prayers will help.
Their commanders have intentions and intelligence, but they’re wrong.
We’ve heard the story before. It’s wrong.
The news will document it, but it will be wrong.
The medium, the reception, the commentary, the commercial break.
The explosion will exceed the necessity of the occasion.
The exchange of fire will be unbalanced.
The response will be disproportionate.
The reporter is factually incorrect, morally misinformed.
The clear typeface and perfect binding are misleading.
The reader is uncomfortably and inappropriately implicated.
The tranquil mind is insufficient to the task.
The young men, necks dirty and damp, advance.
Blessing for Twitter
Before I am fully a person
I want to know what great
horror happened in the night.
The icon’s head
is too thick for its hopeful wings
but responds to my thumb
like a faithful servant of the Eternal.
Give me insult and dogs,
give me west coast results
and a drunk self-own from B at 3 am.
Give me the stream of those I admire
who have been fighting all night
for truth, and the maniacs who hate
everything they can’t touch.
Concentrate, NIMBY. Today, do
some work that is not
fuelled by rage. But first,
do some work with rage.
Just outside, a robin cackles
its first bad joke of the day.
Gray unruly dawn begins
to interfere with the clear
loud light in my palm.
Dwarf
I grew up with Pluto as a planet. And now I’m twenty-five, I turn around and Pluto’s no longer a planet. I gotta find that guy and elbow that guy in the nose.
~ Ron Artest, a.k.a. Metta World Peace
For one day I will not be ironic about the power of art.
For one day I will try not to be ironic about the power of art.
Tonight the President will use his best rhetoric
to make a case for more: more blood, more debt.
I will sit in my love seat and wait for insight.
I will detect this insight by way of an inner ear organ
that knows – that believes it knows – insight when it hears it.
My inner ear likes the President’s rhetoric: more effort, more death.
Sometimes it sounds like insight.
At other times it sounds like a man’s voice in search of insight.
For me, for my inner ear,
the sound of this searching
is as close to insight as is usually available.
In other news, Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet
by the IAU’s Working Group on the Definition of a Planet.
It has something to do with lop-sidedness
and something to do with lack of influence:
“Bodies that dominate their neighborhoods ‘sweep up’
asteroids, comets, and other debris, clearing a path along their orbits.
By contrast, Pluto’s orbit is somewhat untidy.”
And so the children weep because on their cartoon
maps of the solar system, Pluto the Ninth Planet
has been replaced with an unhappy face.
They write pleas to their congressmen, who can do nothing.
But today I have promised to stand by the claims of art,
to believe in things that,
while as far from the tables of power as Pluto is from Poughkeepsie,
to believe that they may have, that they may,
they may, they may, they may may may may.
Fire and desperation and hunger and belief. How to account for them?
How to measure their significations?
What can the cock-eyed orbit of Pluto teach us about our earthly sufferings?
Chen Li wrote, “Traveling in the family of poetry
is the most substantial and warmest link
on the lonesome journey in the universe.” If Mr. Li
wants to learn about loneliness, he should go to Pluto,
whose orbit extends to 7.4 billion kilometers from the sun,
and where there is no poetry,
though plenty is hurled hopefully up on its behalf.
It is a truism that, like a child, art has no
inherent use, and is often a draw on our resources.
As my grandfather once wrote, “Why do men write poems?
Why do men live?”
In those days, ‘men’ meant ‘everyone,’
but recently the masculine general
has been declared a dwarf pronoun
by the IAU’s Working Group on the Definition of Pronouns.
It will be a long winter on Pluto.
One hundred years, roughly.
Here it is the season of fallen fledglings.
They litter the sidewalks of this bulbous city,
some attracting flies,
some cheeping stupidly,
asking for help from parents
who understand the truth
and have begun their mourning rituals.
Sometimes storekeepers scoop the birds up
into shoeboxes and try to save them.
It’s hard not to believe that Pluto
would be insulted by its recent re-classification as a dwarf,
which puts it on par with Eris, the Goddess of Discord.
Discord is only halfway to Hell, but it’s also bigger.
Meanwhile art has been declared a dwarf pursuit
by the IAU’s Working Group on the Definition of Pursuits.
No. I have promised.
We are moon-makers.
We take balls of ice
and blow on them until
they seem to hover and spin.
Sometimes they achieve
an untidy presence
that the President may refer to
when he helplessly casts about –
more debt, more death –
looking for a way to explain.
Pluto has three known moons:
Hydra, a monster.
Charon, the ferryman to oblivion.
And Nix, his mother, who is Oblivion.
Even Oblivion has an orbit.
Even Oblivion bends the light.
Broken Dawn Blessings: https://ecwpress.com/products/broken-dawn-blessings
Crowd of Sounds: https://www.amazon.ca/Crowd-Sounds-Adam-Sol/dp/0887846882
Jeremiah, Ohio: https://www.amazon.ca/Jeremiah-Ohio-Adam-Sol/dp/0887847919
How a Poem Moves: https://ecwpress.com/products/how-a-poem-moves