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Joseph Sherman's newest book, American Standard and Other Poems, ends with a lie. The short biographical note that closes the collection says, "Joseph Sherman is a man of few words." Joe is not, in fact, known for reticence. Friends know him for amiable, occasionally cantankerous chatter marked by off-beat humour. And over many years, he put thousands of words to work shaping ARTSAtlantic magazine.
But those who know Joe only through his poetry can be excused for thinking him a man of "few words." American Standard is his first collection since 1989's Shaping the Flame: Imagining Wallenberg, a haunting sequence of poems about Raoul Wallenberg, whose actions during the Holocaust may have saved over 100,000 lives. Shaping the Flame stands as an underrated accomplishment in Canadian poetry.
American Standard is what Joe describes as "a miscellany," collecting poems written over fifteen years, including reflections on his father, conversations overheard or imagined, reveries and anti-reveries on the romantic and erotic, further reflections on the Holocaust, and reflections on more recent and more ordinary human atrocities.
Joe's poems often tell stories; one poem, "Charlottetown, Saturday 10 AM" has even been anthologized as a short story. "If it were written as running lines," Joe says, "it would not pass as a true short story. In poems, you leave spaces-metaphysical and otherwise. . . . it's easier to pull off minimalism. Even relatively dense poetry is sparer than most prose." Joe admits, too, to a "weakness" for the ambiguity poems allow: "I enjoy poems in which there's more than one intended meaning possible."
In Joe's poems, character and place are important. The diversity in the dramatis personae of American Standard attests to Joe's penchant for writing in third person. "`I' poems make you read more carefully," he says. "There's a persona directly in your view. Third person frees you to say things that could be self-serving or troubling if they were all attached to the same person."
Poems of place play to Joe's interest in themes of belonging. "I'm not creating the poems to honour a sense of place. I'm not claiming it as a geographical, sociopolitical reality," he says. While he doesn't aim to create characters with "local colour," he would argue for the verity of the voices his readers will overhear; but his are not poems of "home." "Strictly speaking, I don't feel I have a home," Joe reflects. "Where I grew up [in Cape Breton] has no pull on me now. I belong on PEI as much as anywhere."
In the past, Joe's poetry has inspired varied responses-including dramatizations and paintings. It seems appropriate that Joe's poetry has been taken up in other art forms. "All people who create are artists," he says, "and all artists are connected by the creative process. . . . When I was working with ARTSAtlantic, it felt natural to be working on visual art as well as composition and theatre and dance, because I personally feel connected. I can't draw or paint, but I like the creative process as a whole."
In his creative processing, one hopes that Joe won't take to heart his biographer's allotment of "few words." He has taken others' ascriptions to heart before. He first felt free to call himself a poet when "called a poet by someone who had the authority to do so." (The authority was NB poet Alfred Bailey.) "Being a poet," Joe says, "is integral to my sense of self-which is a blessing and a curse, because I feel a dearth of selfhood if I'm not producing." Joe admits he is not prolific. "I'll have to trade on this new book for another five or ten years, most likely," he says. But in American Standard he has much to trade on: story poems and poetry of ideas; personal and fictive characters; poems of place and no place. The few words he selects for his poems from his farther-ranging conversation are his best few.