{"id":302,"date":"2012-02-10T15:40:40","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T15:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/?p=302"},"modified":"2012-02-11T02:03:40","modified_gmt":"2012-02-11T02:03:40","slug":"balvenie-doublewood-with-the-flu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/2012\/02\/balvenie-doublewood-with-the-flu\/","title":{"rendered":"Balvenie Doublewood, With The Flu"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n

an ocean of scotch, imagine,
\nfuming raw honey flooding
\nthe plains of the earth<\/p>\n

think of casting nets into it,
\nspeaking in a secret cant
\nwith the men on those boats<\/p>\n

think of every red-rimmed eye
\nevery bleared face moving slow
\nat the sight, sighing themselves on<\/p>\n

but look closer, equip your
\npuny fumed mind with a lens,
\nan equation, the rupture of calculation<\/p>\n

it is a raging wild soup, beneath
\nisotopes lurk leptons, quarks,
\nfilaments of everything<\/p>\n

whose spin is not spin; galliardes
\nof meaning, boson and antiproton:
\nthe teeming immigrants of the underworlds’<\/p>\n

uncertainty, not knowing your feet
\non solidity, the movements of your eye, the pang
\nof missing, of empty space everywhere<\/p>\n

this world you are convinced you see, the one
\nyou think we share, I have not seen, it is a
\ncrust, I cannot speak your kant and<\/p>\n

unfixed it falls apart, this liquor may be
\nart, and perhaps we should set keel to breakers,
\nbreathe deep and fall into the mind-murk<\/p>\n

of fabricated absolutes, in a world without
\nwhere blind men teem after chryselephantines, floating
\nin the intoxicating haze of the world<\/p>\n

— Montreal, 1999<\/p>\n

\n

When I studied with David Solway, one of the exercises we did in our course was to taste Scotch — Balvenie Doublewood, to be precise — and take notes about how it tasted to us. The object of the experiment was to demonstrate that — in writing, as in whiskey — individuals will have variations on what they find, how their palettes are attuned to noticing, but that themes will emerge nonetheless; that, indeed, there are aspects of a text that can be discussed “objectively.” We then had to turn our notes into the bones of a poem, and this is what I produced.<\/p>\n

Here are my actual tasting notes from the whiskey itself (dated 11 Jan 2000):<\/p>\n

Gord\u2019s Balvenie Doublewood (12 yrs) Tasting Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Colour:<\/strong> raw honey
\nNose:<\/strong> not harsh; slightly sweet but insidious
\nBody (\u201cmouth feel\u201d):<\/strong> full; sharp on the edges and smooth in the middle.
\nPalate:<\/strong> powerful; rich and slow with swirling layers.
\nFinish:<\/strong> dizzying; flare with long and slow decrescendo; I\u2019m still dizzy.
\nScore:<\/strong> 1×1033<\/sup><\/p>\n

Apparently I was impressed, though I did not proceed to get into Scotch whiskeys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar an ocean of scotch, imagine, fuming raw honey flooding the plains of the earth think of casting nets into it, speaking in a secret cant with the men on those boats think of every red-rimmed eye every bleared face moving slow at the sight, sighing themselves on but look closer, equip your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-canada"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-4S","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}