Echosystem: Poems and Poem Cycles

Bob Lincoln is the director of acquisitions at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

Roughly half of these poems were commissioned for publication,
broadcast, or recital. In this collection, they are preceded by notes
that detail the poet’s sources of inspiration. One tells us the cycle
of poems was inspired by the life and recordings of Glenn Gould. For the
most part, these notes provide little information that could not come
from the poems themselves.

But the poems need these crutches. They are generally poems of the
moment—topical, journalistic in scope and depth, clearly articulated,
but ordinary and commonplace; they are sad where conventional wisdom
declares it appropriate to be sad, sly where it is clever to be so, and
often anticlimactic in that they refer to people and events rather than
demonstrate them. Most of them struggle to say anything memorable. The
subject of “The writer as prophet for profit” is a rhymer who
flaunts his intellect and is out of touch with the real world. Strecker
dismisses him as a gutless liar who will be bypassed by posterity. There
is nothing wrong with taking up one page in a book to write this kind of
poem, but it is another thing to pass judgment without showing the
reader how that conclusion was reached. In other poems, where Strecker
does manage to create believable subjects, the picture drawn is an
outline. These poems are easy to read, easy to understand—and easy to
forget.