Mercedes Eng, Mercenary English

address to the city

project civil city i call you out

reduce homelessness by half?

half measure don’t do for this half breed

most liveable city i call you out

jamie graham, jim chu i call you out
anne drennan, catherine galliford

former police and rcmp spokespersons

for your complicity while living in a

woman’s body

i call you out women

i call all you motherfuckers out

every

single

one

of

you

who looked away

while women were murdered

left right and centre

in this dream city

this gold mountain city

with its cold coal heart

i call you out

There have been numerous responses in poetry to the past decade of missing and murdered women in Vancouver, but little as powerful as the poem “address to the city” that opens Vancouver poet and activist Mercedes Eng’s first trade poetry collection, Mercenary English (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2013). The piece is an angry, righteous and incensed variation on the poem/chant bpNichol composed out of his own sense of municipal disappointment, “You are city hall my people,” but with a push and a purpose ten-by-tenfold: “i call you out[.]” Providing an opening salvo to the collection as a whole, Eng quickly establishes the tone of Mercenary English as a book of rage, frustration, grief and a call to action, as well as a critique of government inaction, social imbalances and those that have allowed and even encouraged the silence of the disappeared. As the poem/section “knuckle sandwich” opens:

lawyer said

serial killer suffered

a miscarriage of justice

let the women carry this miscarriage of justice on their backs

let them give birth to this miscarriage of justice

Or the second section, that includes:

violence: the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; actions or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom

words are confusing

Is “property damage” violence?

Are “persons” and “property” the same thing?

What’s the one for the big men dressed in boots and helmets, holding shields, holding assault rifles

Through the three sections that make up Mercenary English—“knuckle sandwich,” “February 2010” and “autocartography”—she composes a wide and complex canvas, stretching the poem sequence/fragment to discuss and critique a number of issues focused in and around Vancouver, including the “tentcity” of the Woodward’s Squat, B.C.’s “Highway of Tears” and Ontario’s “Highway of Heroes,” and the decades of murdered and missing women around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, as well as the Robert Pickton trial. And Eng certainly isn’t the first poet to deal with such material—Sachiko Murakami wrote about the representations of missing and murdered women in her home city, and the city's most infamous neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side in her first poetry collection, The Invisibility Exhibit (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), as did Vancouver poet Shannon Stewart in her Penny Dreadful (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2008), not to mention the issue of West Coast Line that Vancouver writer and editor Anne Stone also edited on the complex issues around representation and the tragedy of the missing and murdered women (another issue focused on Vancouver’s infamous “Woodsquat”)—but Eng’s is one of the most vibrant, lively and powerful works I’ve seen so far, able to utilize both a sense of language play and an unapologetic empathy and rage at such an emotionally complex and difficult subject matter.

representation of hooker

i am not a dismembered head with

a pair of hands inside it

i am not dna evidence on a farm

i am not a mugshot

i am not a pair of legs for you to

look at and buy

i am not a subject/object of your intellectual discourse

i am not a future you fear for your

wayward teenage daughters

i breathe

i shout

and

i get mad

someone told me

my anger is a gift

and

I’m gonna knock your teeth out with this gift. (“autocartography”)

Ina piece he wrote on Eng’s work in Lemonhound (posted April 19, 2011), Vancouver writer and critic Clint Burnham references Eng’s two self-published chapbooks, including February 2010, a publication he says was produced during the Winter Olympics. It suggests that the three sections of the collection might have been originally composed as self-contained units (her Vancouver125 bio lists her as the author of the chapbooks February 2010 and knuckle sandwich), but as part of a larger conversation, one tied together, in part, by the opening poem. Burnham writes that Eng is “… one of the brightest young writers on the Vancouver scene, whose work combines tart insights into gender and racial relations, a playfulness of language not always found in political poetry, and a fine ear.” He continues:

What works so well here is the reader’s uncertainty about when Eng is sampling an ad and when it’s her voice. That’s the point – the lack of difference between what is surely an advertisement for a police academy (perhaps the Justice Institute in New Westminster, B.C.) and what is Eng’s own commentary. Perhaps “It’s calling someone”, probably the slashes (used throughout the chapbook); but then the actual quoted statement, framed in quotation marks, makes us wonder if the first verse-paragraph is a quotation. Perhaps Eng just made it up, make a fake sample like Dr Dre used to with those wicked flutes on The Chronic.

Mercy’s second chapbook is untitled; it has an image of brass knuckles screenprinted on the cover. It is concerned with, on the one hand, B.C.’s “Highway of Tears” (a northern highway along which dozens of women, mostly aboriginal, have been found murdered), and Ontario’s “Highway of Heroes” (a stretch of highway along which the bodies of Canadian soldiers who died in Afghanistan are driven). So we have the institutionalization of B.C.’s missing/murdered women (in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as well as the north) and the commemoration of war heroes. Again, Eng works through appropriation, in a brilliant sampling of war reporting that is pitch-perfect:

Paul Strand: We’re, I would say, dozens of miles from Baghdad. I just talked to our commander, and he asked that I not be too specific about direction or distance; I think you can understand that. So far, everywhere we’ve gone we have seen artillery ahead of us and then artillery behind, and we’re getting reports that there’s fighting in all of the cities we’ve been through. So, I guess if this were the Old West, I’d say there were Injuns ahead of us, Injuns behind us, and Injuns on both sides too.

Through her use of sampling and the fragment, Eng knows that words themselves have power, and hers is a voice that needs to be encouraged by those who need to hear it, and feared by those who wish to suppress it.

(another) very short story, up at Readers' Digest Canada!

Thanks to Zach Wells, I have a short short story up at Readers' Digest Canada (online only), alongside little fictions by Anne Stone, Jen Pendergast, Peter Jaeger, Rachel Lebowitz and Ashley-Elisabeth Best, as well as a ticker of twitter-feed of others' stories, hashtag #rdshorts. Thanks, Zack and RD Canada!

The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley

The closest equivalent I can think to Toronto poet Kyle Buckley’s first poetry collection, The Laundromat Essay (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) is to some of the experiments in online hyperlink poetry, a 1990s form that, for the most part, didn’t really go anywhere, one word or a phrase moving off into another direction, another poem (think, too, of those “choose your own adventure” novels you used to read as a kid). In this piece, the first thing you notice is the structure, and the second is the worry that it’s all a trick with no substance, before seeing the poem for its leagues of depth, for what it is. This is a poem that turns back on itself, with the poem on page thirty-nine reading:

The suit was hanging a little high up on my wall, but I needed something to wear, so I got a small ladder out to get it down. The ladder was around because of the work I was doing around my apartment, while my clothes were all at the laundromat because I’d just gotten home from a trip and had nothing left to wear and the laundromat owner wouldn’t let me back into his laundromat to get them because he said it was too late, they were closed. But he had his own reasons for not letting me back in.

In bold, the word “work” leads a line to the previous page, the left side where your eye might have slipped first, and finding:

I thought you and I should understand the life of furniture better than we did, so I brought some wooden beams down from the ceiling, which I could use to build a table. I started to tell you that we preferred rain in the house to mineral water.

Not that this is mere trick, but works instead as an added layer to the main thread. Buckley’s first collection is a poetry that references the merging with criticism, blurring the boundaries between, and a poem with a narrator and structures of story-telling. Through new elements, the original can only deepen in purpose and structure, like the blurring between poetry, fiction and performance that occurred in parts of Montreal of the 1990s (in the works of Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Anne Stone and Dana Bath, for example), or the ongoing blurrings between creative writing and critical or cultural thinking (including David McGimpsey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Nathalie Stephens, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Aaron Peck, Erin Mouré and Anne Carson). On the surface, without all the asides, this is a straightforward (somewhat) narrative of a story-teller telling us a particular story of his experiences in and around his neighbourhood laundromat. Is it as simple as this? What is the purpose to all these asides?

What is the purpose of poetry written using “essay” in the title? Buckley starts the poem with a quote by Steve McCaffery, already leading us in a particular direction, quoting his line “The disappointment of poetry.” The first page of Buckley’s text writes:

I know the owner of the laundromat but can’t remember his name, which could be for many reasons. He is closing up the laundromat as I get there.

Possibly the reason for forgetting his name cannot be sought to any special feature of the name itself, but is explained when I remember the subject we were discussing before I was trying to convince him to let me into the laundromat, which I am late getting to. The laundromat owner was asking me about the whereabouts of his son, Hoopy, whom I am familiar with a little but don’t feel comfortable discussing with the laundromat owner since it isn’t my business. If I try to think of the name of the laundromat owner, this new train of thought, I’m sure, would disturb its predecessor, since I am now interested in trying to get the laundromat owner to let me past him into the laundromat, which is now closed. I can no longer regard the fact that I forget the name of the laundromat owner as mere chance.

Is this a poetry that has somehow renounced itself? I already know that Vancouver fiction writer Aaron Peck has renounced poetry (and Toronto writer Brian Fawcett did too, before him, and then managed to write more on his renouncing than he wrote actual poems). In The Laundromat Essay, prose-poems fit inside other prose poems; there is the main text and a series of small offshoots, each section a series of hubs, central points along a linear line. Where is this essay going? A retail domestic poem, is this any laundromat we already know about? Is this the coin laundry on College Street in Toronto, just beside Cafe Diplomatico, former hangout of Victor Coleman and the late Daniel Jones, as well as various generations of film crews?

Is this an essay, a poem, or a novel? Or does the question even begin to matter? As the poem deepens, so too, does the story, and the structures within. Is this a poem, a fiction, an essay? On different pages, different sections, my answer would shift, and by the end, I would say all of the above. Does the question still matter? Either way, it’s a damned interesting book.

12 or 20 questions: with Anne Stone

Anne Stone has taught creative writing at Capilano College and at Concordia University. She is an editor at Matrix Magazine, and has an imprint at Insomniac Press (Wayside Editions) that focuses on publishing first fictions (this month saw the release of Louis Rastelli's debut novel, A Fine Ending). Together with Amber Dean, she's guest editor of the current special issue of the journal West Coast Line on representations of murdered and missing women. Her latest novel, Delible (Insomniac Press, April 2007), tells the story of Melora Sprague, a 15-year-old girl whose sister has gone missing. This novel offers a glimpse into a sustained experience of uncertainty and, in so doing, explores how our identities exist in those traces we leave behind.

Her first novel, jacks (DC Books 1998), is experimental, conveying aspects of the story through the book's design. Part fictional memoir and part fairy-tale, jacks tells the story of a young girl whose fabulated world is an interlacing of myths, rhymes, incantations and memories. Her second novel, Hush (Insomniac Press 1999), is set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. This lyrical narrative traces the intertwined lives of two generations of women at a local hotel in De'ath Sound. In 2005, Hush was the subject of a Masters of Arts in English (Julie Boulanger's "What Language is this: A Study of Abjection in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Anne Stone's Hush").

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It meant a lot to see that project given tangible form. That's something I'll always be grateful to DC Books for (though it did come awful close to having a clown's head on the cover). I consider first books to be small miracles; I think about the way they are produced and it's amazing to me, such work, without any hint (most times) that there is anyone out there listening.

2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Vancouver since 2000. As for geography, it's not landscape so much as the cultural threading of this place that influences my work; the biggest connection, of course, is with absence, with disappearance, and with the shape my theoretical concerns and writing practice has taken these last years (though that work did begin when I was in Montreal). Race and gender make impacts as well, of course, in all of our works, whether we think about how we are positioned or not.

3 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I always think in terms of longer projects -- if only because I need to form a kind of theoretical backcloth for the fiction, one which seeps into the surface -- and so far, longer narrative has offered me the scope to do both of these things at once.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Other people's readings are part of my creative process, for sure. My own tend to be a distraction, though do I see readings as a moment in which I can understand how the work is received -- and that's a rare experience for a writer -- to watch it taken in.

5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

An editor offers a formalization of a certain kind of conversation, I think. I worked with an editor on Delible, with Jon Paul Fiorentino, an amazing writer, organizer, and poet. It was very much of a piece with the conversations I'd had and been having with a small circle of writers with whom I share my writing and writing concerns -- only more instilled, condensed -- so I really appreciated the opportunity to work with Jon. The previous two books were without formal editors (though, with my first book, Robert Majzels was incredibly generous with his time, and gave me an in-depth reading of jacks that really clarified my thinking).

6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

In certain ways, it's just as hard. You still need to search for the precise form for a given project, and you always start at sum zero. But it's easier in other ways. I've come to accept that, before I find a project, I'll noodle a lot. Too, I now have a sense of the minimum density required for a serious project. That said, at this moment I'm noodling, and while I love the feeling of being onto something you can't quiet articulate yet, I'm already hungry for the feeling of total emersion in something, that filter that announces itself in all of your predilections, what you hunt out to read, to see, to hear.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Years. Years and years. I guess I'm not much of a pear freak.

8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

If needed, to create the context for the work to be read, along with the work itself. When reading with other folks, to be gracious enough not to go over your allotted time (nothing worse than listening to someone whose work you like go on for so long you begin to resent them). Too, in the early stages, to protect your project: To write for your first circle, for those real or imagined intimates who, early on, regard your work in a sustaining way.

9 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Hmm. Interesting. In my thinking, genres are a means. By this question, I might address moving from poetry to prose, but more relevant to me, I guess, is the movement, between the novels. There have been huge shifts in concerns and for me, that's all about finding a form (perspective, language, etc) that somehow distills the particular kind of knowing that a given novel embodies.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Noodling is, for me, the most undisciplined part of the process (sort of like being a teenager: I follow impulses). As soon as I'm onto something, I always spend the last hour of each day on something related -- rereading draft, reading related works -- feeding, basically. The next morning, I'm up and re-reading the last thing I wrote, combing through until I snag on something, a small space opens up, and that crevice becomes a chapter. Novel writing as fractal process.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Everywhere, everything. Visual and auditory arts. The street corner. Voices on the bus. I'm just a giant sponge, ruminating all the time.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

This latest book makes the most feints at straight narrative: It passes for or approaches mainstream fiction, but frustrates expectations when it comes to resolution and movement. Delible is in some ways the most linear and straightforward of my works, less coded. That, for me, felt like a real risk. But an important one.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

For the latest, Delible, the visual arts were huge. I looked to the work of Doris Salcedo, her installation "Unland." The hinging of the two tables with human hair, for me, communicated something about the sisters I write about in the novel, something about fragility, and the danger of being approached, of being seen. Or, to invert that, when you come close to Salcedo's work, close enough to really see it, you put her piece at risk. There is something incredibly perceptive and powerful about all of her works, something that speaks forward, from its moment of construction, to the transient moment in which you are, right now, seeing her work.

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

The one thing I really want to see (and hear): the northern lights.

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I'd like to be a mathematician.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It's something I've always done to make sense of the world, though it never occurred to me that it was my practice: Someone else had to point it out to me. As soon as it was pointed out though, something clicked: I dropped out of law school and started writing a novel. (I had to spend three days considering my life from the perspective of geological eras in order to quit. Good thing U of T law school is so close to the dinousaur exhibit at the ROM).

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I love the short experimental films of Maya Deren (the ones that are less laden with symbols). The dreamy weightiness articulated through musculature, the repetitions, the craggy breaths. I love the work of Salcedo: Again, the weight of concrete, the sublime 'wrongness' of the images -- a lace blouse 'floating' in concrete, or enmeshed with furniture. Absolutely and beautifully awry. In terms of writing, I am very much about the kinds of questions David Chariandy poses in his first novel, Soucouyant -- about interruption, memory, what we carry there, and absence. For similar reasons, I am excited to see Jenny Sampirisi's first novel in print (it'll be released next September from Insomniac Press).

18 - What are you currently working on?

I've just returned to grad school after 10 years as a teacher. So, I'm taking Criminology at SFU and working on a book length non-fiction project about missing women. At the same time, I am making forays into longer fiction pieces (waiting for one to gather up enough weight to announce that it owns me for the next five to ten years).

12 or 20 questions archive

Anne Stone's Delible

Very different from her first two novels is Anne Stone's third, Delible (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2007). A Montreal author working the boundaries between fiction, poetry and performance, Stone's first two novels appeared nearly back-to-back, with her first small novel, Jacks (Montreal QC: DC Books, 1998) published just a few months before her second book, Hush (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1999). After moving to Vancouver a few years ago, she started working on her large novel about missing children, and has been quietly working for quite some time, releasing fragments in side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2002) and in The Capilano Review, among other venues. Compared to the language from the first two books, the language of Delible is far less lush, less lyric, moving the story through the story itself, predominantly of how a fifteen-year-old girl in the town of Streetsville in the 1980s copes with the disappearance of her sister, barely a year older than she is. How does a teenage girl cope? The main character, Melora (known as "Lora"), for all of her teenaged reactions and hormones, is a girl who sees the bad but manages to find the good in just about everyone, eventually. It's a quality that comes even further out after the strange disappearance of her sister Melanie (known as "Mel"), which her single mother and almost everyone else immediately presumes is simply the "troubled" teenage girl Mel running away from home, yet again.

Melissa Anne Sprague and Melora Ann Sprague. Melora and Melissa. Our mom named us so that we would sound alike. Of course, people were always shortening our names. I would’ve liked it if they shortened me to Mel too, but they always called me Lora and called Melissa Mel, as if they wanted to distinguish us more than we would ourselves. Mel was the first born, and so, was supposed to be named for our grandmother, Penny, but Mom didn’t want to name her for so little money. "Why don’t we just call her Chintzy and be done with it?" she said. And so, my sister was named Melissa. Melissa Ann Sprague.

Delible works from that singular point and holds there, moving through the rest of the book in a strange kind of pattern that isn’t holding and isn’t really furthering, moving from that singular point of Mel's disappearance. Essentially, Delible is a book about forgiveness; working back and forth through the time following Mel's disappearance and flashbacking to the events that might have led up to her "leaving," the main focus of the book comes through the voice of Lora (with others, such as the girls' mother and their paternal grandmother as well), trying to figure out the now-empty space where her sister used to be. Not entirely suburb or urban or rural, the family lives on the edges of 1980s Toronto in the now-defunct Streetsville, a city that only seems to be referenced as the place where the subway is, and where Mel's belongings are eventually discovered, leaving Lora convinced that her sister hasn’t left, but has been taken; to her deepening frustration, it takes longer for anyone else to either realize or admit this, leaving Lora lost in her own spreading and singular darkness, with very little for her to turn to. Originally from Streetsville herself (Anne Stone even attended Streetsville High School, the same alma mater as Red Green creator/counterpart Steve Smith), the place itself has long since been overcome by Mississauga, once a suburb outside of Toronto, which itself fell prey to the Toronto Supercity.

In some ways, it wasn’t Mel who was gone, it was everyone who hadn’t loved her
that was gone. After Mel, my field of vision became unstable. I became prone to drift. In all things. It was an effort, a real effort, to focus in and talk to people. The ones I clung to were Mom and Uncle Dave, Val and the Woodsman.

The world that went on without Mel in it became dim. I could list the things that were real to me on one hand. Mel's old glasses were real, and so were the people I could see with the glasses, the signs of hurt eaten into, made soft, by her powerful lens.

Nobody and nothing else mattered.

When I missed her badly enough, I could put on the glasses and we could look out at the world together. I could sense her, the moment I stopped seeing everything clearly and my world clouded up like hers would when she would take her glasses off each night before slipping into bed.

After she was gone, my sister and I were more alike than ever. We shared the same lens and we shared the same language. My experiences did not happen apart from her. My experiences did not happen apart from her. I could not, in my head, split off from Mel because she was gone. To think about Mel meant my experiences, even those without her, were bound up with her still.

For all of the beautiful lush language of her earlier works, Stone's writing has always embraced a particular kind of darkness, writing about illness, insanity, suicide and other dark threads throughout almost everything she has written, but always with a particular kind of light somehow seeing its own way through it, no matter how dark it might get. How does an author or a character find light, in such a darkness?

With all the media attention given to the horrors of the Pickton trial, the west coast is overwrought with the issue these days, and apparently Stone is co-editing an issue of West Coast Line dealing with some of these same issues of disappearing women that is due out any day now.