The Capilano Review 3.20

LC: Is that a poetry credo emerging in a couple pages of In Flux where you step out of your critic’s role and explicitly write “as a poet” (In Flux 203)? It starts for me with “somatic markers” that when articulated in language, “we associate,” you say, “with the becoming of subjectivity” (203).

RM: Your question is not an easy one for me to unravel. You’re citing from an essay on Rita Wong where I focus on the body as a living organism. The body generates a complex of affects in our daily lives, and these often go unnoticed because it is treated as an object to be appropriated, glaringly so in violent confrontations, rather than as a complex life network of somatic processes.

            I’m approaching some very tricky areas of poetic thought here, but as a poet my understanding is that the normalized discursive frames through which the world makes sense to us, as well as for us—in other words, again, what-goes-with-out-saying—are enabled in the exclusion of somatic contingencies, including the finitude of organic processes. In our corporate capitalist culture of commodities the body becomes the target of so many discursive operations from seemingly benign advertising to the extreme violence of warfare, and in between these huge corporate interest in biotechnological knowledge.

            Language plays a crucial yet mostly transparent role in sustaining the normalization of dominant representations, but when language is rendered opaque or made otherwise non-transparent as a channel of communication, for instance in poetic texts, we begin to apprehend the processes of becoming that have the potential not only to expose the limits of normalization but to transform them, we hope progressively, so that they are more inclusive than they were before.

            Here I’m talking about the creative process in general, but in some instances the “becoming of subjectivity” emerges in a more shared sense when dominant representations are seemingly spontaneously exceeded or undermined by what is then a newly identified group. The term “redress,” for instance, constituted a Japanese Canadian group in creating a movement to seek justice for the past injustices related to mass uprooting, dispossession, and internment. Perhaps this is a way of thinking about the current Idle No More movement that has emerged through the coalitional action of young aboriginal activists who are motivated by the words Idle No More. By responding to the call for action in the phrase they have exposed the dominant representations of aboriginality as extensions of a colonial system with a history as long as the Canadian state’s existence. But then again, the shift from writing a poem to a social movement may be too far-fetched a move.

The Capilano Review 3.20 (spring 2013) opens with a small section on the Vancouver poet, critic, bibliographer, teacher and activist Roy Miki, including a new poem, “Please,” an interview conducted by poet and critic Louis Cabri, as well as a review essay by Cabri on Miki’s Mannequin Rising (New Star, 2011). Miki’s contributions to literature and culture have been explored and celebrated on more than a few occasions over the past few years, including through the recent anthology Tracing theLines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour ofRoy Miki (eds. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai and Christopher Lee; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2012). Where the anthology focused on where Miki was and has been throughout his work as writer, critic, teacher and activist, this small feature in The Capilano Review focuses more on Miki’s current work, and what lies ahead. Cabri writes in his essay:

Levelling and redundancy-in-abundance, being dimensions of a capitalist economy, are qualities of consumer culture that emerge in MR. Levelling arises when a thing or process acquires exchange or market value. Redundancy-in-abundance, the way I’m using this phrase, refers to conditions of labour (“surplus” labour, a structural feature of capitalism) and products of labour (overproduction; planned obsolescence). In the second line, leveling and redundancy-in-abundance emerge through a structural homology between economics and language, and elsewhere in MR in the figure of the mannequin.

The issue also includes a small section edited/translated/compiled by Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure, “A New Regard (Quebec and Acadia),” with pieces by Chantel Neveu (translated by Angela Carr), Steve Savage (translated by Erín Moure), Suzanne Leblanc (translated by Bronwyn Haslam), Daniel Canty (translated by Oana Avasilichioaei), Jean A. Baudot (translated by Angela Carr) and France Daigle (translated by Robert Majzels), as well as Angela Carr and Kate Eichhorn’s revealing piece, “A Gloss on The Writing Machine.” Moure’s explorations in translation over the years have been well documented, and her more recent writings on translation on Jacket2 are a must-read for anyone interested in the conversation between texts, and between languages. As Moure’s introduction writes:

Pre-eminent experimental writer Nicole Brossard has recently remarked in interviews (e.g. The Gazette, February 26, 2013) that, following a heyday in the 70s and 80s, experimental writing had left French-language poetry in Quebec in favour of “what was called The New Readability.” For a while, I and other translators felt this dearth in Quebec poetry of the type of experiments with forms, sounds, effects, meanings that writers such as Brossard had introduced into the culture. There were still experiments, of course, but they were much quieter in their torquings.

            In the last ten years, though, publishers such as the pioneering Le Quartanier, La Peuplade, and others have provided national (Quebec) and transnational forums for young writers who not only produce amazing risk-taking writing in French but collaborate across boundaries with Europeans, US Americans, and Canadians in English to produce further works, flows, excitements. Meanwhile, in L’Acadie in New Brunswick, across the Quebec border to the east, established writer France Daigle will soon see her monumental novel Pour Sûr appear in the English translation of Robert Majzels. I include her because what Quebec-Alberta writer Majzels chooses to translate is part of the endeavor of opening new possibilities in French, and thus in English. And one contributor, yes, is a ghost from where the past and future overlap: in the machine itself.

            The writers and translators (and one commentator) in this section are all worth watching, the writers in their own right and as translators, and the translators for their own writing as well. I feel privileged to work among them, and to lend my hand as translator in their midst. I hope you enjoy these foments and new directions in words from Acadia and Quebec—not the avant-garde but a New Regard.

Much of the work included in the section is quite spectacular, and breathes a new kind of life into the form of the Canadian prose poem, such as Suzanne Leblanc’s sequence, “P.’s House for Thinking,” that includes:

Choral V

It was an abstract house, a construction of the mind. I ordered my memory there by an ancient process of remembrance. My tongue sought its speech. My will was oratorical. I would be no less abstract than the discourse of the philosopher, whose oeuvre had convinced me, whose life I admired. I would be no less constructed than this memorization of my singular voice, where I had chosen to stay.

West servant’s room

First floor

Outside the features in the issue also includes new work by Toronto poet Lise Downe, “from Propositions.” New work by Downe is a rare occurence, and something worth noting, reading and almost celebrating. Another highlight is the collaboration by Ted Byrne and Christine Stewart, “from St Paul.” The second in her collaborations with Byrne, she has also published a recent title in collaboration with Toronto poet David Dowker, Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013). The cover to the new issue features a stunning Alutiiq mask, One of the Old Men (2003), by Alaskan artist Perry Eaton, and the issue includes a folio of photographs of others of his masks, as well as an interview conducted by Colin Browne:

Colin Browne: “Yellow Singer” has a very beautiful, quizzical look on his face, which, I confess, makes me see him as a poet.

Perry Eaton: I think I can understand that. “Yellow Singer” is a type of mask made to be danced, with a whistle that sends sound between the worlds.

CB: Please say more.

PE: I can only tell you so much. I’d heard stories about the wooden whistle that you hold in your mouth when you dance, but I didn’t appreciate how important the sound quality was. When you look at the masks in the Chateau Musée, in the Pinart collection, and when you turn them over, the back of the mask can reveal as much as the front. The insides of the round-holed singing masks are finished very smoothly in the mouth area, which suggests that the audio tone was very important. I think in a way these were tuned instruments, and the whistle used was a very controlled sound, but we’ve never found one so we don’t know. We’ve gone through the literature. You’ll read two hundred pages to glean a line. There’ll be one line that’ll give you a clue. You accumulate these single lines; you start to put them together and you get images.

Open Letter (Fourteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2012): Gail Scott, Sentences on the Wall

In the text which opens this collection, Renee Gladman raises the problem of writing about Gail Scott’s writing, the problem of making Scott’s sentences into objects of literary study. It is difficult, her text suggests, to say something about these sentences – and to do so using sentences. Gladman finds her utterances becoming impossibly layered as soon as she makes an attempt. The problem is not so much Scott’s sentences as the English sentence which, in Gladman’s experience, does not lend itself to thinking. Gladman’s solution is to narrate for us the process of drawing specific sentences from Scott’s novels on the walls of her living space, of turning them into “a geometry instead of a verbal consequence.” In her terms, she keeps on saying and drawing until eventually she has “made a complex observation and a picture-feeling.” I am reminded, here, of Guido Furci’s sense that although cinema is relevant to Scott’s work, “parallels with painting speaks more eloquently.” Gladman’s text is as much about her process of writing as about Scott’s sentences. It has the effect of critically reframing as collectively-authored, sentences usually taken to be individually-authored. What is more, by writing Scott’s sentences on the wall – as in a museum, an alley, a washroom or a project room – Gladman’s text turns them into public statements, with the potential to stand as counter-discourse.

             A special issue of Open Letter devoted to a specific writer works a little like Gladman’s text, citing and reframing that writer’s work, and foregrounding its conceptual purchase. The contributors to this issue – the majority of whom are themselves writers – responded to the call for texts with poems and essays. Their essays are not so much ‘about’ Scott’s writing as instances of how to read Scott and, especially, how to read alongside her. The poems engage in a kind of co-authorship, whereby fragments from Scott’s prose, an image or a phrase, become the occasion for more writing. Not surprisingly, the poems dispense with quotation marks. As Scott puts it in an interview with Corey Frost in the late 1990s, “we’re all quoting each other all the time anyway” (66). In the terms of Robert Glück, from a discussion of Kathy Acker’s practice of citation, “[a]ppropriation puts into question the place of the writer – in fact, it turns the writer into a reader” (“Long Note on New Narrative” 32). Appropriating Scott’s writing for new projects – social, textual and linguistic – the texts collected here turn writers into readers and critics into poets. Like Gladman’s sentences on the wall, they emphasize the collective and public status of writing. (Lianne Moyes, “Introduction”)

Guest-edited by Lianne Moyes in collaboration with Bronwyn Haslam comes the new issue of the critical journal Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2012), produced as “Sentences on the Wall,” an issue on the work of Montreal writer Gail Scott. Moyes is also the editor of Gail Scott: Essays on Her Works (Guernica Editions, 2002), and its interesting to see how her interest in Scott’s writing continues after such a project, furthering her own work with another. Given the fact that the same editor oversaw both projects, does this issue become a re-examination of her consideration of Scott after the first volume, a continuation or an update? One of the highlights of the issue has to be former Montreal writer Corey Frost’s exploration of Scott’s punctuation, “Punc’d: Towards a Poetics of Punctuation in the Novels of Gail Scott,” or the collaborative “Temporality, Genealogy, Secrecy: Gail Scott and the Obituary of Genre” by Angela Carr and KateEichhorn. A particular favourite was Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain’s “How Fiction Works: Gail Scott’s Heroine and The Obituary,” not just for how she speaks of Scott’s fiction, but on the mechanics of fiction, providing insight into her own writing, and in the possibilities of writing:

How does fiction work? What is the work or knowledge-making or deconstructing analysis that fiction can do? Harry Mathews reminds us that the fiction writer is not “’saying something’ to the reader”; rather, the writer must “do no more than supply the reader with the materials and … the space to create an experience” (7). Indeed he emphasizes that “of the writer and reader, the reader is the only creator” (7). The writer and reader are collaborators, and to establish a place for this, the writer must choose “as the innermost substance of” the writing, “a terrain unfamiliar” to both writer and reader (6). Furthermore, he argues “the unfamiliar matter the writer chooses in nothing else than his [or her] own story” (7). Of course this is not the familiar “publicity” story we tell about ourselves in casual conversation. Rather it is the story or stories of what has made us what we are. We find this story, he says, in our personal histories, in our bodies, and in our consciousness, by which he means, not merely awareness of things but “what you think and feel with.” Consciousness, he says does “not contain or withhold meaning; and consciousness itself has no meaning at all”; it is “the power to create meaning” (8-10). “What we long to know in our speculations about the stars,” he says, “surpasses merely something: We long to know everything. And in fact that consciousness is capable of exactly that: of knowing not only anything but everything” (10).

As Moyes wrote in her introduction, part of the appeal of such an issue is not only the range of essays on Scott’s works, but the tributes included as well, with poems from Fred Wah (from “Music at the Heart of Thinking”) and Camille Roy, as well as a short essay/tribute, “My Two Cents” (an earlier version of which appeared in How2 1.2), by Robert Glück that opens with the sentence, “Every aesthetics is an aesthetics of class.” He continues, writing:

In thinking about a poetics of class that knows itself, it’s instructive to look at the history of feminist poetics. In the first place (if you could call the sixties and early seventies the first place), an innovative feminist poetics seems to be disallowed. If you were going to make a feminist poem recognizable to feminists or to the avant-garde, feminism was content. Formally innovative poems founded on radical politics took their cues from Marxist and socialist critiques which did not include sexuality, gender, or, somehow, glass.

As Camille Roy writes of her “2 Miracle Plays,” “These poems are tributes to Gail Scott. They incorporate specific ideas from a talk ‘The Sutured Subject’ that she gave at the University of San Francisco in November 2009, as well as some lines taken from her latest novel, The Obituary. In her talk she explored the relation of history to the sentence, where history (and the dead) are encrypted in our language and the sentence itself becomes a kind of crypt for what has disappeared. The first ‘Miracle Play’ explores this relation, and uses the English future tense (“I will…”) with its expression of will for the future to highlight what Gail noted in her talk, that French lacks such a will for the future.” I reproduce the first of Roy’s “2 Miracle Plays” here:

The Sentence As Sentence

On the afternoon we are murdered

our story will become malodorous.

We will arrive at prison’s gate wan & hesitant

to show: no guilty conscience.

Stripped of false unities

& without will for the future

we’ll hold to the blaze of our wrong idea.

Its sullen rejoinder & refusal to admit defeat!

The light of custom will be our bodies.

Call this play: as density,

encrypted & insensible.

Until a new sentence rises: in layers, tender as cake.

Creatures as words: so much alive.

Whinnying in the slammer.

Despite her work and lengthy career as a writer, thinker and innovator, Gail Scott remains much admired and followed by other literary writers, but critically underrepresented. One can only hope that such a critical tribute and exploration could do worse than bring a new group of readers to her difficult and innovative ongoing work.

ongoing notes: some magazines;

Since I haven’t managed to find a good magazine store in Edmonton yet (and I refuse to go into Chapters), I've had to wait until Ottawa to get whatever magazines I think I've been missing (oh world! if only you would mail me more…)

Winnipeg MB: Rereading the issue of The New Quarterly a few days ago that Charlene Diehl (then still Charlene Diehl-Jones) edited on Robert Kroetsch (Volume XVIII, No. 1, spring 1998; I actually picked it up while looking for pieces on the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner) got me thinking of her again, wondering what she's been up to lately, and what she's been up to lately in her writing. How wonderful it was to see, not 24 hours later, her interview and new writing in Contemporary Verse 2 (Volume 30, No. 2, fall 2007).

to wake with perfect awareness of muscle, houses all in a row, questions sprinkled amongst the chairs. look back, little arrow, then step out, cross in full curiosity. the horizon is a nest around the blue egg of the sky, rings around the sun mark the beginnings of rest, the generous entry. everything is balance: yes is the only answer. wonder will refuse to unveil itself. up and down, it will say, side to side, lift one cross-hatched corner if you like. the trap door is somewhere, everyone will finally escape. the treasure is the map. sometimes all you can know is breath. (from "subliming")

The director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival the past few years, she has published a poetry collections and two chapbooks, as well as excerpts of a memoir. When do we get to see more work from Charlene Diehl, who, in the 1990s, was on the verge of doing just about everything?

Yes, most people who know my writing have encountered chunks of my manuscript, Out of Grief, Singing. When I first climbed back into language, I leaned into poetry. Memoir offered itself several years later—I suspect by then I was ready to visit the narrative dimensions of that loss and all the intersecting lives and meanings that shape my understanding of it. Prose is less bewildering to most people, that's a factor too. But I keep exploring this experience poetically—I think the genre itself gives me access to this story in deeper and more instructive ways. As a matter of fact, my most recent suite of poems is "lessons in dying: snow poems," written at a dozen year's distance. The specifics haven’t changed, but my understanding and engagement of them have.

These big events continue to inform a present, and once you're no longer shattered by loss, they can actually function as a powerful ground. Maybe grief is one of those psychic impediments that generates creativity? It's certainly been a powerful resource for me, and as the years pass, I'm less afraid of being broken open again and more curious to find how I might be hearing the shifting resonances. Writing shows me where I am.

An intriguing interview with someone I'd like to hear much more from, one of the lines that stayed with me was when she said "…from where I sit a lot of what would pass as poetry is barely engaged with the real work this genre is capable of performing." I couldn’t agree more.

The interview also has an interview with Toronto poet Steve McOrmond, whom I'm quite fond of, as well as some magnificent poems by Calgary writer Emily Carr. I'm taken very much by what Carr, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Calgary, is doing with these pieces; I like her line breaks, hesitations and dislocations.

air
c.d. wright, jeff derksen, lyn heijinian & nicole brossard

for those want

apple cheeks. enters
the living room

from the sleep side.

a practical person
arranges for her own

disappearance on several levels.

blue lifts; pink
deepens; clouds rise.

he, suddenly, impossibly,
saturates.

(it can be measured.)

just enough wind
to keep the flag flapping.

tactless, to insist
on being

a there.

instinct knows
where the international

boundaries are.

(which is like fruitskin
around fruit.)

a mad sum, absence.

And how much more can I keep saying about Sandra Ridley [see my note on her here]? I know she has her first chapbook coming out with Leaf Press next year; her first book, whenever it appears, is going to be kick-ass.

tumbler-snapper: able (two)

The Rio Motel in Socorro sells trinite souvenirs:
clip-on earrings with matching double-loop necklace.
Their check-in girl models her favourite set,
tempts the guests.

She will work there only six weeks.

~

A Santa Fe bank offers an incentive to any new customer,
a small sealed package with the label:

Do not hold close to the body for more than a day.

~

From Alamo's Alka Café, a new waitress writes the commission:

If the bombs aren’t harmful, why can't you detonate them any time,
not just when the wind is blowing the right direction?

~

A false dawn rises in L.A.

~

Lincoln Continentals jam the lot at the Sundown Drive-In,
then tear out along Highway 24. A rush of rag tops closing.
The forecast called for a backdrop of Perseids, a clear screen,
not mud rain from a black cloud, a bruise against the night sky.
A Gary Cooper western plays on. A projectionist watches,
smokes in the doorway, worries if he should change the reels.

~

Herding cattle across another blast area,
atomic cowboys assess what makes a nuclear landscape—
the rate of survival. A sidewinder snakes in circles.
A kit fox runs toward them, without fear.

Sure, with enough beer rationed, men piss out radiation.
And a quick scrub does them good.

~
Faith in the words, there is no danger,
soldiers keep recruiting.

I was also very taken with Ev Nittel's poem, that received an honourable mention in the 2007 2-Day Poem Contest, probably the most in an issue of Contemporary Verse 2 I've enjoyed in quite some time. But still, there's something in the McOrmond interview (which I enjoyed otherwise) that really grabbed at me, something I couldn’t let go of, when he said "The heart doesn’t speak in prose." Man, you're simply reading the wrong prose…

Vancouver BC: The most interesting part of the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.3) had to be the "Four Anagrammatic Translations from Nicole Brossard" [I'm even reading a Brossard novel right now, finally a copy of Mauve Desert] by Calgary's Bronwyn Haslam, writing:

These poems are anagrammatic translations. As such, each English poem uses the same letters, and the same numbers of letters, as the French original by Nicole Brossard.

Although French and English share the same 26-letter alphabet, each language uses it distinctively. In fact, it is possible to determine the language in which a text was written by looking only at its "letteral profile"—the frequency of usage of each letter.

Translating Brossard's poetry anagrammatically creates an English text with a French letteral profile, yielding a more "French" English and a translation that has irrevocably absorbed something of the language of the original text.

Retelling lineage

pleats and repeats patience replete
in each patience our undeleted physique
conceives its cosmetic edges
its cadent lure a muscled beat
eloquence traverses our fists
moving our set letters to
split open seeds

open arteries of life stories careen, slam
and course our lives beside
endurance of mad faults of failure
become relation's rigour
all hunger is an adamant love
a valid imagination

Another lively selection has to be Montreal writer Angela Carr's "Nine Poems from The Rose Concordance." As she writes, "The Rose Concordance translates and organizes lines in the keyword index to the 13th century poem Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The lines are fractures of epic sentences. Translating, I rub the concordance, I flaunt the concordance, I dodge the concordance, I spurn the concordance, I regard the concordance."

of the precious

to have a precious lover
a precious kindness
what i could not promise
of these hundred precious books
take what's mine and precious
now subterfuge and blue
doubts sweep a bare and
precious backdrop
don’t wait for me to choose
preciously between
meaning and coincidence

preciously the covers
and the stones of blue ink
are transformed presently the
shhhhhh of soft
and contrary kisses/

and sighs of worse preciousness
of these hundred precious books
do they suspect wrongly?
in whose night and day were types of grain argued
most passionately?
in luxury's garden
asleep as though
my precious eyes
i cannot see her

Also good to see new poems by Peter Culley (he has a new book out in the spring, a second volume to his Hammertown), and Jon Paul Fiorentino (poems from a manuscript called Mentholism), who told me he was giving up poems a few years ago; is this another Kroetschian technique, saying he's stopping just when he's about to start?

The Wire

Then the tree if not time
at least Art Blakey—
hard bop with a touch
of the parade ground,
in a good way—
the orderly handling by
many bird species
crowded up amongst
the short-term food
emergency—giving way
on the good branches,
keeping beefs short etc.—
then everybody gets their
designated seconds of
bark digging umolested
maybe some eavestrough
spider web, but stepping up
clean and bright
in bandstand order with
a solo worked up ahead of time
so that routine becomes display
and spring can start to operate. (Peter Culley)

Waterloo ON: I haven’t looked at The New Quarterly in some time, but get the feeling that this most recent issue (104, subtitled "Canadian Writers & Writing") is the first in a new format. Calling itself "The Real Estate Issue: a gathering of poems, stories, and essays on how place defines us and our experience of what's real," it has the most amazing photos inside (and on the cover of) the issue by Toronto-based photographer Toni Hafkenscheid (more of the same series can be found at http://thphotos.com/art-fs.html).

I find it interesting how so much of this Canadian literature is obsessed with space, with geography, with place; every few years, someone new asks Frye's dictum, Where is Here? Or, every few years, someone else new telling us how the whole question is out of date, bears updating, etcetera. What fixes our thinking so much in spatial terms? Even by those attempting to avoid it manage to write it in as an absence, writing a line around the hole in their argument; is it only those such as Christian Bök and derek beaulieu who manage to escape the argument at all, writing finally a post-place, post-geography, by moving into further concerns altogether?

Either way, the issue itself is pretty compelling, especially the non-fiction pieces by Elisabeth Harvor, Amanda Jernigan, Richard Cumyn, Andrew Tibbetts and Elizabeth Hay, among others. Cumyn's piece, borrowing from Norman Levine, is "Ottawa Made Me," writing an odd little memoir of growing up in the capital that ends on the line, "Ottawa can still surprise us in felicitous ways." What really intrigued were the selections of poems by Alison Pick and Matthew Holmes. Pick's are "House Hunting," a series of poems that appear to come out of searching (I know, it seems pretty obvious) for a house.

HOUSE-HUNTING:
92 Freshwater Road

You cannot keep your eyes off
the owner, ring through her nose, braid
down her back a length of rope

you could climb. Save me. Let down
your hair. Your words are chewing up
in the garbage disposal she's using

to woo you. You need a friend.
She calls you honey—
it tempts you to sign. Kitchen

features a built-in dish-washer,
stove she is willing to leave.
She needs to move now—

she wants to be gone.
You, of course, take this personally.
Back at home the flashing red light

is just a wrong number, a hang-up.
You're porous, lachrymose, social-life
starved—but hip

to the law of supply and demand.
You want to buy. She wants to sell.
Both of you human, no less.

From house-hunting to home-owning, Holmes writes not of the searching, but through the house (a "fixer-upper") he and his wife purchased in Sackville a couple of years back. I've always been a fan of the poems of Matthew Holmes [see my review of his first collection here], so it's no surprise that his poems would have jumped out at me. A magnificent series of small fractures and fragments, I think some of these "Housepoems" would make a fine little chapbook (from above/ground press, perhaps?).

Glazier

I close you
with panes
from this open air, its wind
not sated by dry leaves. It wants you.

The putty a stubborn child
with the notion, new, of "no."
I hold a knife up, edge it under your lids
and with my blunt attention
you grow a wrinkle, a hairline of difference
that catches light
(I catch my breath)
and cracks, too tight,
across your gaze.

How clear you make yourself, how open,
no quarter closed, no quarter given
in such close quarters as glass and mullion,
sach and seal, joint and shim, sill

and still,

how clear.

Montreal QC: I'm still going through the new issue of Matrix (78, The Narrative "I"), but I've already read the featured interview with Lisa Robertson by Angela Carr about half a dozen times. Less a question and answer than a series of fragments, Carr writes, "The following pieces are transcripts from a soundfile (nightwalk), an interview with Lisa Robertson across the sidewalks of the plateau on November 18, 2006. My tiny recorder was fastened to Lisa's left lapel. Later, transcribing the interview, impressed by how the interviewer's voice had become immersed in the ambient sounds of traffic and conversations of unknown passers-by on the streets, I rendered it as punctuation."

LR: Susan Clark, Christine Stewart and I, published it in this one issue zine we did called Giantess that was on legal size paper, pale green printed on hot pink. It was illegible. It was the organ of the new abjectionists; they only had one organ. So it was printed there, then I got busy doing other things. After that I ended up writing the Soft Architecture manifesto. Again it was a one time thing for a gallery catalogue and then I went to Cambridge, and there, when I was researching The Weather, I was talking to my friend Matthew Stadler on the phone, and we both discovered in this conversation that we were both interested in architecture, and we hadn’t known that about each other before — obviously we weren’t really close friends then — so I said I'd send him this architecture text. He got really excited about it, so I thought okay maybe it's not so bad, maybe I should keep this office as a situation for developing texts on architecture. And then when I got back to Canada I started doing that and Front magazine, which is published by the Western Front — it's the oldest artist-run center in Vancouver — they have a monthly magazine — every two months now actually — they asked me to write a long piece in installments over several issues, so it seemed like a good opportunity to work on the architecture stuff, and I wrote four of those walks.

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The whole flaneur thing is pretty male-centered. It's represented as though it's male-centered. The female authors are not represented. But there are feminist critics like Janet Woolf who propose variants, critiques about gendering, and you know you can look at Djuna Barnes and Violette Leduc as flaneurs. As soon as you start looking closely a whole lineage of walking women arises around you.