Ongoing notes: early October, 2019: du Plessis + Waldrop

Don’t forget the ottawa small press fair turns twenty-five years old next month! You should totally come out for that. What else is happening? I'm at IFOA later this month, participating both as part of a small press fair and on a panel on small press, which is pretty cool. I had a book or two out this year (here and here), don’t forget. I mean: you knew all of this already, right? And did you see that 2020 subscriptions to above/ground press’ TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR OF PRODUCTION are now available?

Wolfville NS/Montreal QC: I’m extremely impressed with Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis’ chapbook unfurl: Four Essays (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2019), an assemblage of some of the sharpest and engaging critical work I’ve read in some time. Her language and detail are swift, electric and utterly delightful, and some of the sharpest, smartest prose I’ve seen. As the small collection opens:

Unfurl, for me, is the shape of a leaf managing itself into growth. It’s the gesture of a front uncurling itself, standing upright, broad-shouldered and confident. It’s a leaf from a book, a page inscribing poetry that is organic and energetic and lends itself to my mind.

            Un-furl is a negation with a generative definition. The word’s semantic growth is so strong that its prefix denoting absence is satiated, incorporated, and reinvigorated into verdure.

Unfurl is a collection of four review essays, each on a different recent poetry title by a Canadian writer—Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and an overview of a couple of titles by Anne Carson, a short essay that begins:

Anne Carson never completes a book. Currently, I am surrounded by her books. Plainwater is on my lap. Red Doc> lies open beside me and Decreation peeks out from underneath it. It crosses my mind that I need an extra perpendicular desk to lay out Eros the Bittersweet, my printout of “The Gender of Sound,” the multiple inserts of Float. And yet, Anne Carson never completes a book.

Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting

the same page.

As she writes, again, in her opening pages: “I am attuned to heed work on language, ars poetics, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetics. I seek out female embodiment of intelligence through sensuality, racial integration into geographies of mind and space. Yet each essay also stands alone. I am not flattening these poets through similarity. Rather, it’s a curious, beauteous phenomenon to see the reading of four poets’ work channeled so clearly through a mind, a set of concerns, an ecstatic moment of being animated to write. There is endless strength in considering how poems go together, enter into dialogue with one another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one another as they draw on an archive of an individual’s reading practice become writing. My reading mind à my writing mind, unfurl.” I can only hope that these essays are a teaser for an eventual full-length collection.

Minneapolis MN: New from American poet Rosmarie Waldrop comes the stunning chapbook Rehearsing the Symptoms (Minneapolis MN: Rain Taxi, 2019), a short assemblage of poems – “Wanting,” “Thinking,” “Doubting,” “Knowing,” “Doing,” “Coupling,” “Escaping Analogy,” “Meaning,” “Translating,” “Loving Words” and “Aging” – that sit at the heart of what Waldrop’s work has been doing for more than five decades: utilizing the poem as a space for sharp thinking on being, writing and literature. Given the amount of work she has published over the past fifty or so years (something evidenced through Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s recent Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin that Wave Books produced earlier this year [see my review of such here]), I find it stunning just how breathtaking and relevant her work continues to be, writing evocatively around specifics and abstracts, language and being, and the impossibly concrete, as in this excerpt of the poem “Loving Words”:

I’ve filled my house with many different things. As if to create an ecology to encourage diversity of experience. The way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species are said also to have a greater number of languages.

Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of page and perspective cavalière. Turned my back on the window in favor of definitive articles on perception. Of introversion and subcutaneous shivers.

Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos

VERSO 10.4

One could not easily separate oneself from the “we” constructed and being constructed by the spectacle and its narrations or reiterations. And perhaps one ought not to be able to so clearly distinguish onself from that “we.” The grim list of the clerk begins. We believed in nothing, the black-and-white American movies buried themselves in our chests, liquid, glacial, acidic as love. the poet admits culpability. This is not enough for the clerk. Don’t let yourself off, the clerk says, I have enough to deal with on the wharf, thick weather, appears to be, easterly outside. The clerk knows that admitting guilt is a cop-out, it’s like wanting to be noble without giving anything up, it is drawing attention to yourself as if you are in a soap opera. If the poet doesn’t do more, the clerk will be inundated by bundles of sheets tightly fastened with gnats and wire.

Currently on the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlist, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2018) is a sequence of prose-poem commentaries on life, literature and history. Composed as bursts of lyric prose, these pieces combine the lyric essay with storytelling, as her “Versos” suggest a collection that writes on the “reverse side” of history, those tales that fall away from the forefront. “In June,” she writes, to open “VERSO 5,” “I realized I had already abandoned nation long before I knew myself, the author says. That attachment always seemed like a temporary book in the shoulder blade.” There is something of The Blue Clerk that feels a sibling to Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), through their shared sequence of short prose bursts, both of which explore a variety of subjects, as well as philosophy and theory, and the nature of how stories get told. Beyond that, Brand’s poems also exist as a narrative thread, composing a novel through lyric fragment, and the story of the story itself, told, between the author, and the author’s creation, the clerk. As “VERSO 5.1” ends:

            So what? You feel featherless, the clerk says. Didn’t you always; weren’t you just an outrider? You tried to fit in, to your own demise though, you rode shotgun to your own distaster, she says. You’re right. No need for violent metaphor, the author cautions. Again, let me draw your attention to the tracing paper.

In “The Voice Asking,” a conversation with Souvankham Thammavongsa in the collection What the Poets Are Doing:Canadian Poets in Conversation, ed. Rob Taylor (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here], Brand responds to one of Thammavongsa’s queries: “I notice now how I read. The pleasures are different. Now I read for structure, so the shape of the work is what gives me pleasure. Or the insight it accumulates. I am interested in the architecture of the work: what it borrows from, what it leaves unchanged from the past, how it breaks embedded narrative or not, how lazy or agile the poet. A dear friend poet asked me, a long time ago, ‘D, does the world need that line?’ And it took me aback and then made me laugh and then made me measure each line of poetry I wrote against this question. Such a simple question and such a difficult one—bracing and settling.” Brand’s power, throughout this book, emerges from the blend of genres, and the slipperiness of lyric essay, memoir, novel and prose poem, engaging with history and theory, the intimate and the purely theoretical. This collection is up for the Griffin Poetry Prize, but could just have easily be shortlisted for the Giller Prize (perhaps it still could), allowing the fluidity of genre to exist equally (I am reminded of Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, for example, originally published as “poetry” and reprinted as “novel,” once the movie adaptation appeared). She grounds her book through character and the small moment, but anchors it, just as much, through an exploration of large ideas, such as in the second section, as she begins:

STIPULE

Elegy, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked, is one of the principal sources of poetry. It is the great complaint … the complaint is “what’s happening to me overwhelms me.” Not (simply) that I am in pain but what has taken away my power of action overwhelms me. And why do I see these things why do I know these things why must I endure seeing and knowing.

There is something really graceful and lovely in the way Brand’s sentences unfold, wrapping the lyric in and around itself, as “VERSO 27” begins: “The baby next door was in full voice last night. I didn’t want to put him in that last verso. It would have injured him.”

Kaie Kellough, Magnetic Equator

From Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough comes the powerful collection Magnetic Equator (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019), another title in the quartet of first titles from McClelland and Stewart poetry editor Dionne Brand [see my review of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Cluster here]. Set in ten poem/sections—“kaieteur falls,” “mantra of no return,” “high school fever,” “exploding radio,” “bow,” “zero degrees,” “ghost notes,” “alterity,” “essequibo” and “the unity of worlds”—Magnetic Equator writes out a very personal journey across time, geography and culture. This is a poem, very much a singular, book-length work, that is populated, in a generative sense, by all who had come before; Kellough delves deep into sound and cadence to propel his text through a coherence of location, dislocation, immigration, longing and belonging, from South America shores to his Canadian teenaged prairie. As he writes to open the second untitled poem in the poem/section “mantra of no return”:

people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated. whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people penned the past. people roved over on planes. people talked over people. people rented places. people planted people in people. people aided plantations. people prayed.

In the poem/section “high school fever,” subtitled “nowhere, prairie,” he writes: “these were the worst years of my life. i wasn’t supposed to admit that.” Throughout the collection, Kellough excavates and investigates the materials of his own past, and the pasts that made his possible, moving through a deeply personal and intimate series of investigations, memories, joys and frustrations, many of which come with the shifts of geography and culture. He writes of between-ness, being of one place in another, and then of being of both, but somehow neither, concurrently evolving into and away from. His is a seismic lyric built on sound and memory, song, salvage, seekers of asylum and those dislocations that continue to hold. Through Magnetic Equator, Kaie Kellough lays the foundation for what it means for him to be where and who he is, exactly, now, and it is an incredible sight to behold. As a fragment of “ghost notes” reads:

i’d like to erase this poem. i’d like to erase the syntax i grew up in: the unlettered suburbs. the strip malls, the pickup trucks        the spilled asphalt, the ranchers and bungalows, the clustered skyscrapers exclaiming downtown, the futurist signifying of the calgary tower     i would leave the natural grammar: the bow river, the supple foothills that accelerate as they buckle into sawtooth peaks that scrape the big sky     i can’t erase everything, so i choose to erase myself, remove myself from the prairie come the 1980s, gulping white exhaust in the garage, or on a blurred silver greyhound     fleeing the province to vanish into anonymous eastern multitudes, a slow smudging that only a poem’s time-lapse lettering can

Souvankham Thammavongsa, Cluster

Through three earlier poetry titles, all of which were produced by Beth Follett’s Pedlar Press—Small Arguments (2003), Found (2007) and Light (2013)—Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa’s work has focused on silence, precision and a reclamation, whether of materials, history or of language itself. Her fourth full-length poetry title, Cluster (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019), furthers these explorations in lyric meaning through a series of stretched-out sequences, many of which are pulled apart and across the page in highly deliberate placements. With lines set seven or eight lines below the line prior, Thammavongsa’s pauses, her silences, are crafted as carefully as the lines themselves, such as the poem “O” that opens:

When this letter is written out by hand

Where it begins and ends land in the same place

It is a gesture to single out what isn’t perfect

It marks an outside and an inside

Her minimalisms, silences and use of the page really are remarkable, and I haven’t seen any other poets combine such equal attentions and concerns; there aren’t that many poems that could create such expansive poems with so few words. Cameron Anstee, Mark Truscott and Nelson Ball, for example, utilize their own minimal, compact poems, but in very small forms. Other poets I could reference, such as Sylvia Legris, utilize a similar and equally-remarkable lyrical density, but Legris’ poems engage with physical space on the page, which feels entirely different from what Thammavongsa utilizes through the physical placement of her lines: a carved silence, as opposed to an engagement with lyric space. In Thammavongsa’s poems, her lines feel composed in a tension against that same silence, one that works in conjunction, as well as in opposition, of the words she places upon the page. As the mid-point of her poem “NORTH” writes:

Changes in temperature are a determining factor

Look for the sun and track where it rises and sets

Tell from the shape your shadow casts for you

It will matter to know where you are and when

As part of the recent What the Poets are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation, edited by Rob Taylor (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here], there is the illuminating and utterly delightful conversation between Thammavongsa and Dionne Brand (editor of this current volume), that includes:

Brand: Everything begins in meaning, which is different from conclusion. I think even if we haven’t discerned it or chosen it or known it we begin in meaning—that is we begin in the world. So it may arrive independent of me, so to speak, because I have no control of all of it, only what floods into me and what I then manage to see through the lens of my experience, the knowledges I’ve gathered.

Thammavongsa: Meaning doesn’t conclude. That is why it means and continues to mean. I wrote something down once, just to record it, that did not make sense to me at the time but many years later reading it over I understood what was said to me. And there was no way to go back to that meaning.