Little Red Leaves: Kasimor, MacPherson + Davidson

I’m slowly sifting through my stack of elegantly designed chapbooks from Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, designed and sewn by Dawn Pendergast, including three wildly different yet incredibly playful works: The Windows Hallucinate (2013) by Mary Kasimor, Sheep Dip Excerpts (2013) by Doug MacPherson, and Arcanagrams: A Reckoning (2014) by Amanda Davidson. There is the most interesting cadence present in the work of Minnesota poet Mary Kasimor, staggered and staccato through a series of spacings and capitalizations:

multipl e s of              wine

Sin ersshining   s in bla c k e

ye black  s in in multipl e s of

los  t cha nces overt hehil l

&  char co al out lin e s      cert

aintyp  e s o f belief s i n  sin

hl e   fil  e o n a flat ho riz o n

sta r s s pea k  i    n for e

igntonquechangeli

ngba   l  lso f ten  wine

The author of three trade poetry collections—& cruel red (Otoliths, 2010), silk string arias (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books, 2014)—Kasimor nearly speaks in a coded language, hidden within such familiar English. Her poems manage to explore and challenge sound and meaning while moving quickly across the page, revealing an unusual (and even refreshing) cadence that I would be interested to hear her perform, such as in the opening of her poem “a starry night,” that reads:

Plants speak in CODE tongue

WALKERS in desert

talK straight

Dope IS for THOS

Who EXHale A

Starry

STARRY night WHEN the painter

DRoppeD over for

COcktailS

WHEN we GathERED

Around WAITing for Kool Aid

IS an ALLUSION To the PAST

in the JUNGLE the plants

HABITAT was involved IN

A Sting OPERation

WHO knew?

As the colophon of San Francisco/Tahoe poet Doug MacPherson’s Sheep Dip Excerpts reads: “This collection of poems is an excerpt from a larger work called sheep dip, a creative translation of O Guardador de Rebnhos by Fernando Pessoa, who wrote it under the persona of Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd. It is also in conversation with two English translations of Pessoa’s book—The Keeper of Sheep by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person by Erin Mouré.”

No 16

            for Altus

who would publish me minha living life as an office boy?

squeaking early morning down the road with my cart

returning with my cart at dusk down the same road

i have no tinge of hope i have these wheels

i am getting old without wrinkles or gray hair

i am no longer of service take off my wheels

i am left upside down and broken at the bottom of a drain

While I’m unaware of the Honig and Brown title he speaks of, MacPherson’s translations are certainly far straighter than the work in Mouré’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person [see the piece I wrote on such here], without the vibrancy she worked through her own transelation of the same text. Still, this is certainly a compelling collection, and I’m intrigued to see what the full text looks like, once its published in trade form. MacPherson manages, through his sequence of numbered translations, to respond to Pessoa’s original text in intriguing ways.

No 49

i go inside fetch a channel tracy with candle says night

minha voice content says night minha life sighs to day check

of sun saved rain afternoons pass on channel O last hello

friend soggy trees deposit Os i fetch another channel light a

candle night of withouts course like a river bed and four big

silences like days that sleep

The most compelling of these three works has to be Amanda Davidson’s wonderfully playful Arcanagrams: A Reckoning, which responds, in part, to the works of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). Davidson’s bio includes the fact that she is “currently at work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg,” and she includes this intriguing fact in the colophon of the short collection: “‘Dromböken,’ on page twelve, is a cut-up poem using text from Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams. This English-language edition was translated from the Swedish by my great-great-grandfather, Carl Theophilus Odhner (Bryn Athen, Pennsylvania: The Academy Book Room, 1918). This book is now in the public domain.” I’m fascinated by her interest in the work of Swedenborg, especially given her personal connection to him and his work, and wonder (in the “chicken-and-egg” way) which may have come first, her interest in his work, or her knowledge of such a connection?

DROMBÖKEN

I was neither in a state of sleep nor wakefulness.

Throughout the whole night I seemed to be

going deep down, by ladders and other spaces.

This signified moving from celestial to natural

understanding

I slept deeply for eleven hours

I dreamt I was being punished

I dreamt of a woman

I dreamt of cages

I was arrested

Whipped

Climbed down

I flew

This signifies inmost affection from the Lord

This signifies the grand man

This signifies natural truths

This signifies the highest heaven

This signifies I had not washed my feet

I spoke long and familiarly with our Successor

who changed into a woman.

What it may signify is best known to our Lord.

In the morning my eyesight was so improved that I

could read the Bible without glasses.

What this signifies I do not know.

Something will happen to me after I finish the first

chapter on the sense of touch.

Whether I am to take one road in my work or am

being prepared for another, I know not; it is dark

to me.

I was not able to have the strong faith I ought to

have. I believed and yet did not believe.

Once again I was thrown onto my face.

I do not know what this means.

The Last Usable Hour, Deborah Landau

I’d rather watch you doing it

than do it myself.

I’d rather hear about it.

I want to be told.

I’d rather read about it.

I’d rather just sit here.

Hold the mask over my face

while you do it to me.

I’ll put on some music.

Now see how we grow aglow

so young and beautiful

our capillaries all lit up. (“All Else Fails”)

I first became intrigued by American poet Deborah Landau and her second trade collection, The Last Usable Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), when I discovered this post she wrote about one of her methods of composition for this collection:

A few years ago I was in a writing group with some amazing poets—Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Anthony McCann, Damian Rogers, Matthew Rohrer, Richard Siken, and Matthew Zapruder. The idea was we’d each write a poem every day for a month, and we’d take turns giving writing prompts. All of this was done by email, and there was a great pressure to get a poem done and sent out by the end of each day—pressure which turned out to be extraordinarily helpful to me in generating a lot of new material. One day Richard Siken gave the following rather cryptic assignment:

            Poison

            Get a drink and put it in front of you.

            Consider this:

            If I gave you poison, would you drink it?

            What if it made you stronger?

            Now drink or don’t.

            Now write in couplets.

I’m not exactly sure how I ended up writing the poem I did from this prompt, but am grateful to Richard for provoking me to do so. The poem ended up in my most recent book, The Last Usable Hour—a series of linked sequences set in a midwinter, perpetually-nocturnal New York City—and sits in the apocalyptic final section, “Welcome to the Future.”

In The Last Usable Hour, Landau writes a single, extended line in her self-described “ghost book.” Broken into four lyric sections, her “linked lyric sequences” are composed as epistolary love poems, and as Pessoa (referenced within), can her unnamed narrator be a hetronym of sorts, writing out to someone she can’t quite name? Or does the someone not entirely matter? There’s an odd voyeurism to Landau’s depiction of midwinter New York, writing Larkin dreams and Pessoa, as in the first section, where she writes, “Don’t cry, don’t kiss me either, and also don’t stop. / That’s the way he looks when he wants to watch.” Her poems twist and turn, shift the gaze and just who is watching whom, a last desperate hour that holds the uncertainty of the narrator into a plausible strength. Dear someone, she writes, and it almost doesn’t matter whom. Or does it?

I’m thinking of

you tonight Philip

Larkin groping back

to bed after

a piss

and yes

the moon

so cold

through the bars

on the window

the empty

southward

sky

(there’s so much

of it now)

and here

in my

narrow bed (“Blue Dark”)

The Unmemntioable, Erín Moure

I’ve decided to take E.M. for my experimental subject. She’s here and she’s a pest; she might as well serve some useful purpose. And she has an inner forum, and recalls an infancy, an infans before speaking.

As for me, I am better off without either.

Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s new poetry collection, The Unmemntioable (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2012) continues a number of threads in her work over the past few years, from translation, border-crossings and her increasingly-constant companion, collaborator, foil and hetronym (in the Pessoa sense) Elisa Sampedrín. In The Unmemntioable, Moure includes a study of Sampedrín alongside her own grief, taking her mother’s ashes to (as the back cover writes) “the village where her maternal family was erased by war and time. There, watching E.M. through the trees in a downpour, an idea came to her: she would use E.M. to research the nature of Experience.” The nature of experience, as the book explores it, is multi-faceted, and somehow complex enough that it actually becomes more readable. How does that happen?

My intention was just to write at the desk in Bucureşti, but this notebook paper turns into a plant again damp with sap and fibre and breaks the nib. Perfumes anarchic tendency and a way with words, fallen down on crested birds.

“The smell of hay at the look of god”

the pen writes.

“We wept our gifts for you, dear mother, our treasures. Waking up in the night and wringing out the shirt. Even then, the tumor was growing in the blood.”

(Tomasz’s shadow bent long from the doorway to the forest, but it’s just the noise of darkness and the gate banging shut in wind)

This notebook is arresting sleep (lying face-down in a pool of snow). When I look up, a siren, and the light of the ambulance flashes off the walls at it streaks down Matei Voievod in the dark…. but who does it carry? And repeatedly? E.M.? Has she eaten a peanut again?

Over the course of Moure’s trilogy of poetry books O Cidadán (Anansi, 2002), O Cadoiro, poems (Anansi, 2007) and O Resplendor (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2010), as well as her Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005), where we first met the writer and translator Sampedrín, Moure has worked increasingly complex book-length collages of essay-poems, lyrics, arguments, questions and prose-lines, all while adding layers and nuance to Elisa Sampedrín. It is as though Moure works hard to diminish or even erase the narrator/author, even while building up the hetronym of Sampedrín. And why is Sampedrín so argumentative in this collection? We’ve seen Sampedrín be argumentative before, certainly, challenging the narrator in all sorts of ways, but this collection almost sees Moure’s hetronym downright hostile in places. Exactly what is happening between the narrator and hetronym, two elements of the author herself? It would seem that, although the questioning is sometimes harsh, the collaborations remain.

Where Moure’s previous trilogy focused on “the citizen,” her new collection, The Unmemntioable, turns the same gaze sideways, writing out her mother’s Ukrainian background quite specifically, and exploring how the experience of this particular citizen and her forebears produced the woman that Moure knew as her own mother.

If anything, it’s the fault of reading. When Chus Pato’s poetry appeared on my desk, I decided to give up writing poems. I moved to Bucureşti to see if I could free myself from this crisis of experience, this excision of language. Then I saw Erín Moure in the park at a café table, looking at me. Why did she come here?

What does she know about experience? Her mother tongues resist all attempts at a technical language.

Is it that she has no mother tongue?

Today, I refuse to be pinned down to an identity. Right away, I want to betray it.

Through her mother’s death and the exploration of her and her family’s history, the blend of narrative, fragment, language and translation weave throughout in a remarkably natural and fluid way, all of which could be boiled down to Moure’s interior monologue. Scribbled down in moleskins while travelling, the book concludes with what, on the surface, reads like a prose memoir of travel. These are sketches possibly even composed in that café in Bucureşti, perhaps, writing out and through the geography of her mother’s family that read as deep, meditative and as personal as, say, Brian Fawcett’s Human happiness (2012) or Susan Howe’s That this (2011):

Dear Chus: everything I had dreamed turned out to be made of paper. The skin was an organ that suffered in silence the rays, the scourges, the cuts of trees and medicine. In Hlibovychi in 1922, the war was over but the repressions escalated. Predeceased by her father Oleks, now with more children, my grandmother Anastasia emigrated with Tomasz in 1929, to NW14.72.9.W6. Riding down the south side of the mountain, the side with a road, the smallest daughter, my mother, went to school.

Forderung. “We must press forward to the schools.”

In the innermost core of blinded love, with is and must never be realized, a woman is trying to open her eyes to see.

* * *

Though my mother is gone, her face still claims me. In the morning I write wearing her cancer hat. I wear her Western belt to Whitehorse. In my pocket, she stands at the summit cairn in Wonder Pass with her friends the nurses. They wear anoraks and sunhats. Maybe one day, as she did, I will wear her blue ribbed hat, the knitted one, as hair.

Moure has composed a book that furthers her ongoing explorations in language, translation and identity as well as writing out a tribute to her mother and her mother’s history. “A mother is the unmemntioable boundary / that can never come fully clear.”