Ongoing notes: late May, 2016

Further to our baby distractions, I thought I should add a second entry of brief reviews, acknowledging the books over the past two years-plus that I started to review, but, for whatever child-related reason, I wasn’t able to complete as a longer, full-sized review. Here are some notes, if not even regrets (I’m surprised at how many scraps there are, and how long they’ve been sitting, unfinished, upon my computer), on a couple more books that I wish I’d more time and attention to properly discuss (as they each, obviously, deserve).

The Belladonna* Elders Series 6: M. NourbeSe Philip, Gail Scott, Kate Eichhorn (2009): In many ways, the most interesting element of this all-Canadian volume of The Belladonna Elders Series is Kate Eichhorn herself, composing works that build upon what her two chosen elders, M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott, have been working on for years. In two interviews, later included in longer versions in the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) [see my review of such here].

NB: Because for me when I work in English, I always feel as if I am working in a foreign language.

KE: Even with your mastery?

NP: I never ever take it for granted. The course of the foreignness is the awareness that this is not my tongue. Mind you, I think that all writers and poets have this sense. As you write your poem, you have this idea of perfection, but of course, what I am talking about is slightly different from that. I'm talking about this sense of utter foreignness in what is supposed to be my mother tongue. When I was working on the poem, I remember sitting in this room on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto that I rented from a doctor, my doctor in fact. I had a room at the back of his office, and there were some days when I felt that I could actually taste the foreignness of these words. I can't apply profound theoretical language to it. I can only go to the body and tell you what it felt like. There was this awareness of that and all I could do was weep and weep. Maybe it was some sort of collective memory.

In her “Preface: The Elder Function,” Eichhorn writes:

The Belladonna Elders Series has proven far more controversial than anticipated. Some critics have charged that the term “elder” is inherently ageist. Others have suggested that the structure of the series reifies problematic notions of artistic lineage. A few detractors have even implied that the Elders Series is symptomatic of a generation of writers unable to invent anew, choosing instead to linger indefinitely as a parasitic presence on their “host” (an older and apparently more vital generation of writers). These objections have arrived from critics speaking across generations and genders. But as Belladonna* curators Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman have repeatedly explained, running counter to prevailing definitions in our culture, the term “elder” is neither synonymous with “old” nor does it signify a stable identitary position.

I came to appreciate the complexity of the elder function during one of my first interviews with a writer in the early 1990s. Maria Campbell, a Métis writer and storyteller, had been invited to speak at a Native elders conference hosted by my university. She graciously offered to spare a few minutes of her time but explained that this was an elder's conference, so I would have to conduct the interview in the presence of her elders, and because they would potentially be better positioned to respond, she might not speak at all. In the end, this was not an interview with an author but rather an encounter with a writer/storyteller speaking amongst others. I had arrived well prepared, or so I thought, to navigate the complexities of power and appropriation this encounter was bound to raise. I left perplexed, wondering whether I had carried out an interview at all (I don't recall asking any questions). This, of course, is precisely the kind of productive trouble wrought by elders, and for this reason, adopting the category for an avant-garde reading and book series may be surprising, but it is by no means antithetical to the work of a project such as Belladonna*.

Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology, eds. Evan Jones and Todd Swift: Evan Jones and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology (Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 2010) certainly lives up to its initial hype, despite the inclusion of poets David McGimpsey, Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson, in being an anthology of “Modern” Poets from Canada (those exceptions, I’d note, are also poets possibly known and read better outside Canadian borders than from within). Going through the list of authors—W.W.E. Ross (1894-1966)? Alfred Bailey (1905-1997)?—I initially wondered if this was an anthology aimed at what they saw of the British poetry audience, once that doesn’t necessarily jibe with what little I’m aware of such, from way across the pond, mind you. As the editors write in their introduction: “It is now more than fifty years since an anthology of Canadian poetry was edited for a British audience. As editors, and as Canadian poets living in a foreign clime on a new shore, it has appeared to us that there is little or no groundwork on which to build, no models towards whom we could reach. In Britain, there is scant knowledge of Canadian poetry.”

Despite an awareness of British poetry favouring formal models over experimentation, my original question was this: is this an anthology for those interested in contemporary poetry titles by Carcanet, Bloodaxe Books and Faber over, say, titles by Stride, Shearsman, Salt or Reality Street Editions? Instead, I’m realizing this an anthology directed to the classroom, given its historical swath across a century and a half of Canadian writing, working to produce an anthology that exactly pushes the mandate of the “modern” period. But then, how do McGimpsey, Robertson and Carson fit in?

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.

FIELDNOTES, a forensic, Kate Eichhorn

I drove from village to village with my ethnic-cleansing methodology

an onlooker tells me in a language I do not speak

“You do not see because you have units of analysis

such as states”

The purpose of this text was dutifully transcribed

with incomprehensible force

taken by the reader dilettante day-tripping

in another body’s funeral (“SCENE I.”)

Canadian poet Kate Eichhorn’s second trade poetry collection, FIELDNOTES, a forensic (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), works to dismantle not only a series of inquiry, but the nature of inquiry itself. Anthropology is rife with moral obligation, directives, warnings and miscomprehensions, and Eichhorn’s text explores the nature of exploration, attempting to dismantle biases. Is it possible to enter a new idea with a clean slate, or does one simply replace one’s initial biases with someone else’s?

Writing in the face of that data made me vulnerable. Cursed my uterus. Troubled, I became a client to a healer. A practitioner of sorts. We had varied and tentative identifications based on our shared status. (Perhaps I should leave it there? I’m departing the realm of rational conduct). There were insights, findings, magic, even specimens. Sorcery was used to label some of the photographs. The text we anticipated was entirely accurate. He already knew because presence is grounded on the fate of a tableau. On the contrary, I only contributed memories, interruptions, negative effects. (“SCENE II.”)

The poem moves through fragments, each accumulating as fieldnotes collected in six scenes, sculpted from suggestion of travel through not only foreign lands, but an entirely foreign landscape. Interspersed with fragments from the “Anthropologist,” a text set lighter than the main text, it is difficult to tell if this is meant to be a voice entirely separate from the narrator, but the movement itself suggests, perhaps, another point-of-view from the same nameless speaker, contradicting in places, and pushing to understand the differences in how to approach a foreign space, a foreign space, a foreign perspective.

The book investigates the question of how to learn about another (in a perspective that reads often like a foreign aid worker in a third world country) without damaging, interfering or judging, how to learn about another space without letting preconceptions stumble perceptions. The text speaks of the army, of corpses, of Ramadan, each leading to the suggestion of a specific, skimming notes across lengthy liner notes. One can become philosophical in such a landscape. The notes themselves suggest a narrative, but the story itself has been excised, erased, leaving only the investigation, and the lessons learned. That might be all the story requires.

6:45 am, Awake since 4

nestled in soil and undergrowth

all this taken in stride as stable personalities work the pit

another day of eyelashes

liquefying colour of cloth slings

maggots

This is the power of hair adhering in chunks

to skulls (“SCENE IV.”)

third issue of margaret christakos' influency now online;

Jacqueline Turner on Kate Eichhorn's Fond, Trish Salah on Ronna Bloom's Permisio, Lisa Roberton on Trish Salah's Wanting in Arabic, etc.

Barbara Godard, 1942-2010

a sad note from Kate Eichhorn: On Sunday evening, literary critic, cultural theorist and translator Dr. Barbara Godard [pictured, left] passed away in Toronto. The author of over 200 articles (some reprinted in her 2008 book, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture) and editor of several edited collections, Barbara played a major role in creating new critical approaches to Canadian and Quebecois writing, especially innovative women's writing. Barbara was deeply committed to working in collaboration with colleagues and students as well as writers, artists and activists. In 1984, she founded the journal Tessera with Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott and Kathy Mezei. For many years, she served on the editorial board of Open Letter. In addition to her research and writing, Barbara supervised several generations of Canadian literary critics and cultural studies scholars. She will continue to have a tremendous impact on Canadian literature and culture, both terrains she helped to write.

Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne

I’ve been stunned by the recent work by Kate Eichhorn and her collaborators, from the recent Open Letter issue [see my review of such here] to the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009), each dealing with a number of innovative Canadian women poets whose work hasn’t been dealt with nearly enough, if at all. Showcasing fifteen writers of poetry and/or poetic prose—Nicole Brossard, Susan Holbrook, Nathalie Stephens, Gail Scott, Margaret Christakos, M. Nourbese Philip, Karen Mac Cormack, Rachel Zolf, Erín Moure, Daphne Marlatt, Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Sina Queyras, Rita Wong and Lisa Robertson—each section includes a lengthy critical interview with each author, as well as examples of their work, making this collection an essential part of any discerning reader’s bookshelf. Why is it so much of this writing gets ignored critically, even from those who spend so much time engaged with the practice as writers? As the editors explain the anthology in their introduction:

Much of the writing in this collection is the product of working in and against systems – linguistic, libidinal, affective, technological, economic and ecological. As with all systems, the import or redaction of elements has profound effects on flow and meaning. Meaning is produced through the processes of circulation, recirculation, recombination and procedure and as such, this work must be understood as enacting a poetics of flux not stasis. Rather than bring the reader to a single or fixed truth claim, this writing asks the reader to become an active agent in making meaning and more importantly, to abandon ‘getting it’ as the only or primary objective of reading. Writing through and across multiple languages with varying degrees of fluency, Erín Moure reminds us that fluency cannot be easily understood as a singular achievement or point of arrival. Her translations and transliterations invite the reader to enter linguistic economies where no degree of fluency is sufficient, but there are still many ways to navigate Moure’s poetic terrain. The ecologies of Rita Wong’s forage demonstrate the grave dangers and rich possibilities of living in systems where the animal elements has become the norm. These ecologies do not always ‘make sense’ but neither to the ‘logics’ of late capitalism, globalization and genetic modification Wong investigates in much of her writing, and as she emphasizes, such material conditions also ‘disrupt syntax,’ necessitating new approaches to writing.

Any work like this should be an opening, a beginning of not just reading but further critical inquiry; will someone else work a follow-up to deal with some other writers that deserve the same kind of critical attention, including Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Rob Budde, Anne Stone, Wayde Compton, Phil Hall, Stan Rogal, Judith Fitzgerald, derek beaulieu, as well as innumerable other writers who seem to have done all the required work, but still get the short shrift of critical dealings? What’s happened to criticism in Canada? Where did it all go?

The interview with Margaret Christakos is particularly interesting for her talk of Toronto since the 1980s, being one of the few poets continuing to work in innovative writing to bridge the gap between then and now, talking on the shifts in critical response to writing, both locally and nationally, moving from her first collection in the late 1980 to her current (and spectacular) work through her Influency course.

HM: It occurs to me that there is not as much of a body of criticism around your work as there should be.

MC: And I don’t know if that’s more about the fact that by the time I had published a few books, nobody was really writing criticism. The reception happened in the ‘80s. My first book had only three reviews. I’ve never really known what to attribute that to except that I guess it wasn’t very good and I guess it wasn’t very interesting and I guess it wasn’t doing what people what poetry to do at that point. The benefit of being almost twenty years older at this point is to celebrate the fact that I am still writing despite the lack of reception. It didn’t inhibit my production to such a degree that I stopped writing and I have to really question how it is I maintained a writing practice through the ‘90s. I just had to write. And I know that there is some bizarre thing that keeps all of us writing despite the fact that there is a resounding silence critically. Maybe that is changing though. There are new conversations. And there’s the internet. There’s all this online discourse that didn’t exist in the ‘90s. And I think that audiences are much more savvy in terms of polyphonic narrativity and they’re actually more plugged in to understanding the relationship of history and theory. There are a lot of very smart readers out there.

And anyone able to get not only an interview but new writing out of Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk has to be commended.

KE: You have this line in Redactive – in one of the poems that also appears in this anthology – where you say, ‘from what level could I abstain from inventing.’ I love that line, because it seems to me that it’s a way to sum up your own poetics. There’s no level from which you could abstain from inventing, because it seems that you get easily bored with your own voice.

DL: I agree. I think that’s the closest I’m going to get to making a poetic statement.