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.
