When I read from Taxonomies a couple years ago I was engaged with the format and the picture dictionary look it, but put off by skim vocabulary loaded with words like: precedes, mentality, pelagic, pugnacious, conspicuous symmetry.
It looks, in formatting, like prose, which is fine. It scans formal. It looks like it comes from the head, rolling in higher tier concepts abstracted away from life stories or gut (I thank anyone for the former). It seems evasive nonsensical and humourless. But.
The text is quite a different creature read aloud. There’s a sound play and it’s pleasant to the eye and tongue. There is a liveliness and a play but not because what you say doesn’t matter. It is considered and a sort of indirect route to questioning how we think. She’s not just mining vocabulary for some hippy playing about from stolen, half-understood lexicon. She’s engaged the ideas of boundaries of how we define our world and how we define what we define.
**
In an interview by Malcolm Sutton in 2008, Christine Stewart said,
“I was taught to mistrust the metaphor as if it promised me something it could not keep. Now I love its false promise, its ridiculous leap. It offers nothing–only itself. Why should it be true? These metaphors do not mind the gap. They point it out. Falling, crashing into it. I hoped to make this visible, this constitutive failure.
8. Is the work of the reader to move forward no matter the size of the gaps?
Minding the gap. Mining the gap. To move forward or perhaps to fall in and maybe (or maybe not) crawl out.
What would we be if we didn’t endlessly order, define and name? What else is there? […] The project of categorization that takes place in from Taxonomy works to reveal the arbitrary and delusional nature of such a response.
**
Here are a few excerpts of from Taxonomy which was published in The Gig in 2000, printed online there in 2001. The chapbook version I have is from England by West House Books, 2003.
2001: Species
Species is its own din. A strange and shiny pin, not intersection
but equipment and tight. Sensual and metal, penal and ribbed, species
strides the trembling air. It is turgid: the vegetable must not cross its
lusty animal path. It is febrile: the mineral must avert its magazine
gaze. To defy its earnest wrap is to melt into open chromatic skies—blood
red and yellow hair. Like a medium‑sized tent tumultuous with luxury and
haggard with resistance, species is the inverted bird in an anarchy of
suction—the suction of luck thought hill‑like. The suction of acanthus
thought breathing excursion garden. The suction of type thought strike
(our palms like flint). The suction of time thought light (our arms like flight)
Sudden and published, spawning and sheer. Kind is its sharp and silver aspic
—pelagic, all dark-pointed, high-polished and seen.
Species: 2003
Species is its own din. The sharp tick of a shiny pin — not
intersection, but equipment and tight. Sensual and metal,
penal and ribbed, species strides the trembling air. It should
read, turgid. It should bent, febrile. But it won’t. Vegetable,
you must cross the lusty animal path. Mineral, you must
avert its magazine gaze.
To defy its earnest wrap is to melt into open chromatic skies
— bright lips and yellow hair. Unlike the multi-coloured tents
by the soft and silty stream — tumultuous with luxury and
haggard with resistance — Species is the inverted bird in an
anarchy of suction. The suction of luck and hill-like. The
suction of acanthus thought breathing excursion garden. The
suction of type thought strike. The suction of time thought
kind.
Sudden and published, spawning and sheer, Species is sharp
as sliver, as crazy as aspic — well-plattered (not pelagic)
high-polished, and seamed.
Fun to be able to side-by-side texts as they were edited in different versions as it developed.
What she nailed she didn’t mess with like “species strides the trembling air” and ” tumultuous with luxury and haggard with resistance”. Great sounds and flows. They are intact.
She trimmed back where sound was pushing the meaning at least as much or more than carrying it: “The suction of type thought strike (our palms like flint). The suction of time thought light (our arms like flight).” She dropped the bracketed parts which by being marginalized in brackets, were already being squeezed out of the poem, in aside then entirely. It got tighter and with a stronger eye towards sound.
What she changed she improved: “the sharp tuck of a shiny pin” clicks better in sound than the more flat description from before, “A strange and shiny pin”. So far as turgid and febrile, the grammar and tone is more interesting and punched up in the later version that gives a mandate to the veggie rather than describes it.
The close with seen was overwritten with the less expected word seamed pushes it off from shore, reminding of how meanings are sewn, constructed.
We say species as though it were some foundational thing, but then our one orca whale by genes and social mixing seems now to be 3 species. Our polar bear and grizzly are thought to be distinct species, yet their hybrids are fertile. We insist our classifications of particular cases are right yet convergent evolution and unexplainables that don’t fit our model keep popping up.
**
She has since published Pessoa’s July: or the months of astonishments (Nomados, 2006).
Both chapbooks were described (by Jonathan Ball et al’s project), in brief, as “not the most immediately engaging” but the rhythm is gonna getcha.
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Where would I have put Trees of Periphery, Alberta Series, 2007 by Christine Stewart? I know just the shelf it was on at the old place before we moved…ah, a pdf version is here. Quite a different set of poems. Also with some of a length of a line or two on an occasional page that keeps the rhythm of pages from being stodgy. The subject being largely about sex, torquing and toqueing the loaded language and the fecundity and fun and words.
412 All flood and gush. All salt and spray.
Suck it up. ( We’ll not be sewn for these spurts and trickles).
Tragedy, washed us thus.
[…]
432 This is a science. I repeat. The blown brow of a thrown hill flickering. The sticky
weep of a ripe vine dickering: Resinous. I repeat. Je répète.
It’s more taking chants to play.
**
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