Many of the things I’m drawn to are about gaps. I will not say int _ _ _ices — the keyword bingo jargon. But poems that are more leapy than average. Salience isn’t what is or where something is. It is not context so much as expectation and cross-connections. Language and sounds and their relationships to what bridges. It’s not that I want to read what is deliberately obtuse or difficult. It’s that I don’t want to read what’s deadened down by oversimplifying. I want a culled curation of something that someone has plucked as interesting enough to pursue, but not necessarily a finished curation with all the labels, how-tos and therefores already laminated. I want something to do other than consume.
I’m still nibbling at the nutrition of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (Green Integer), p. 112, “There is no air on the moon to carry talk. Is that violence or violins?” I could pause there a good long while. Lyn Hejinian encourages passing notes on the moon? Since it was written in 1987, it foresees talk without air behind vacuum sealed glass? I like the idea of pondering just how to take omissions. Is it something to grieve or oppose because it is opposition? It is question of battles to fight or let slide.
The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 by Gregory Betts (Pedlar, 2009). I love all the directions of branching of quotes from across centuries and the clustering themes. Here Catherine the Great, there Darren Wershler-Henrym in 2000 or Arthur Young in 1793. I’m up to p. 177, #115
is love
in the body
is it
the shadow
It’s reshaping my brain further towards looking for words embedded in words and joining fragments across words. I can’t even read straight.
You may have already noticed but the new Branch Magazine issue is out. I’m so glad there’s a version without flash. [I’ll removed flash from my computer entirely one day]. There’s an interview with Mary di Michele “it is language itself speaking, it is larger than me, saying more than I can intend, and on stage it feels like a cloak of invisibility — the clothes have no emperor!” There are pages on the process of writing, notebooks, scribbles of Susan Gillis and photographs around the perimeter of Lake Louisa by Melissa Mercier. A lot more to see in the issue still.
The Snowbird Poems by Robert Kroetsch (University of Alberta Press, 2004), p. 67, poem entitled: January 12
Two huge green warted squash on the table in the living room and Pauline saying, They are my squash, I raised them, and Fred saying, But the manure was mine.
Who then can lay claim? Who is it, then, I ask you, dares to lay lay claim? Fred, by spreading on the manure; Pauline, letting the green rind swell with its hidden cargo of yellow-orange flesh, its flat, slippery seeds?
We were having wild salmon for dinner, the salmon baked on a cedar plank.
Does the city give us the poems? Or do the poems give us the city? How does a city remember itself?
The everyday plain and the comic and the profound. We do get possessive of the funniest thing. Block off a square of air or water or idea as if there can be no-touch-backs. Bizarre human need to be behind victories that happen by themselves. The gaps of our culpabilities are everywhere.
The Little Seamstress by Phil Hall (Pedlar, 2010) (not to be mistaken for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress the film which is also good.) p. 64 is in pace and breath and play and leaning into and out of meanings,
So stupid & still am
couldn’t hear speed or silence
thought silence a sculpture in a park
speed all dong & séance
let a sculpture be a fallen totem / theatre train
(bear head fluttering under the waves of an inlet)
off-kilter / let song / & dance / usher in / alert calm
on one leg I try to bow but my goat mask falls off
as I trip over it — my prayer comes out — duh
to read & wait — open & hum
my great story / migratory
See what I mean? Leaps and play and is it humbleness or self-deprecation or being realistic about this foibly comedy that is living?
Magma, issue 50, has arrived. They have such wonderful essays in there as a rule and this time on Romani poetry. Look forward to that. The feature focus is poets in exile, poets in translation from Spanish. The opening poem of the issue is by John Glenday that starts “Let’s head for a place, neighbouring and impossible – / that city neither of us has ever found./It swithers somewhere between elsewhere”. Swithers. What a wonderful word. If I start in on the issue, that’s all I’ll get done.
I have too many things on my desk being pecked at in parallel. At least with this habit of reading 50 pages per sitting, I can recall where I was when my bookmarks go off to be bedsheet marks or couchmarks.
World Literature Today, July/August Issue has as its feature the many voices of Italian poets, 15 poets in translation. Their book review section is exceptional. Lovely to be able to access a new set of poets and aesthetic of ideas. And of course, enough overlap to be as understandable as anything local or present.
Project Rebuild where Mat Laporte, Natalie Simpson added some ooh-poems. 102 poem-houses and growing.
The Anatomy of Clay (ECW, 2011) by Gillian Sze p. 29, from Insomniac conjectures
The dark has stolen my sleep again,
thrown it, like a deranged sweater, over the wooden owl
perched on the edge of my neighhour’s balcony
with the half-closed barbecue
and empty terra cotta pot.
It has a scene of dishevelled detail. It is not tidied nor is it harped on, justified or made terribly symbolic. It is more take it as it is. Draw what connections you will. He’s a peep at something.
The poem doesn’t inflict itself. Poems about the poet in discomfort can have a habit of wanting to transfer the experience and spread the ripples of trauma and re-traumatizing. That sort of thing seems unfair and unfinished in a less good way. Process an experience and get back to me. If its still raw, let it alone. Get a historical calm instead of a hysterical .com rant on.
The shadows of not being able to sleep could have been made mystic or otherwise silly and looming but instead the flatness is flattering, a state of becoming is becoming.
Seems appropriate to end on a note of dark with that restless storm moving in again and it seemingly dusk in mid-afternoon.