Talking Poetics #4 : Gil McElroy

Talking Poetics

The blackness of my notebooks, large and small, on my desk directly behind my laptop. Not many; the earliest dates back to 1983.  There are others – collaged journals in three-ring binders that parallel twenty years of the making of these black ones (and one blue intruder), and an early set of notebooks (also black) – but they don’t count, here. These are the ones that matter, and they sit here on my desk not out of nostalgia, but because I still use them. They are still eminently utile.

It might be reasonably expected that I jot down drafts of poems in them, early jabs at a constellation of words. But maybe I’m not reasonable, because I don’t. I write on my laptop (and before it, my typewriter), needing, as Charles Olson explicated in his essay “Projective Verse,’ the visual organization of text. I guess I’m a modernist that way.

Anyway, my notebooks don’t comprise drafts. They comprise individual lines, an ongoing accumulation thereof. Some explanation of what I mean is in order.

By the late 1970s, my writing had become, let us say, “constipated.” In my poetry I sought to distil things down to their essence, to the diamond at the compressed end of carbon. The extraneous (or so I thought it to be) was hewed away, leaving, well, leaving not very damn much. Alas, not so much diamond as constipated turd.

It was a dead end, and I began to realize it. So under the sway of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, whom I’d been intensely reading, I began to experiment with the cut-up. I used newspaper articles about the oil crisis of 1979 (in the midst of which I drove a friend to Pittsburgh, returning to Canada via Windsor and damn near running out of gas before I crossed the border) that I cut into small rectangles and glued to large sheets of cardboard. I didn’t transcribe exactly what I found there, but close enough. Wrote some prose pieces, some of which was published, and began to ponder what I was doing, whether or not this was a possible way forward. The cut-up as I was working with it was a bit awkward and laborious, and while I was deeply interested in how it wonderfully skewed things and opened up entirely new vistas, I wondered how it might be managed differently.

I remember, during that time, mis-reading something in a magazine and finding it hilarious. When I thought about it after the laughter subsided, I realized that it was also very useful. Mis-readings, mis-hearings – those moments when meaning slips about accidentally, bumps headlong into preconception and expectation, then heads off entirely elsewhere…. THIS was useful and interesting stuff. My first major literary influence had been the work of the French Surrealists, so I incorporated free-association into the mix, and began writing stuff in my notebooks as it emerged or as I encountered it. There was no attempt made to link individual thoughts that were transcribed as lines in my notebook, no attempt at that kind of coherence  - no attempt, in other words, at poetry, no imposition of any kind of narrative. It was (and still is) a dissociative  free-for-all. Randomness and chance are fecund and generative of the new (so I found great sympathy with, and encouragement from, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology).

So chance became my poetics; it set me free, liberated me from the overbearing tyranny of my ego, from the narratives my mind would be determined to set into words. Rarely, now, do I sit down to write a poem with something in mind (and if I do, they mostly turn out like crap). Instead, I turn to one of my notebooks, leafing through the pages looking for a line that catches, that resonates, and this I set down, finding another somewhere else that catches and resonates with the former and setting it down… Get where I’m headed? Okay, then. Just so you know: I hope I never do. The poetics of chance, of the accident, of a very real form of abandonment, leads me forward now. Poems are always surprises, not just semantic templates of some conscious thought, transcriptions of what’s kicking around in my head. I’m really not that interesting, and anyway, my life or thoughts really aren’t anyone else’s business. Oh, occasionally poems crop up that are telling of slight aspects of my life, but they’re rare and infrequent.

Good. I prefer the accidental. I’ll stick with that.

Gil McElroy

October 26, 2019 (JD 2458783)

Gil McElroy is a poet and artist living in Colborne, Ontario. His most recent book, Long Division, will be published by University of Calgary Press in 2020.

Recent Reads: Touch the Donkey (Issues 3, 2 & 1)

Touch the Donkey : third issue, October 2014.

Touch the Donkey : second issue, July 2014.

Touch the Donkey : first issue, April 2014.

(Also available with an above/ground press subscription)

For years I’d been planning to “get into” experimental poetry. Perhaps this sounds familiar. I had not circled a date on the calendar, nor browsed excerpts from celebrated masters of the avant-garde. Truth be told, I hadn’t moved an inch on the subject until Touch the Donkey’s third issue appeared, as plainly and mysteriously as the previous two. (For 90s inclined music fans, we can just as well refer to these as we do Weezer albums; the "blue issue", the "green", etc.) I recall feeling deflated in April when flipping through the debut, quietly bemoaning my indifference. But with July’s follow-up I found some energetic pockets, and then October’s release clicked more often than not. Let's rewind, re-assess.

Has each Touch the Donkey issue improved by leaps and bounds? Possibly, although it’s just as reasonable to suggest that I’m now jumping with the text, instead of panting against each abstract hurdle. If we opt to credit any learning curve, we’re obliged to discuss above/ground press’ subscription service, the caravan by which many a Touch the Donkey issues have found readers. Inserted with bundles of chapbooks, the literary magazine’s kinship goes beyond the aesthetic, featuring many familiar above/ground alumni. But its platform for experimental poetics, which also includes writers brand new to me, is paving a left-field expanse for publisher rob mclennan and company to explore unfettered.

third issue,

Since the issues haven’t relied on theme or more than eight contributors a piece, it’s no surprise that much of the reader’s enjoyment will rest on each writer’s style and subject matter. The third issue has so much going for it precisely because the roster feels stacked and in a generous mood. derek beaulieu's conceptual piece “one week”, which collates violence in the middle east, unfurls with the grace of a pillow-case full of hammers descending the stairs. Emily Ursuliak’s “Tourists”, presumably taken from the same project as Braking and Blather, finesses themes of otherness and sexism into the minutia of a roadside stop. But the real surprises come from authors I haven't read before. The lack of punctuation and twitchy enjambments in Susan Briante’s “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” make for a deep reflection that halts as much as it flows. Two poems by D.G. Jones are also powerful, in particular the way “goldfinchen” feeds us tightly wound tangibles that piece together a small moment.

goldfinchen

greedy guts, again and again, stack

the feeder

                   distracting

from

the snow-rain-snow end

of May with

                       their flashy

  counterfeit

                     sunshine

some of it

mint fresh

                   silly coin – the cardinal

interrupts them like

  a sin

second issue,

If some hidden comprehension key helped me enjoy Issue Three so, it must’ve started turning in Issue Two. Susanne Dyckman’s “Across the Street” and David Peter Clark’s “On the Way to the Tranzac on March 7, 2013” peer out from under streetlights with different surrealist takes; Dyckman reconstructs the spatial relationship of architecture and the moods that weather it, while Clark trips over an intentional blurring of memes, alley cats and distractions as digressions. Both held my imagination, though as Dyckman brought me closer via her whimsical logic, Clark’s self-satisfied cleverness kept me at a distance. His scattered line-breaks and narrative inconsistencies fashion a convincing stumble but Clark’s checking-in on the reader – whether we’re following along, whether we looked up how to pronounce a particular word – reaches into the obnoxious side of inebriation, making me sort of wish he’d stayed at home.

In acknowledging a distaste for this tongue-in-cheek breakdown of the fourth wall, I’ve likely tapped a vein in my own subconscious bias against the focus of some experimental writing. I sense a similar disconnect with Catherine Wagner’s “Notice”, which in a dry third person tone, reads like a pamphlet on who does and doesn’t pay for her poetry. Still I cannot criticize “Notice” for the specialized audience it seeks (namely, other writers), nor pinpoint weak spots in clarity or form (it’s quite readable). The versatility of voices arguably works more to Touch the Donkey's advantage than its audience's, aiming at a brave readership while exposing the casually curious to new forms. In other words, it comes with the territory that less adventurous readers should expect peaks and valleys, throughways and dead-ends.

first issue,

Does my learning curve in reverse cast a more generous light on Issue One (the “beige issue”…)? Actually, yeah: Pattie McCarthy’s “from wifthing” (which some totally academic, online research defines as “an affair connected with a woman or wife”) gets by on envious layers of mystique that wrestle new love, post-family. Alternately I’m reminded that the first batch of Gil McElroy’s project Some Doxologies, which gains new traction after enjoying Issue Three’s helping, and rob mclennan’s “Acceptance Speech” were noteworthy the first time around. An excerpt from “wifthing”:

keep the wolf from

the door her lips

numb   bored like

every drag of a cigarette

after the headrush

practically deranged with need

congratulates herself for not

devouring you in front of all

assembled       patience

figure in a taxicab crossing

& now I’m lying in it

As someone who enjoys going into a text blind, I've delayed mentioning Touch the Donkey's digital side, which compared to the sleek, minimal design of the card-stock journal, is crammed with supplemental interviews. Despite the technological divide, the process is fluid: each poem acts as the foundation for an interview discussing the poet's approach while also linking to other recent work. It's like speed-dating for new titles and authors.

In stripping back my expectations of what Touch the Donkey should be, I’ve uncovered a better idea of what it is: a margin, fortified and flipped horizontally, gloaming the trespasses of expression I was too intimidated to venture into alone. Three books in, Touch the Donkey has graduated from perk-status to a mercurial entity all its own. 

On Writing #36 : Gil McElroy

Building a Background

Gil McElroy

A

A normal reading of words offers, at best, timid glances down Newtonian successions of corridors. The cause-and-effect of letters and newspapers following  one upon the other is an idea devoted to reproduction (or to what exclamations really look like).

Handfuls of order are measured in such a way. We want a custodian, a hired perspective, lbs. of absolute and everlasting solidity. (Resilience is indeed considered a perfectly reasonable way to total ruin.)

In a place so organized, the container of traditional questions, answers, and achievements daily exemplified by names comes to seem incontrovertible.

But the membrane of metaphor is permeable. First of all, one must fit.

B

The present grammar has rocking chair meanings. The little maelstroms of poems wrinkle of conversation and the humpty-dumpty of things. Entire utterances devour the smaller things that move (the mere sensations of language, the unpointed vowels, the asylums of syllables...), swallowing each pregnant bulge of creatures.

This world is new and unalloyed, but in any geometry something is always given.

Here, it is in a diminishing that readers, all with parallax, have the anatomy to attack: a cone, the base of which is given to the more widely used dimensions, the apex a point somewhere sudden and intrusive amongst the very basic clumps correlated outside of the teeth* , letters typically and tightly buttoned by words.

C

Raw and quivering to the touch, these comparisons (so made) are invented in a manner I can only describe with all the inadequacy that words, sailing down without context, can imply: we write, posturing some arguable ideas; we read, embodying an upright condition.

We have these definitions retained in parallel, but we have the accidental in common (the same water of escape).

A stone can dive no deeper.

*Though the palate brings us their names.

Gil McElroy is a poet, visual artist, independent curator, and critic living in the village of Colborne, Ontario. He provided the introduction to Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press, 2003-2013 (2013).

Recent Reads: Ground Rules: the best of above/ground press' second decade

Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013

Edited by rob mclennan

With an introduction by Gil McElroy

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2013.

Beyond its implicit roundness, skipping forward or backward in clean slices that gleam with impunity, what’s in a decade? What makes it a respectable interval, a begging glance? Does it detect a pillow of separation? Or a panic-stricken jolt? What did you do in the last decade? Perhaps our reverence to the decade owes to the limitations of memory; that as the years gather and so much blood and sweat get mothballed, nobody can rightly gauge the potential of ten years without its anniversary, marked by cultural clocks in fluorescent detail. Oftentimes, there’s just too much to remember beyond the face of it.

So how does one approach a decade (the second, to be precise) of above/ground press, one of Canada’s most fertile and industrious publishers? Gil McElroy’s introduction, while hazardous for someone confused by the very mention of calculus, arrives at a sort-of chaos theory, interpreting poetics – through Louis Zukofsky’s “A” – as Music and Speech captured in a relationship of exhausting potential. As the two forms zigzag from opposite comfort zones of traditional rhythm and lyricism, McElroy locates above/ground press as reliable coordinates by which fresh collisions consistently occur. Ten years, in McElroy’s view, isn’t so much a measurement of time (the how-longs and how-manys) as it is a matter of choice and execution. It’s about staying vital: the enduring impact of and interest in above/ground press acts as its seal, its legacy.

Fittingly, Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 begins with an impulsive foot forward, sharing visual poems by derek beaulieu and strong, solo poems highlighted by Stephanie Bolster’s instantly re-readable “Night Zoo”. With its playful sense of variety firmly intact, the compendium settles into a showcase of chapbooks, the medium above/ground champions at a prolific, damn-near-obsessive pace. Now as a relative newcomer, having followed only the last handful of the press’ twenty years in business (and thereby missing Groundswell), I was quick to get excited about the selection process. Which titles will make the cut? And had Ground Rules been a perfunctory slap on the back, or even some cut-and-paste of personal favourites, much of that anticipation would’ve reconciled itself on the Table of Contents. Instead, editor and publisher rob mclennan has used this occasion of collecting previously published work to reframe and carry anew the conversation about poetics.

Organized like a trade pamphlet, Sharon Harris’ More Fun With ‘Pataphysics gazes upon the poet from the stance of a curious outsider and offers imaginative answers that reflect the futility of assigning too much structure to craft.

“8. If I place a poem and its translation across from each other, and I stand between them, can I

see my reflection stretching away into infinity?

In theory, you could get an infinite number of reflections in the poems, but only if the poem 

was perfectly translated and you stood there forever."

"15. Where’s the best place to sit at a poetry reading?

Sit up front if you want the best view. Sit in the middle if you want a scary ride. Sit in the back if to 

feel like you’re floating.”

Harris’ light, irreverent jabs at the somber weight heaped on poets from the mainstream form one of the many voices interested in the function of art itself. A more clinical tactic surfaces in Lisa Samuels’ The Museum of Perception, a chapbook of poems that look the part – and, to some extent, serve the purpose – of text panels one would find in a gallery but overlap their descriptions with a poetic voice that obfuscates the imagined view. Sometimes Samuels probes the limitations of perception, other times she warns against accepting directives for how a given thing should be perceived. The grey area between forms and intentions feels oppressive, complicated but mesmerizing nevertheless. Then there’s Natalie Simpson’s Writing the Writing, a clear-headed mediator between the aforementioned cheeky and theory-drenched examples, which through clever wordplay pinpoints the transient ways a person can net and manipulate everyday language for something therapeutic, something unusual, something new.  Each of these chapbooks begs the reader: what is this practice and why does it happen? What are we, as readers and writers, chasing?

If that’s the knottiest theme unifying Ground Rules, it’s interspersed with chapbooks that fortify the shoe-gazing, near-existential question by looking outward and showing no concern for it.  In her conversational free-verse poem My City is Ancient and Famous, Julia Williams’ preoccupation with living spaces and the rites of moving collide with the maintenance, politics and market-worth that often keep people stationary. Eric Folsom’s Northeast Anti-ghazals alternately thrives by obeying a tailored structure and littering severed omissions for the reader to fill in.

“Slipping Away

Whatever lies frozen in the ice, a mitten or a Buick,

Suspended as though floating upside down in the sky.

The fiddle music over, so the priest went home

And saw the ghost of his father sitting on the bed.

Late in the season when the ice gets soft,

Some drunk tries to cross at night and disappears.

Most people worry about saying the wrong thing,

Think too long about the darkness beneath their feet.

Wheels lock automatically

When passenger doors are open.

She gave her daughter the red sweater and a key

To the safety deposit box down at the bank.

Something that shouldn’t have been there,

A car in the same spot for days, gathering tickets.”

“Slipping Away” dutifully showcases Folsom’s ominous tone and knack for loosely associated imagery, although it's worth noting the latter quality flexes just as convincingly in a nearby poem about the warmth of a young family’s morning routine ("Just Another Yuppie Raising Children"). Almost evaporated and yet equally unmovable is Rachel Zolf’s the naked & the nude, which in pockets on each page displays a sensual account in its minimal, elemental glory (stealthily citing the work of Bob Marley, Phyllis Webb, and Joni Mitchell in the process).

Alongside a wealth of titles I’d missed the first time around, Ground Rules exhibits reproductions that intuitively fill gaps in the library of authors I’ve grown to admire. The crumbling Santa Maria hotel in cuba A book exists in an historical and cultural nexus perfectly suited to Monty Reid’s inquisitive voice.

“Pot-holes

soldiers and barricades

on the airport road

checking the papers

hard stabs of light

that doubt

who you are.

Oh yes

we are still

who the papers

say we are.

A cloud of jellyfish

wash up

on the shore

at Santa Maria

where you found

a cheap hotel

built by the Russians

and used

as a love hotel

in their idyllic phase

and then abandoned

in the general

abandonment

that comes after

the idyllic phase.

The jellyfish tremble

in the small breeze

or is it resentment

since no one

will touch them

in spite of their beauty

and their arms

so many, so much

to let go of

can still

hurt you.

Remember

the Russians?

How they went

home disappointed

in love

and in concrete?”

The above excerpt offers a surface glimpse at the subjects Reid meshes – aging amid the rituals of dating, identity as culture and place, nature as pure or putrid – without letting their philosophical weight hamper the clarity of his tourist’s candor. Another eureka moment arrives with Helen Hajnoczky’s A history of button collecting, a shimmering exercise in prose poetry that takes inventory of the material, maternal and natural ephemera that instill memory.

“Pastel smudge of sunset, cold memories cling like dust, crackle of

gravel, the lane sheltered by an awning of oak trees. Press on and

watch the sun go down. Cold gravel of memories, crackle of sunset

like dust. Go down the lane, sheltered by an awning of sunset, oak

trees watch the sun go down. Press on, a pastel smudge.”

Memory’s addictive traits form a paralyzing subtext to the whole but the above portion finds Hajnoczky’s nostalgia at an impasse, dwelling less in specific details than in temperatures – warm or cold. A history of button collecting remembers itself in revisions; the actual past increasingly fragmented, obscured. Catching minute impressions creates a more physical memorial in Cameron Anstee’s Frank St. but the act is pressurized all the same; our wordsmith scales the premises, recording every happenstance from a perch over downtown Ottawa but his proofs struggle to compete with the building’s scars. None of these poems bear any strain of the restlessness they recite – each effortlessly rooted in the quirks of an old apartment and the timeline of its resident couple – but Frank St. documents memory as an ongoing present, a unrequited limbo. Anstee’s couplets and stray lines tiptoe the left margin, never staking their subject as home with a capital H but sketching a safe haven for books, plants and cooperative hands. Earlier I mentioned chapbooks that interrogate their own bones but these recent examples (by Williams, Reid, Folsom et al.) tend to above/ground's duality by seeking new ruins, new worlds.

Readers will approach Ground Rules with varying degrees of familiarity; longtime above/ground subscribers might own all of these selections while casual fans should recognize at least a few. Given that my knowledge of the press’ output exists somewhere between these two camps, I’ve been in the enviable position of adding several authors to my must-pursue list, discovering older work by authors I already enjoy and revisiting some classics (by the likes of William Hawkins and Robert Kroetsch) that require no introduction from me. Even so, the bounty of Ground Rules doesn’t hinge on what you have or haven’t read yet. These entries probe, reflect, dance and thrash together, harnessing a friction that confounds as much as it compliments. It’s surprising that an anthology looking backwards should say something new but, then again, above/ground press has been releasing fresh poetry for twenty years now. We had a solid ten to see this coming.