Recent Reads: Helen Hajnoczky and Sonnet L’Abbé

The Double Bind Dictionary by Helen Hajnoczky

Influence (“poem” broadside #316) by Sonnet L'Abbe

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

Instantaneous – that’s how I’d best describe Helen Hajnoczky’s style. Cascading imperatives grounded by physical surroundings that, upon each poem’s spiral, complete a curious mental image. Just try to resist her commanding flow and read them slowly; it feels unnatural. These are poems to get caught up in and they suit the chapbook format well, considering they’re part of a more sprawling body of work Hajnoczky is calling Magyarazni, in which poems are written for words chosen from the Hungarian alphabet.

In The Double Bind Dictionary’s more intimate table of contents, Hajnoczky has selected poems derived from words that feature multi-character Hungarian letters: cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, and zs. A title like “Gyogyul” may signal a bumpy path (my online research suggests a translation of “recovery”) but it needn’t shed light on the poem that follows:

“grip rum and hack.

gargle with salt water.

you’ll go from groaning

to glowing

it’s hard to see but

levitate – leave ash and

wipe your fingers

you hold fever in your hands.

a warm towel around your neck

you’ll feel better after

you’re wrapped in sour wine

and water, soup swells

and boils but

your throat will heal

do you feel better now?

oh well, honey,

have some tea.

someone’s always

there for you

when you’re sick.

now go to sleep.”

Hajnoczky’s work offers a direct study in cadence, in no small part giving a poem like “Gyogyul” its effortless readability, but that isn’t to say The Double Bind Dictionary leaves nothing to digest. Rogue thoughts tend to poke out like sticks in spokes. Amid calling out ways to become a “more malleable Hungarian” in “Cserkeszek”, Hajnoczky drops this little gem:

“wonder how well you know friends

who you cannot express yourself to –

who you cannot understand.”

And later in “Zsibbad”:

“you preserve what you picked out

canned it, keep the jars up on the

shelf, guard it carefully

for special occasions

though you won’t take it down

though you forget what it

tastes like, wouldn’t recognize

the flavour

if you dipped in a spoon –

stale now, anyway.”

These stanzas burst out of Hajnoczky’s greater linguistic muse and attach themselves to the reader’s psyche, often requiring a slower, contemplative re-read. It’s an intensely quotable chapbook for that reason, not to mention a promising precursor to her Magyarazni project.

When I first moved to Ottawa and researched its literary scene, every article about above/ground press mentioned its prolific means of publishing new and newer work. Broadsides, which founder rob mclennan designed as single-sheet, folded handouts, surely play a role in above/ground’s fertile masterplan but, more importantly, they showcase creative talents in single, brief glimpses.

With Influence, Sonnet L'Abbe filters visual poetry’s pensiveness down to its core delight: eliciting a response. In this case (and for this reader, although I’d venture to conclude that many winter-sick poetry lovers feel the same), that response is of longing. But “leaves of grass”, stretched and enunciated so broodingly from the roots up, twists zen-like thanks to L’Abbe’s aesthetic choice, with each curve of letters encouraging the phrase like a calming mantra. More, please.

The Poets' Pathway Springtime Party

             INVITATION

         The Poets’ Pathway asks you 

                             to

             a Springtime Get-together

   With wine, nibblies, chat and bonhomie

          (For lo the winter is gone)    :( 

                 Between 2 and 5 pm

                    Sunday, April 14

                                        649 Brierwood Avenue   (Off Dovercourt)

                                                          

                                                    Chris, Jane and Ben  

                                                                   The Poets’ Pathway 

Recent Reads: Jordan Abel and Abby Paige

Scientia by Jordan Abel

Other Brief Discourses by Abby Paige

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

Last spring I attended a talk on contemporary poetry styles given by rob mclennan and Pearl Pirie. In my full account of that Ottawa Independent Writers event, I mentioned an instance when some of the group’s most vocal members took exception to the merits of visual poetry. For the purposes of that review, I referred to the incident as little more than a hiccup amidst the flow of discourse. In the heat of it, however, that hiccup persisted for over twenty minutes. Several attendees brashly refused to see substance in visual poetry while the two guest-speakers defended the form as yet another approach to language and expression.

Keep in mind: nobody had been close enough to read the text in question. The chapbook hadn’t even left the guest-speakers’ table. Nevertheless that flash example of chaotic and non-linear displays resulted in a prolonged back-and-forth, as if unearthing insecurities in the writers’ own private works. That thought-provoking debate springs to mind when I read Jordan Abel’s Scientia because, aside from the fact that I’m also a tad intimidated by visual poetry, I think naysayers would gain some insight via Abel’s sharp approach.

Scientia’s lead poem reads like a testing of organic matter, the accumulation and reductions that eventually balance in the creation of life:

“All colour terms are reduced, cut short, not the usual

length. Acephalous: without a head. Those muscid ad-

ditions that give the glandular structure that branching

apex. Abrupt or hidden. Rubbed or scraped. The third

abductor extending past the honeycomb of the op-

tic tract. The tapering surface made white like a siphon.”

As pointed and sensory as schoolbook directives, Abel’s language unfurls on the adjoining page, exploring its subject in wide-open parameters without losing the text’s core meaning. Such is the twofold approach of Scientia, a study of insect anatomy and miniscule advances that help to shape a greater understanding alongside Abel’s visual accompaniments. 

Of these eight poems fully immersed in the working gears of insect species and their visual re-interpretations (in which insect outlines blot the swarm of off-shooting words), neither approach feels the dominant one. Instead they’re co-dependent on a singular focus that succeeds in drawing the reader to parallel the base instincts of these complex creatures against our own. With particularly stunning presentation by above/ground press, Scientia’s findings can behave like Rorschach tests just as convincingly as they look the part.

Very few experiences inspire me, both as a writer and overall life-enthusiast, to the degree that discovering a new city does. Whether I’m grabbing life by the horns or trying to flee from its expectations, a new city promises that clean slate the restless crave and the committed can only dream about. Abby Paige’s Other Brief Discourses, a sequence of poems centered on a trip to Quebec, instinctively reminds me of the raw drifter muses I’d pore onto pages during countless Greyhound bus trips.

But Paige finds a unique lens beyond the escapist reverie: ‘translating’ Samuel Champlain de Brouage’s encounters in New France “during the early years of the new millennium”. In this fantasy memoir, the explorer wrestles to integrate himself amidst post-millennial Montreal’s “pox of pavement”, the outer banks of the Saint Lawrence River and citizens who illustrate modern life as secular and money-driven (compared to the late 1500s, of course). Excerpt from "VII. The metro":

“and he is gone in the earthquake of sound

that rushes past, sucking air from

the station like a succubus – and people

in the belly of the snake!  A blur of faces,

hundreds, two kissing. The doors gasp

open, we step over the threshold

and in. Inside the beast, we swim through the inside

of the earth as the dead swim, treading soil

like water, ghosts breathing without gills.”

Although fully aware he has lost four centuries, Paige’s Champlain rarely engages old-world wonderment as much as in the above excerpt. In fact many observations feel symptomatic of a far less lengthy absence; the sprouting big-box outlets in Montreal, the zoned-out travelers and junkies at the bus station. This is as much Paige’s poetic retelling as it is a fictional what-if tale and Other Brief Discourses thrives on the duality of its yearning protagonist(s).

By its very premise, this sequence of poems is charming. (A poem chronicling Champlain’s irritation while waiting at the American border keeps springing to mind.) Paige doesn’t settle for situational, fish-out-of-water commentary though, instead touching on shades of nostalgia and belonging that gather additional traction for her narrative. From cramped, urban tunnels and hostel quarters to Champlain’s soiled, waterway haunts; through the flurry of morning commuters to downtown’s late-night pub-crawls; Other Brief Discourses strikes a natural ebb and flow that frees the reader from feeling stuck in one place for too long.