Ceremony
Kaie Kellough
for
Jayne Cortez
You write because you are haunted: not hunted, not vanquished,
but visited by something that hovers just beyond immediate perception. You write because you are aware of something that
flits close then away, that is vague but prescient, like an invisible twin, an
entity you can only approach by by calling out, sounding, knowing that words
are equally abstract. Words may say other than what you think, and may mislead away.
Words are themselves but they are also other, scattering without discretion. A
ship is spelled s-h-i-p but it is not a ship. It may also be a shape and a slip
across an expanse, an estrangement, with an interrogation point looming in the
rising song. The writing process is a
reach across this unknown, and as the letters are pushed and pulled across,
they dissolve into something greater than themselves, somehting as expansive as
a family never met, a hauntology, a bush of ghosts.
The stories you want to tell are always the stories that
tug and release when you try to grasp. The
only way you can pursue them is by laying out a trail of letters, a trail that
you and others can follow, a spelling into being. Somehow, these stories are
always vexed by inabilities, inadequacies, lack. Inability to completely
address or redress immediate or historic grievance, inadequate ability to act
on the world and directly effect change, inadequate ability to rise above the
roiling mess of dialogue that is, at the end of the day, just dialogue
struggling with dialogue. Inadequate ability to expand the stories of the
minor characters in official histories, in everyday life, and in literature:
characters who have been written into the background or erased altogether, and
whose haunting is never fleshed into full presence.
The process of writing is also bruised by dismissal and
rebuke. When it hears: we don't have an
audience for your story and your kind of work; your language is too strident;
your rage is too loud for this festival; your verse lacks
"density"; your poetry isn't
nuanced enough, you hesitate and question the value of your undertaking. But even in the face of rebuke, the mind drifts. Its unconscious drift traces letters, words, and
that too is haunting.
You reckon with the vexation, hurt, digression, and haunt
before sitting down to write. This
writing, then, honors the difficulties and the inadequacies. It is a ceremony of slow sentences
encircling, decorating, and temporarily ennobling the crushed ego, a wreath of
letters to throw into the void, perhaps a sacrifice or a purification rite, an
acknowledgement that this service is not good enough but that it will be performed
in spite of its naught. Welcome to the ceremony.
Kaie's work fuses formal experiment and social engagement. Kaie is the author of 2 books of poetry Lettricity (Cumulus Press 2004), and Maple Leaf Rag (Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2010), and 2 Sound recordings: Vox:Versus (WOW 2011), and Creole Continuum (HOWL! 2014). Kaie performs and publishes internationally, and is presently working on a novel.
Please visit: www.kaie.ca and www.kaiesharp.ca
YES!
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