covering ottawa writing, writers, events and publications; curated by rob mclennan,
Friday, December 15, 2017
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Recent Reads: "The Sourdough Collaborations" by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie
The Sourdough Collaborations by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie
Published
by Phafours Press, 2015.
The Sourdough Collaborations is a rare consortium: an exchange between two poets that is chronicled in evolving drafts as well as informal discussion about the
applications and results of each approach used. To put it another way, The Sourdough Collaborations is the making
of The Sourdough Collaborations. And
seeing as how authors Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie have lifted the curtain,
explaining their various intuition and internet-based means of manipulating
text, I’m essentially writing footnotes on footnotes.
Regardless,
I felt like a participant in the chapbook’s playful abandon. Whether they’re
putting a poem through a series of translations (in one case: Spanish to
Catalan to English to Klingon to French then back to English), riffing on the outcome
or each other’s interpretation, Prevost and Pirie share an unguarded
willingness to chase fresh writing. To give a broad idea of their interchange, here’s
a poem undertaken by Pirie:
(Note: Although
it’s customary to share a few excerpts, I must preface to remind that very
satisfying context surrounds the creation of these poems. Seek out a copy here.)
water-mind
sweet chap
of bubble-language, nothing else
is in this
(refillable) glass but us.
past
refracted alfalfa fields, their roots like turnips
we 6 gaze,
nod as seahorse steeds
ledge of
seashells are Christian bystanders
in 2 hour
litany of k’pows, daddy finger-blams
mangy fox,
psycho cow, vagrant bear till Emmy holds up
her teddy,
asks, would you shoot this in the bush?
an organ
grinder in the gut claps, makes terrible
digestion,
a useless sluice of gastric;
no bite
against junkyard violence. us listing
as a group
what gives reflux, cukes, orange juice…
the
movement of ripples is a wobble in the plans
in the
planes, in the planets
not the
culpa of our wet earth.
it’s only
you and me here; what matters now?
let us have
as much compass direction as a rake.
that APB?
never mind. self was never lost but a rain walk.
(Pirie, pg. 16)
(Pirie, pg. 16)
And here is
Prevost’s response:
our slow liquid
The
original bottle of us, filled and capped
permeates
our travels
undersea
fields of the kelp-woman
as she
rides quiescent undertows
thin
calcium armors, whose ridges
foretell an
upcoming sparagmos
even
landlocked prey will plead
with
many-faced little-girl gods
what we
stomach laughs out loud
weak acid
drips harmless off skin
a stack
gathers to attack
a lining
that shrugs away
shaken by
what should stir
the edge
curves around the globe
tides,
tidings on this stage
this known
story still surprises
the map or
mapless number
remains one
small-big-whole fraction
that walks
from and into fog
as
enjoyable as ether
(Prevost, pg. 17)
(Prevost, pg. 17)
Despite appearing
surgically removed from their authors’ comments, “water-mind” and “our slow
liquid” present the core infallibility of this collaborative unit: Prevost and Pirie are keen readers and listeners, capable of shaping one another’s gambits into sturdy morsels worth pulling apart. Though the exercises seem custom-built
for Pirie’s elastic dissection of koan and colloquialism, Prevost proves
totally up to the challenge, often distilling these ‘bastard ghazals’ to their
imagistic potential. Like any thriving partnership, one person’s strengths must
balance the other’s. At various points in-between the peaks of exploration and consolidation, the Ottawa-area poets achieve a single,
hybridized voice.
It could be said, albeit unfairly, that the procedures and approaches they discuss outshine the poems themselves – but that’s like saying limitless possibility outshines the closure of a finished piece! At one point, Prevost and Pirie realize their exchange could go on forever:
It could be said, albeit unfairly, that the procedures and approaches they discuss outshine the poems themselves – but that’s like saying limitless possibility outshines the closure of a finished piece! At one point, Prevost and Pirie realize their exchange could go on forever:
“As in
renga, the poetic conversation starts conservative, safe, and gears up. By
mid-point it can go wilder as at the height of a party where speech is most
loose. More politics or violence or conflict or general chaos can be engaged
with. Likewise with this. Once we were comfortable with the back and forth, we
could stretch, throw wilder and assume the other could run for it, catch and
throw something back.” (pg. 12)
The allure of possibility is magnetic because it’s theoretical. But these poems, often thoughtful, warm and surprising, double as blueprints of choice, using stream-of-consciousness, linguistic and homophonic translation, a bunch of excisions and intuition as ways of keeping options open. Given the imagination on tap for The Sourdough Collaborations, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these bakers finding their way into the kitchen for a second batch.
The allure of possibility is magnetic because it’s theoretical. But these poems, often thoughtful, warm and surprising, double as blueprints of choice, using stream-of-consciousness, linguistic and homophonic translation, a bunch of excisions and intuition as ways of keeping options open. Given the imagination on tap for The Sourdough Collaborations, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these bakers finding their way into the kitchen for a second batch.
Wednesday, December 06, 2017
Recent Reads: "North" by Marilyn Irwin
North by
Marilyn Irwin
Published
by above/ground press, 2017.
(&)
he said he
wouldn’t speak
to me ever
again
if i killed
myself
This is the
opening page from North, a chapbook by Marilyn Irwin that documents a woman’s unraveling life. Perspective here is obscured by depression, plainspoken in
sparse lines that communicate exhaustion but just as evocative through
omissions – the disassociated flitting between subjects and settings. After moving
from a clinical environment of bed straps and wired windows to a domestic refuge of bedcover stasis, the text hones in on smaller maneuvers, sharing various
interactions in a semi-present state.
(&)
goes to an
interview
she puts
bright colours on
and what
she thinks is a smile
she doesn’t
get the job
she repeats
this 17 more times
And in a later stanza:
(&)
her mother
asks if she is tired
this is my voice now
she says
A lot of creative
writing about depression drives to the net: protagonist suffers a steep mental decline
followed by an act of self-harm (which, callously speaking, acts as the money shot). This isn’t a totally inaccurate depiction so much as a limited one, often exploited in CliffsNotes form as a
plot point in some greater narrative. Inattention to the broader scope of
depression – the creeping isolation, fatigue and gradual surrendering of
capacities – might rescue readers from "the boring stuff" but it also implies
that the author looks in on this condition as otherness.
Quite the
opposite, North shapes this woman’s
chronic fog like a lived-in experience, embodying mental illness through
feelings of exclusion and the banality of repeated tasks. The intentional
overuse of the ampersand may entwine each narrative instance for one marathon, run-on
sentence but it’s the author’s restraint – the precision in voice and diction –
that transmits so much despondency in so few words. Almost every line feels like it could be the last.
Where the
title comes into play is “epilogue”, wherein Irwin switches from “she” to the
personal “I” and makes an oblique reference halfway through:
a thank you
card in the mail
a job
application to Toronto
she chose
north
It’s the
only mention of “she” in “epilogue” and, given the prior couplet, it’s possible
that “north” is being used geographically. Or, perhaps the abrupt change in
perspective is making a solemn, figurative pronouncement – who’s to say? With
the uncertainty of “epilogue”, Irwin throws a wrench into her own
well-constructed malaise and alerts readers, who had settled into the woman’s
decline, to re-evaluate both voices. No spoilers here – I only have theories –
but North is a haunting little
chapbook that sharpens "the boring stuff" into vital, heart-churning attempts at salvaging a life.
Tuesday, December 05, 2017
On Writing #146 : Arisa White
On Writing
Arisa White
This past summer, I spent my second time in Tulum, Tankah Bay.
Staring into the sea, body absorbing sun, inhaling salt air, my feet buried and
unburied in sand. I now look for these elements in poems.
Where is the earth? Air? Fire? Where is the poem’s water?
Together they must ether a poem that suffuses the reader.
(Whenever we look at anything in fragments, we think that will
help us reproduce it; but the poem, at any given moment, requires different
balances of these elements. This is the script for any ecosystem.)
I’m not looking for the elements in a literal sense, but the
earth as structure and container; the air as the logic of the poem; the
gravitas and passion—that thing that pulls us to care and read on is fire; and
the water as memory. Personal and collective (re)membering.
It is a water body, a poem that wishes to recall and respond.
Anissa Janine Wardi, citing Robert Lawrence France in her book
Water and African American Memory,
writes that “Since ‘water is not a renewable resource,’ it follows that ‘every
molecule of every droplet of water in existence today has always been [here],
recording all acts upon the globe” (9).
A poem worth its water accounts for_________. It whets our
whatnots and Dixies, don’t shy from bayous, themgroves, can seduce a maroon
from inland to shore.
We put so much of our minerals into our writing. We are
leaving our belongings so we can return. Milk blood semen urine sweat saliva
tears. I sometimes dare myself to lick the poem to sample the crystals, love
and gratitude—all that funk we Calgon away.
My student Hernan wonders, how to make a poem dance. To that,
I question, how to make a poem ocean. Make it puddle. Make it wetlands. Make it
rain. Does the poem come down in Benjamins or Washingtons? Is it true, sixty
percent of the time, the poem washes you?
We beseech for the rain. This is when a poem dances and get
wet. We show our moves, remember the curve in our spine, our aquatic brethren.
Throw up pulses, however we amplify the beat, everywhere—felt. Show dirt,
match, and breath—all our in-and-out and around again. When a poem turns up
drought, how thirsty you got to be to doo-wop?
I live below sea level and still it’s dry. We don’t want it
too dry. We don’t want it to break up in our mouths and take moisture from our
taste. An unleavened wafer we want to say is a body but the crisp is unnatural.
It’s ungodly not to be supple.
Northern California is on fire. The fires are wild because if
it’s not coming from your lighter or stove, it knows nothing about tame. It
doesn’t fear water; it doesn’t fear a soak. What is a poem that is burning,
that doesn’t have an inch of water to save its life?
They say, the rappers say, spit your rhyme. Will you give your
spit to the line? Your salt, your wounds, a scab remains, a record.
After a long journey, a glass of water is offered to the
traveler. It is a way to welcome, to say, Sit
and be here awhile. Here, because getting here cost you your water. She
gives you a glass, condensation started, ice cubes clinking and buoyant, an
energy of words. That goes down electronic, indefinite, without preposition, no
punctuation. She sees you’ve been refreshed.
When your Aunt asks, “Where you’re from, child?” The poem
stirring up eddies in her hands, you say, “Where memory crystallizes and
secretes itself as a particular historical moment” (Wardi 6).
My friend Goodman tells me, in the three minutes I spare to
chat, on my way to the class I’m instructing that begins at suppertime, that he
almost died. Him and I, shots and cocktails, drink like fish to get back to our
pre-born days. A wave took him into its arms and he went under. How many waters
has he crossed to know something new? He can’t help himself. In the Pacific’s
stronghold, he thought of two poems. These two poems, he says, saved his life.
Goodman tells me—each word a brick in this memorial—keep writing.
“So I gotta make the song cry,” Jay-Z admits in recitative. There
are three kinds of tears. Basal tears are the continuous tears that lubricate
our eyeballs; reflex tears are produced when we chop onions or get poked in the
eye; and psychic tears are those caused by, and communicating, specific emotional
states (Wardi 9). Jay’s song will do what the body is socialized not to do and
this gesture, like whipping your hair back and forth, is a speech act. Oily and
protein rich, the poem must plait a holy trinity of tears into a French braid.
Although, the surface of a poem is reflective, “when we
consider water’s molecular makeup, we see that it is capable of displaying a
vast array of expressions” (Emoto 2).
You can face-beat a poem until it’s haiku, yet to be bottled.
We drink, too, its containment. Along with hydration, the feeling we cannot
move. We are held in this volume. Turgid, you feel stacked on a shelf, jostled
and what a sigh of relief when the cap comes off. The touch of freer vibes.
What would it mean to have the river in us, to have our poems know that they
are moving toward a wider embrace?
On writing, I’m floating on the Caribbean Sea. Life jacket on,
arms legs splayed in multiplication, I’ve fallen from stardust and why get up.
Every each inch of waves on me, hold me. Rays loving me. This touch like this,
one and only. Makes us bob, poem please ripple, leave us feeling centered and
spoke.
Sources:
Water and African
American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective, Anissa Janine Wardi
The Miracle of Water,
Masaru Emoto
Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White [photo credit: Nye' Lyn
Tho] received her MFA from UMass, Amherst, and is the author of Black Pearl,
Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, and A Penny Saved. Her recent
collection You’re the Most Beautiful Thing that
Happened was a nominee for the 29th
Lambda Literary Award and the chapbook “Fishing Walking” and Other Bedtime Stories for
My Wife won Daniel Handler’s inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize.
As the creator of the Beautiful
Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic
collaborations that center narratives of queer people of color. She serves on
the board of directors for Nomadic
Press and is a faculty advisor at Goddard College. arisawhite.com
Friday, December 01, 2017
We Who Are About To Die : William Allegrezza
William Allegrezza edits the Moria Books and the e-zine Moss Trill. He
teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published many
poetry books, including In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile
Replacements, Collective Instant, Aquinas and the Mississippi (with
Garin Cycholl), Covering Over, and Densities, Apparitions; two
anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century and La
Alteración del Silencio: PoesÃa Norteamericana Reciente; seven chapbooks,
including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament
Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems.
He also edited The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein. He founded
and curated series A, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition,
his book Step Below: Selected Poems 2000-2015 was recently published
with i.e/Meritage Press.
I’m in the Chicago suburbs of Indiana, a 35 minute ride from downtown.
On my desk right now are the following books: Tyehimba Jess’ Olio, Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down, Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, and Mark Young’s some more strange meteorites. I’ve been reading Young’s work for years, and I really like the sound of the language in this book. He’s really excellent at the line break, and the pieces show the influence of haiku on his work.
I feel most at home reading experimental poetry, but I try to read widely so I keep up with what is happening with all types of poetry.
I didn’t really discover it lately, but I find the Asemic/Vispo online groups fascinating. I can get lost for hours just sorting through the different images and figuring out what the pieces are doing. We often talk theoretically about how different poems make you figure out how to read them, but that is definitely clearer with Asemic poetry than other pieces because the traditional form of poetry is removed as well as the words. One’s very expectations of poetry are thwarted, so the reader has to follow the design to find an interpretive stand. I especially like the work of Marco Giovenale, Craig Svare, and Tim Gaze, but many, many excellent poets are doing visual work.
I write in my basement. I have a collection of typewriters there to use, a computer, and a collection of sharpies to write on objects like wood or recycled materials. It is a fine place to write, but it is not as productive for me as my last place. There I was in Chicago with a study that looked over a neighborhood street. With the trees, people, and sunlight, I was more productive.
I have two collections that I am working on currently. One is based on my typewriter pieces. I’ve been amassing a collection of hundreds of temporary poems. I type them quickly and then throw them into a pile. Every so often, I go back through the pile sitting in front of a computer. I combine the pieces and edit them. The second collection I am working on is based on a form that I created a few years ago. I have been writing pieces in that form quite often, but I have only published a few pieces. I find that the form makes me go more personal than I like to publish, so I have been working with the pieces to make them come out less me and more poem.
I don’t have any forthcoming books, though I just published a critical book titled Epics of the Americas. It’s essentially just a reprint of my dissertation. I have several pieces coming out in e-zines and magazines, and I am shopping around my last completed collection. It’s funny to me, for at this point, I’ve published sixteen books, and I have not found anyone interested in my latest collection, so I’m wondering if I should scrap it and move on. I like it, but perhaps I am the only one who does.
What would you rather be doing?
I’m a poet. I’ve chose that, so there’s nothing I’d rather do than that, except for add on to it. Like, for example, I’d like to spend all my time traveling and being a poet.
the dance
the water buffalo cried
as we fought, and though i
saw, i did not
let go as i should, as
we should. the water
buffalo cried as we fought hard.
the tears were a
river through reeds, but i did
not let go, as
i should, as we all should.
(Published
originally in On Barcelona.)
2.
i call through ruined buildings
wrapping a central figurine
in fire but my once rough voice
is now speechless with design or
desire. we are stabbing at loneliness
abstracted and pale though we are
not turning, have not shifting the hour
of sun and root when hidden things
emerge, though we see and have not
seen the fruit waiting for touch,
have heard the blue songs newly
opened through closed ears.
life so rich refuses to bear the black and
gold of our suddenly pale creation.
(Originally published in the book Densities, Apparitions put out by
Otoliths)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)