Oh Writing
Michael
Turner
An invitation to contribute to an ongoing project is
to first familiarize oneself with that project. I tell this to anyone
interested in a life of writing. “You can’t just send the New Yorker your poems without having read an issue or two,” I said
recently to an emerging writer. “Why not,” the writer demanded, “they pay more
than The Fiddlehead!” When asked if the writer was familiar with The Fiddlehead, the writer burst into
tears and confessed, “I can’t do everything, you know!”
To contribute to any ongoing project -- be it a
magazine or an exhibition space or a concert series -- is to enter a
conversation. Typically, this conversation begins with an idea or an event and,
as it is added to, expands beyond the sum of its contributions. For the
self-conscious vanguardist, expansion is a forward motion, where the medium is
pushed ahead and its practitioners follow. Modernism was big on this (formal)
gesture until it was outed in the 1970s as Modernity’s PR department. Humanists
have their own idea of expansion, where inclusion (often to the point of
affirmative re-inscription) is privileged.
My contribution to this project has more in common
with humanist inclusion than it does with vanguardism.
A couple weeks ago I began preparing a talk for the
Kamloops Art Gallery on the artist Samuel Roy-Bois, whose current exhibition explores
how “architectural structures act as vessels for everyday objects,pointing to the ways in which human experience is inextricably linked to manufactured things and spaces and how the greater meaning of our existence is being mediated through things.” With Samuel’s proposition in mind, I went
to my bookshelf looking for Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974), hoping that it might expand my talk,
take it in a different direction. While looking I noticed Peter Culley’s The Age of Briggs & Stratton (2008),
the middle book of his Hammertown trilogy. Pete often began his readings by
telling audiences that it was Perec’s fictitious Hammertown that provided him
with the title of his trilogy. For reasons I am never entirely sure of, Perec chose
to locate his Hammertown in more or less the same place as Pete’s hometown of
Nanaimo.
Flipping through Briggs & Stratton I thought about the first time I read its poems, recalling how so many of them were first published on Pete’s blog. And with Samuel’s proposition in mind (less its content than its form: a statement of a relationship between variables), I remembered thinking how odd it was that a book whose title was taken from a 100-year-old manufacturer of gasoline engines was filled with poems that could have only been written with (or at least accelerated by) an electrically powered interweb. Last week I shared these thoughts with rob: Have you thought about a project that asks non-Millennials to talk about how the interweb has impacted their writing? A couple days later rob emailed back to ask if I would write on this topic for his On Writing project.
Flipping through Briggs & Stratton I thought about the first time I read its poems, recalling how so many of them were first published on Pete’s blog. And with Samuel’s proposition in mind (less its content than its form: a statement of a relationship between variables), I remembered thinking how odd it was that a book whose title was taken from a 100-year-old manufacturer of gasoline engines was filled with poems that could have only been written with (or at least accelerated by) an electrically powered interweb. Last week I shared these thoughts with rob: Have you thought about a project that asks non-Millennials to talk about how the interweb has impacted their writing? A couple days later rob emailed back to ask if I would write on this topic for his On Writing project.
An invitation to contribute to an ongoing project is
to first familiarize oneself with that project. With that in mind, I clicked on
the On Writing link rob included in his email and what came up was not a table
of contents, per se, but a mass of contributor links bunched together like
socks in a drawer. George Bowering’s contribution (09/2018) had “Oana” (Avasilichioaei)
in its title, and because I know both writers and their work, I clicked on George
and read:
We do not really need poems
that tell us what the poet saw and how he can make figurative language to give
us his view of those things. We do not really need language that is passed over
the counter by its baker. Ms Ovasilichioaei is environed by language as she is
by any world she enters, and when you read you don’t read her version––you are too busy
negotiating the pleasant difficulty of her pages. If you run into one another
from time? Well, what a nice thing to experience first thing in the morning.
This poet offers no Frostian conclusions, but possibilities leading in all
directions. Judith FitzGerald was right when she wrote that you can’t really
read the poems, but you can sure experience them––and if you do not want poetry
to lull you, you will want that experience.
This emphasis on experiencing a poem over reading it
is a hallmark of Donald Allen’s New
American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960) anthology, of which George and
contemporaries Daphne Marlatt, George Stanley and Fred Wah are among its readers.
That’s something else I tell those interested in a life of writing: if you want
to write poems – if you want to participate in the conversation that is Poetry –
read poetry, particularly the poems of your contemporaries. But how has the
experience of reading poems online, versus reading them in Donald Allen’s glue-and-paper
anthology, changed the way poems are written? Is something (necessarily?)
altered in the haptic shift from book to notebook? Are we “closer” to our
sources when we are writing a poem on the same device as the one we are reading
from? Does this closeness imply an intimacy? Or is this closeness closer to a
flattening, what Byung Chul-Han refers to as a “smoothing” when speaking of the
consequences of a “transparent” society, where “everyone is so smoothed out and
uniform that we only meet each other ourselves”?
The next name I clicked on was new to me. In Sennah Yee’s entry (04/2018) the reader is shown how procrastination is not a threat to her writing but, in the same way Han inverts what many believe to be a truism (transparency is not a freedom but an “auto-exhaustive” constraint), a generative activity (“In a twisted way, procrastination is how I am productive”). Yee writes:
The next name I clicked on was new to me. In Sennah Yee’s entry (04/2018) the reader is shown how procrastination is not a threat to her writing but, in the same way Han inverts what many believe to be a truism (transparency is not a freedom but an “auto-exhaustive” constraint), a generative activity (“In a twisted way, procrastination is how I am productive”). Yee writes:
I recently realized that I only write when
I’m trying to avoid writing something else.
I started writing screenplays when I didn’t want to write a play. I started writing poetry when I didn’t want to write screenplays. I started “writing” found poetry when I didn’t want to write my “own” poetry. I started writing prose when I didn’t want to write any poetry.
I started writing screenplays when I didn’t want to write a play. I started writing poetry when I didn’t want to write screenplays. I started “writing” found poetry when I didn’t want to write my “own” poetry. I started writing prose when I didn’t want to write any poetry.
This goes on for some time, and we
let it, in the same way we let ourselves reach for a book that isn’t the book
we are looking for or, like Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin or more
recently Lisa Robertson, we find ourselves taking the long way to the fromagier because something in our soul has
encouraged us to do so. Han might find diversions like these exhausting, but
for those careful not to take on too much, they can be a pleasing.
Elee Kraljii-Gardiner is another On Writing contributor (12/2016), a poet, editor, organizer and mother who invited
me many years ago to participate in the Thursdays Writing Collective, of which
she is a founding member. Elee’s contribution, entitled “Essay on Inclusivity”,
begins with this:
My literary
community in Vancouver seems to rotate around and on social media – or maybe
that’s just my epicentre. It’s a question worth asking myself beyond lamenting
writing time lost to gif giggles and memes. In truth, social media has enabled
me to do far more writing and creating with other artists than I would have
managed without the internet and it has given me an easy channel to connect
with writers and editors with whom I can exchange thoughts and eventually,
poems.
Elee talks about the importance of
social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) in connecting writers and editors. Further
on she notes how not everyone has equal access to its technologies – and
therefore not everyone gets the “call”:
But their submissions may be sampling only
one end of the pool of writers. Who is not part of the conversation?
Elee speaks plainly yet passionately
about Collective members like Henry Doyle. In doing so, she brings more than
Henry’s situation into her essay – she brings (with his permission) his words.
Elee writes:
If a writer living in an SRO
(https://dtescollaborative.org) can
acquire a laptop they may not have the time, connections or quiet they need to
figure out saving and backing up, a confounding experience for me even when I
am rested, fed, focused and undisturbed. If belongings or housing aren’t
secure, the writing isn’t either. Theft and damage of laptops or jump drives
means losing novels, submission records, bios, author photos, literary CVs,
manuscripts, editing conversations, journals – imagine all of that hitting you
at once. Imagine it happening repeatedly. These practical difficulties in the
writing life are a colander, straining the breadth and depth of voices from a
fuller literary community. Award-winning poet Henry Doyle (https://vimeo.com/178824020), who
periodically struggles with Wi-Fi issues told me on the phone, “It’s really
hard to be out of the loop. I don’t know what’s going on or how to get in touch
with people. I feel like I’m missing a lot.”
The last contributor I clicked on was Bruce Whiteman, a name I was only just familiar with, having read a book review he wrote for Quill & Quire a few days before. Rather than assess Michael Redhill’s Twitch Force on its own (specialized) terms, Whiteman states his
preference for those poems that are “most accessible and least determinately
clever.” How many times have we heard this? How many times do we have to read a
review that suggests a poem or a painting or a video installation be
“accessible” to an ostensibly unspecialized subject? As for the commissioning
publication, if a poetry book that uses scientific language is submitted for
review, would it not make sense to offer it to a poet/reviewer who shares that
language – or at least a disposition towards it? I am sure if Christopher
Dewdney or Sylvia Legris were given Redhill’s book we might have a review that
extends beyond the connoisseurial.
Here is the opening of Whiteman’s On Writing contribution (08/2016):
I am neither young nor old,
i.e. I am at that point where no one much notices what writing I do. Young
poets deservedly occupy the limelight, or what there is of limelight for poetry
in Canada today, they and the revered dead, who occasionally get statues
erected to them in Queen's Park, near where the business of provincial
governing goes on. The statue of Al Purdy stares at the statue of Edward VII.
Whiteman was 64-years-old when he
wrote this. I know this because, as someone who also thinks of himself as “neither
young nor old,” I looked up Whiteman’s birthdate to see how old I might be
feeling. (He has ten years on me, so I feel better!) And yes, while I too think
young poets deserve attention (young poets received much less of it before
social media became the force it is today), I relate especially to what
Whiteman says later, how he
began
writing poetry out of emotional need: a confessional, a talking cure, a vague
aspiration to shrive myself without help from anything or anyone save words and
rhythms. It took a long time to figure out that that impulse often made for
boring poems, whatever psychoprophylactic benefits it might have had. Sitting
on the sunny deck of a summer cottage somewhere north of Toronto in the early
1980s, I decided quite consciously to give up that kind of poetry, and to try
to open up my writing to something more encompassing than personal experience
and private grief.
Apart from that “summer cottage” and
those “psychoprophylactic benefits,” this is something I might have “decided” in
my early-30s -- not towards a life-long poem sequence, as Whiteman has (or Pete,
with his Hammertown trilogy), but the
opposite: towards occasional poems, discrete poems, poems that suggest
themselves through an ongoing engagement with new and unfamiliar spaces; poems
that pull me outside of myself, to the point where they no longer come out of
me, but through me. And in doing so turn me inside-out, exposing me to that
which requires a different sense of
being in the world. Only rarely have I achieved this state, but I keep trying. An
ongoing project I hope to become more familiar with.
Michael Turner [photo
credit: Brian Jungen] is a white man living on stolen Coast Salish land. He is,
and will likely remain, part of the problem. His most recent book is 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x andEleven (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2018). He is currently an Adjunct
Professor in
the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary
Studies and Graduate Studies at OCAD University.
