We Who Are About To Die : Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of 18 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for kids. His most recent book is the short fiction collection, I, Dr Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 and the visual poetry collection, The Wild and Unfathomable Always. He was 2014-2015 Writer-in-Residence at Western University and has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario with vague and unsettling feelings about nature.

Where are you now?
On my phone. In my bed. 100 years after the publication of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

What are you reading?
Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle. The Compleat Flea by Brendan Lehane. If by Inger Christensen. A Complete Guide to Heraldry by A.C. Fox-Davies.

What have you discovered lately?
I discovered a Great Horned Owl in a tree. Migrating turtles crossing a local road. The medieval “Charter of the Forest.” A recording of autotuned 31-toned Renaissance music. My brother sent me a picture of a local Ottawa funeral home booth at Westfest which featured a hearse bedecked with balloons. You could put on the driver’s cap and pretend to drive. “Cast a cold eye/On Life, on Death.”

Where do you write?
See picture. At least when I don’t feel the need to slump over my desk blasting Coffeeshop sounds https://coffitivity.com or Jordi Savall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6yTc9ggG-Y or Anthony Braxton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8OWAFbFGbA

What are you working on? Have you anything forthcoming?
I’m almost sure I have untold wealth on the way. And happiness. But also, Yiddish for Pirates (a novel, Random House Canada, spring 2016) and Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Summer 2016.) Also I’m very excited that Amanda Earl and her AngelHouse Press is going to be reprinting my first chapbook (phases of the harpsichordmoon) from 30 years ago (30 years!) this fall.

What would you rather be doing?
Much of me wants to be beside myself, doing many other things while simultaneously being present in the moment doing just this one thing.

Can you include, also, a recent poem or two, as well as a bio and photo? The poems don’t need to be unpublished, and we could cite book or chapbook (if that is what you send), as long as you have permission to reprint.

I’ve a new book just out, I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 (short fiction, Anvil). Here’s recordings of two stories from the book. “The Hand” (a video made by Jenna Mariash) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAn8ZW9jdYk and “Tart Sweet Crunchy Crisp” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3bU-GYRef0

And here’s a new poem from a series that I’m working on where I populate and modify other poems with creatures from an inventory of living things in the city where I live. There’s a remarkable diversity of species here, many of which I’m just learning about and discovering while hiking or kayaking.

The Snakes of Hamilton, Ontario
for Safia Elhillo

ring-necked the milk snake    
is mudpuppy     
redbelly
oh what the garter

ring-necked the milk snake
is mudpuppy redbelly
red-backed four-toed
yes blue-spotted oh all smooth green

oh what the ring-necked
milk snake
all redbelly garter
oh ribboned mudpuppy

oh four-toed
blue-spotted
never ribboned
oh all smooth green

*
Also, see the attached visual poems.

On Writing #41 : Gary Barwin

ON WRITING
Gary Barwin

There are those who feel at home in several languages. Language-wise, I’m always in a hotel, or just across the road from it.

I speak only English, it is my mother tongue. I speak but trippingly only a light sputtering of words from other languages. And so I wonder: is there such a thing as a ‘mother hand’, that is, a writing script in which one feels at home, a script in which one writes fluently as opposed to an experience of writing words which is more like drawing them?

I did learn to read Hebrew and to write its script, though I know only little of what it actually means, but what I am referring to here is a variety of styles of writing Roman letters.

Though I can produce many written ‘fonts’, there are a few styles of letterforms that seem natural to me, scripts which I learned early and which continue to form a natural and ongoing part of my writing life. These in addition to the script I employ in my signature.

If I were a computer, I might cite Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier. Instead, I have a style of cursive, and three styles of printing: all caps, upper and lower case printing, and an ornate style that I developed when I was about 12.

Certainly my styles were influenced by observing scripts around me and adopting some of their elements.

My ‘th’ ligature was learned from a middle school science teacher. The G and the B in my signature were adapted from my father’s (and somewhat from my mother’s) signature. Something about the shape of their letters appealed to me and so I took them on board my orthographic canoe. I use these forms of the letter as a specialized kind of display font, mostly when writing my name, but occasionally in writing uppercase G and B. (For security, I haven't posted an image of my signature. I would hate the $4.53 in my bank account to be emptied by an unscrupulous reader.)

I grew up in Northern Ireland and I remember, when I came to Canada, a principal looking at my script and noting its British provenance. I suppose it was more spidery, less plump and round than the standard North American school script.

When I studied with bpNichol in my first years of university, I learned to love his style of lowercase printing as it appeared on my work for class as well as in his work. The writing seemed to delight in itself  and in an entirely unostentatious way. This was an influence on my writing.

When I was twelve, I taught myself to write an ornate, swirly curly script after reading a book on heraldry. The actual style in the book was somewhere between Irish Uncial and Italic, but I adapted it and added its little leafy swirlycues to my repertoire.

I tried to adopt an Irish lowercase ‘g’ sometime in my teens upon observing a friend of my father’s who came from the south of Ireland. It was an affectation for a while, like wearing a cravat which, I confess, I also did for a painful year in my teens.

It is true that, as a teenager, I wanted my writing to say something about me, to make an aesthetic statement, to be an interesting feature about me. This gave way to my current fascination with typography, lettering, orthography, and visual poetry.

I wonder how many writing forms most people would consider their mother script, or at least a script in which they feel at home?

This leads me to wonder, also, what are our default ‘voices’? What is our mother sound?  And mother grammar and father lexicon? The nation tongue of our micronation? What script do we follow? What form of natural selection occurs in the ecotone between our past and future?

Indeed, I’m interested whether people’s writing—their literary and literal writing—remains stable or if they are aware of it changing over time as those who must sign many documents find their signature evolving through repetition and exhaustion. For me, my writing, while remaining stable for the most part, is not so fluent; this causes me to examine it, making conscious decisions as I write as to which form to use, how to connect letters, and even how to shape individual letters.

And so writing—like that other creative writing—remains a form of discovery, a wavering line wandering onto the page, an alphabetic artery coursing with orthographic blood—our own, and that from our history, family, and culture—or perhaps, the blood of outer space.

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His work has been widely performed, broadcast, anthologized and published nationally and internationally. His latest book is Moon Baboon Canoe (poetry, Mansfield Press, 2014.) Forthcoming publications include: Dr Greenblatt, 251-1457 (short fiction; Anvil Press, 2015); Yiddish for Pirates (novel; Random House Canada, 2016); Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, introduced and edited by Barwin (Laurier Poetry Series). Two recent visual poetry chapbooks are Bone Sapling (with Amanda Earl; AngelHousePress, 2014) and The Wild and Unfathomable Always (Xexoxial Editions, 2014). He is this year's Writer-in-Residence at Western University for 2014-2015. and lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com.

Recent Reads: Gary Barwin and Monty Reid

Seedpod, Microfiche by Gary Barwin

Moan Coach by Monty Reid

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

In the first, numbered entry of Seedpod, Microfiche, Gary Barwin stakes himself some earth in a local setting and issues a standpoint. The setting carries the calming air of a park, some quaint greenspace barred at all sides by the infringing noise of a city’s hustle, and Barwin articulates the scene as if transcribing the beats of a field-recording. He’ll return to this spot repeatedly over the course of his new chapbook – in spirit if not in person – toying with memory spores that organically shift about.

“1

a grass blade, a truck

a small son

a constellation

evolution is an oblong song

the fishes whisper

seedpod, microfiche of twilight

a dewdrop observed, a cobweb

a weed-wrapped tongue or treetop

bulrush, an art song

consciousness

a fossil 8-track of the city

there is, my love,

a stethoscope whose end

is nowhere

whose earpieces

are everywhere.”

Is Seedpod, Microfiche a long poem exploring the conservation of one’s bearings or a half dozen incarnations of that one twilight? It may read like a shrug when I say “both” but Barwin does too good a job of balancing dual momentums here – one locked in constant revision, the other evolving layer upon layer. As a series of memory drafts substituting aspects of the plateau set in “1”, Seedpod, Microfiche puts forth a playful tone. But as an episodic long-form poem, those word-swaps take on a somber agency of their own, reflecting the aches of an aging timeline.

After “winter makes smaller our small sun”, “3” goes on to say that “seedpod is the nape / of springtime on the map of trees”. With seasons there are years unspooling Barwin’s casual landscape, marked affectingly by the way his metaphor about love and stethoscopes evolves. The youthful romanticism in “1” doesn’t harden so much as loosen into vague uncertainties by “5”:

“an experienced guide can follow

8-tracks through the city

the way a scientist follows

an atom’s breath

love like a stethoscope

with neither ears nor heartbeats”

Possibilities narrow into proofs. The whispering fish build a barbican; “a grass blade” becomes “glass stuck in the foot”. The park is now seen through a different set of eyes. Seedpod, Microfiche’s spectrum can be flipped through within minutes but its brevity belies how a knack for the right words (and some alluring omissions) can deepen an implicit narrative. So it is that Barwin’s “oblong song” exists off the page, between renditions; his unassuming language like tectonic plates opening a fissure that readers will think on long after the last page.

“1.

She was asked to be part of a production of the Vagina

Monologues but after a couple of rehearsals they said she

wasn’t convincing enough.

Convincing enough at what, she thought? It’s your moan,

they said, it needs some work.

You have to moan as though you weren’t doing it for an

audience. You’re going to need some help.” 

You can admit if you’re already hooked. The premise, matched with Monty Reid’s informal storytelling, renders Moan Coach an immediate page-turner. It almost reads like the beginning of a joke headed someplace dreadful but, by page two, Reid commits a potential Saturday Night Live sketch to deeper concerns on femininity, sexuality and authenticity – all twitching through the lens of a demanding society.

It’s still broadly funny, mind you, and Reid’s handling of semi-tragic themes remains light and focused on the oblivious surface. In fact that casual tone seems fitted with the task of keeping Moan Coach together, judging by the way Reid’s line-breaks and punctuation defy any persisting discipline.

“9

She was sleeping poorly.

Something gathered in the corners of the ceiling, abandoned

skins under the bed.

For sure there was all that moaning. Yes, you were doing it again last night, said her partner

I’ll be in the spare room when you want me.”

It takes an unwavering voice to guide Moan Coach’s readability without letting its aloof spirit register as disinterested. And it no doubt helps that Reid’s protagonist, whose sexual identity conforms to a series of male-supervised amendments, faces a highly sympathetic problem: how can we express ourselves without fear of correction? And why is individuality so often met with consternation instead of success? Questions like these shudder like aftershocks well after opening night wraps in Moan Coach, an engaging chapbook that sacrifices easy punchlines for thoughtful commentary.