On Writing #52 : Renée Sarojini Saklikar

No language exists on the outside. Finders must venture inside.

                                    from thecanadaproject, volume two

Renée Sarojini Saklikar  

Dear T-LOHK,

So here we are, beetling away into a language, alone in our library corners. I will now attempt a trans-literal inscription of this note.

Scrip. No. #1

The fragments are proving elusive. My Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon is terrible.

To search for the grammatical underpinning of any hybrid...a. f. maze. What.

However, I refuse to accept that even writing about Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon in its cousin-language, English, is a kind of sacrilege.

Worldwide there are but a handful of scholars who would hazard a guess at the bastard provenance. Glad you, at least, are interested.

BTW, I refuse to believe Old Aunty’s curse.

One monsoon afternoon, over steaming surti-tea, she said: Deekrah-beti, don’t use acronyms. Use of acronyms will find you with some really bad happening-thing. This will occur on the last day of February, in any given year.

Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon= Sanskriti-RCS

Back in my misbegotten university days out at the far edge of Pacifica – there existed that tutorial assistant, Ram Chandra-Gupta. He first introduced me to Sanskriti-RCS.

Ram Chandra-Gupta claimed anyone with a surname beginning in Sakli ought to be schooled in Sanskriti-RCS.

Ram developed a penchant for writing about Sanskriti-RCS in Sanskriti-RCS, thereby keeping alive its wonders.

Odd outlier branch of the Indo-European “lost languages.” Attendant scholarly machinery. Obscurity.

Scrip. No. #2

Yes, it is truncated. One of Suresh’s beedi-cigs fell on the page (he had had rather a lot to drink and we were by that time on the fourth floor of the Colony building in his old apartment looking out Bose Way).

I could not scan the charred thing so transcribed it as follows:

Ancient Language (Enclave Press, New Delhi, 2010)

...At the Kolkata Colloquium. (K.C.) Each year, at the end of July, for two weeks, a handful of the world’s leading Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon scholars meet in Northern cities, the colder the better. This year the star of the K.C. is Ram Chandra-Gupta, having obtained from both Delhi and Birmingham the prestigious Clarice Lispector Founding Grant for Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon (overseas iteration). Mr. Chandra-Gupta will present on recently discovered papyrus fragments, of interest, he believes, to the General Writer.  As scholars have now documented, these papyrus fragments were stored for years in...

Scrip. No. #3

Would you believe it? These were found in Madame Dumont’s pied à terre in the 5^th arrondissement (upper roof top, charming. Have you been there?)Who knew! Ecole Nouvelle Sorbonne will be right pissed.

Now the thing is, Suresh, before he passed out on his divan, showed me another magazine. One of those flimsy U of D fliers, cover page torn off, no publication data whatsoever.

The whole thing written in, you guessed it, Sanskriti-RCS.

Best I could do on such short notice. You will notice a missing bit.

Writing in the 5^th century, the long forgotten monk-priestess, Sarojini of Southern India, compiled a list of sacred teachings on the nature of alphabets and phonetics. Her native Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon, a result of an earlier enforced captivity in Roman Gaul, would prove a continuing challenge to those of her translators, who, in later times, were still dedicated enough to surrender to such a laborious, some might even say, fool-hardy task. Of these recent translators, most were Austrian monks deputized to Mauritius, in the bottom-half of the 19^th century, engaged in tasks equalled by ...

Rather than venture down some sharp nosed goose chase as to the veracity of the texts commonly now know as SSIA (Sarojini of Southern India, archive)—we shall stick to a brief assessment in the hopes that it might be of benefit to other writers interested in the history of alphabets,

This is as far as I could go.  Ram Chandra has heard from Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon scholar, A.Ghoosh. He will send Ram a letter with a key which promises to unlock still more ma-baap language.

Did you know that Ram also heard from David DeLilo? Pretty amazing: DeLilo has access to all that funding over at Columbia.

p.s.

Ram just sent me an email. He insists that I not forward it.... He’s now heard from A. Ghoosh.  Your hunch correct:  Ram is to meet A. Goosh in Paris, two blocks in from rue Monge (herbed chicken a noir!) off rue Mouffetard market—that’s when they’ll compare alphabet keys. The work continues!

pp.ss.

Funny, to have travelled world over world, seeking the touch of letters—Uppsala to Dublin-Paris-Delhi—only to fetch up in some river-town back-of-beyond place, at the edge of Pacifica.

Picture me with Suresh (he’s here working on the J.L.T. Festival, rootling(his word)  about for talent in this most unlikely port-city. Anyway, there we were just last week, up town the locals call it.

Suburban restaurant: The Spot.

Legendary, Suresh cackles, laughing to himself as we order two burgers. From the overhead air conditioner dust circles over a page of alphabet, the script Roman cursive, beautiful to the touch...Suresh says each formed part of Sanskriti-Romano-Celtic/Saxon, if touched in the correct manner, thumb edge to paper, will release—of course he’s sworn me to tell you only in person. In the flesh, he said.

Till we meet again, I remain and faithfully,

XRSS

Renée Sarojini Saklikar [author photo: Vessios Photography] writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle that includes poetry, fiction, and essays. Published work from the project appears in journals, anthologies, and newspapers, including, ti-TCR / a web folio (The Capilano Review), Literary Review of Canada, The Vancouver Review, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine and many more. The first completed book from thecanadaproject is Children of Air India, un/authorized exhibits and interjections, winner of the 2014 Canadian Authors Literary Award for poetry and a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. A mentor and instructor for Simon Fraser University’s writing and publishing program, Renée is the co-founder of a new poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU.

Recent Reads: Abject Lessons by Jennifer Baker

Abject Lessons by Jennifer Baker (above/ground press, 2014)

    somewhere

              a small voice screaming

                                               is better off (“Pilgrim”)

Abject Lessons is as much an admission as a rejection of self, a set of contradictions oscillating one’s roots, relationships and how they inform identity. A lesser poet would leave these inconsistencies out on a platter and let the reader choose, but Jennifer Baker makes you believe all of it: the humdrum and implausible clashes that suggest the unknowable depths of an individual. 

Her first publication of any sort, Abject Lessons introduces Baker as both a daring voice out of Exeter, Ontario, and the test subject of three suites. Her rural account in “Pilgrim” is half projected onto a framed family tree, and half lapsing through a hole in the wall. Follow that shaft of light; it provides an account of growing up and living off of land that will just as soon swallow you. That all consuming fear of being stuck isn’t just youthful hyperbole, either — there are horse corpses in the creek and septic quicksand in the backyard.

Among those victims is the Biblical Adam, whose eager dominion relegates the world around him to submissive roles.

content in this mastery    of naming    horses   women   land

Adam slept

he wakes to find himself surrounded

                      swallowed whole (“Dwelling”)

Much like the ominous memories that complicate Baker’s “simple life” upbringing, Adam’s possessiveness in the Book of Genesis offers Baker another veil to chip away at. These rural and relationship concerns seem to be introduced chronologically, as stages of a cryptic bildungsroman, but their juxtaposition isn’t one slab of burden layered over another. Instead they’re knotted. A fieldstone house that “pulls the landscape and sky/ to a hard embrace/ of each-otherness” provides the establishing shot for an internal embrace of duality: 

a Self that fits like a glove

clumsily stitched turns easily

inside out and back again

(not a turncoat, exactly

you misheard me)

embracing the both/and expansiveness

                     lest dust caress and collect in the cracks

                               of well-worked leather (“Dwelling”)

The dynamics of this headspace grow more complex and relatable as the title sequence unfolds, tackling couple-hood in all its concessions and restrictions. The fear of falling prey remains but not in the wild, which is reduced to a luxury concern amid “saintly clasping of masculine hands & small tweets of/ empty outrage”. As the failed coaxing of a strawberry plant symbolizes, nature is difficult to manipulate — particularly between two people. And as Baker tries to solidify an independent self in this arena, “Abject Lessons” spirals toward a distinctly feminine horror: the Medusa-like transformation. 

was he fantasizing a redemptive narrative

with his apology — expecting gentle forgiveness

                                 before he found me in the orchard

the Cixousian hysteric                                            hucking apple cores

at him and screaming 

WHATHAVEYOUDONEWHATHAVEYOUDONEWHATHAVEYOUDON

E  (“Abject Lessons”)

The ramifications of what we don’t know as readers — what is being muzzled or internalized by the author — gets increasingly unnerving. And while this suspense helps make Abject Lessons such a page-turner, the credit belongs as much to Baker’s form. Never sitting still or pining for uniformity, her stanzas look good on the page and read naturally in the span of a breath. Baker’s command of tone almost makes it possible to hear these poems aloud as they’re being read. Such authority also suggests details that aren’t explicit, as Baker intensifies and then turns a cheek, almost apologetically, as though choosing to save face rather than own up to a more vulnerable side of the glove. The raw admission “baby you worked your way into my fleshy heart rooms/ wounds/ like necrosis” is quickly followed by “poetry about feelings is boring/ so let’s talk about how agonizing/ mitosis must be”. 

This is bizarre praise but I can’t think of a chapbook better suited for a David Fincher adaptation: a narrative of quick edits that challenge our societal impulses while orbiting an unresolved mystery. An outstanding debut.

Recent Reads: Brood by Rob Thomas

Brood by Rob Thomas (Bywords, 2014)

Reviewing poetry enables me to research a range of topics I otherwise wouldn't. Sometimes that means getting to know the origins of our modern bathtub by studying ancient Egypt or finding an excuse to explore the Mediterranean. In the case of Brood, the chapbook resulting from Rob Thomas’ 2013 John Newlove Award win, I listened to “Five Little Monkeys Jumping On the Bed” and reacquainted myself with nursery rhymes. 

This Bywords chapbook revels in the simple joys of childhood via day-to-day anecdotes you’d expect from a stay-at-home parent. A playful poem like “Cereal Killers”, which gleefully does away with certain breakfast-box elves and tigers, finds Thomas in full-on Dad mode: caring for his children while, in a way, getting to become one again himself. It’s a cute poem that, if channeled in tone throughout the whole of Brood might've put readers into sugar-shock. Instead “Cereal Killers” stands as one innocuous flash in a spectrum, where perspectives on Thomas’ own coming-of-age dissect the roots of parental anxiety.

Bridging the realms of innocence and world-weariness gets explicit attention on “the number fourteen bus”, where an odious passenger attempts to impress Thomas’ kids. The tension, seeing innocence at risk of being tampered with, proves brief, but lies dormant beneath some of Brood’s best work. “quarter pounders”, for example, reflects on the author’s own adolescence as grim proof that innocence doesn't last forever.

as a teen, in winter, drunk on the tracks,

a waddling family of skunk surprised us

and I pissed myself, a blush of warmth,

though they spared us further indignity

this is why I imagined 

those hunks of meat and splintered bone

were just some other animal (“quarter pounders”)

Just beyond the confines of this excerpt, there’s sufficient reason to suggest that those hunks of meat weren’t animal at all. It isn’t made clear and that omission empowers the tension further. Thomas’ language is as direct as his gaps in narrative are precise, meaning that readers will cruise unencumbered by abstract frills but end up pitted against the occasional unknowable. It’s a tactic that arguably renders Thomas’ verse most noteworthy for its prose-like storytelling — matter of fact, but a touch enigmatic for good measure. It’s only upon transcribing lines that I notice the partial rhymes covertly buoying his rhythmic ease.

Brood prefers the tailored reality of the household to the uncontrollable nature of the outside world, measuring the development of his sons (“Yin and Yang”) and the challenges of managing them (“where it counts”). But only in the six-part “missing children” suite does Thomas delve beyond the chores of maintaining the fantasy and create one anew, weaving well-known fairy tales into a police procedural. 

ii/ missing children

covered tracks

we trail breadcrumbs into twilight

accompanied by

the cackle of crows in a delightful murder.

I knew this was going nowhere,

the constable snipes; the

search party weary with his bellyaching.

we should question the hag, he continues.

I see licorice smoke coiling

from her cottage in the clearing.

meanwhile, the twins

gorge themselves in the marzipan kitchen

and rehearse their story. 

Riffing on the likes of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel without betraying their often grisly moral messages, the “missing children” series meets the chapbook's chief concerns (i.e. the title's dual nature) halfway. Moreover it serves as a reminder that fairy tales were originally intended for adults as well. That fear of losing something so fragile motivates Brood in ways that are both heart-warming and thought-provoking.

On Writing #51 : Ian Roy

On Writing, Slowly

Ian Roy

Here’s the thing about me and writing: I work very slowly, painfully slowly. Have you seen a turtle trying to cross a rural road? That’s me writing a sentence. Have you also seen those turtles that didn’t quite make it across that rural road, tire tracks across their cracked and flattened shells, their sad little prehistoric legs splayed and bloody? Those are half of my sentences. How about a sloth climbing lazily out of a tree to poop? That is also me, trying to write a sentence. I once drove to Montreal because I learned that it was the closest place I could go to see an actual sloth. That day, the sloth was hidden in the canopy of branches and leaves high above the fake forest floor of the Biodome—sleeping, presumably. I’ve since gone back three more times; I have yet to see that goddamn sloth. Sort of like the book I’ve been working on for the past several years.

I used to blame my kids for my small literary output. Trying to write with babies or toddlers in the house is like trying to clean a cat’s litter box—while the cat is in it, peeing. So it was fine to blame them for a while. But they’re older now; they sleep in until noon in the summer; they’re in school the rest of the year. And besides, I meet writers all the time who have babies and manage to finish a novel or whatever. I don’t know how they do it. Who cares? I also meet writers who work full-time jobs and still manage to publish pretty regularly. They’re probably bad people. Again, who cares? During the school year, while I’m teaching, I might not write a single sentence of fiction for months. Like, months. Slow and steady.

In an interview I read with the late—I can’t believe I’m writing ‘late’—Alistair MacLeod, he said that he wrote one sentence at a time. Meaning: he wrote, rewrote, edited and perfected each sentence as he went along, never jumping ahead—working his way methodically, meticulously, from beginning to end. I think this is true; that is to say, I don’t think I’m making this up. I tell everyone I know about his technique. I tell them because I find it fascinating and admirable—and I hope it will give some perspective to my own sluggish pace. Writing takes time.

Some of us, when we’re young, are in a big rush to get to the end of the story, to publish—often to the detriment of the story itself. By the time I was 35, I had published 3 books. Sometimes I say two, because I don’t really count the first one. I was a young man, in a hurry to publish. I worked hard, but I also rushed. I didn’t sit on things long enough; I didn’t read enough. Oh, I read plenty—just not enough. Junot Diaz says that he reads one book for each page he writes. When I first heard that, I thought the number was kind of inflated. But I’ve since discovered that it’s pretty accurate. The reason I bring this up is that I consider reading a part of my job as a writer—and, well, it takes time to read all those books.

I think I just placed a little blame for my slow pace on reading. I’m a work in progress. I’m also a slow reader.

Alistair MacLeod, arguably one of the greatest short story writers anywhere—was not in a rush to get to the end of the story. He published two remarkable collections of stories. Two. With a seven year gap between the first, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, and the second, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. And a fifteen year gap between the second and his heartbreaking novel, No Great Mischief.

So there’s something to be said for taking one’s time.

Of course, there is also something to be said for finishing what one has started.

Here’s my average day—when I’m not teaching or doing whatever else it is I do when I’m not writing—I wake up, make coffee and go straight to my desk. I start working on whichever story I have on the go. I fuss a lot. I pace around the house. I anxiously run my fingers through my hair until it falls out—I find strands of it in my keyboard. (This is partly why I shaved my head at the beginning of the summer.) I rewrite and I rewrite. I procrastinate. I put stories in drawers—I have labeled a dozen or so thin drawers for the stories from the collection I’m currently working on—and I leave them there for weeks, months. (I pulled out a couple stories this summer that I hadn’t looked at since last summer.) I fiddle with these stories. I change things around. In some cases, I completely rework a story.

I have spent entire mornings working on one sentence. It’s not pretty to watch.

Eventually, a story will feel finished and I’ll put it aside and move on to the next one.

This particular and idiosyncratic (idiotic?) process of writing a book takes me years from beginning to end. Hence the turtle, hence the sloth. The trick is to keep going, however slowly, and to not get flattened along the way, to not fall out of the tree, to not turn back.

Ian Roy is the author of the books The Longest Winter, People Leaving and Red Bird, a collection of poems. He lives in Ottawa.