On Writing #18 : Eric Folsom

On Writing

Eric Folsom

For decades now I’ve been journaling and drafting poems in notebooks of various sizes.  The early days were dominated by old steno pads with spiral bindings at the top.  Lately, it’s pocket-sized artist’s sketchbooks, stacks of black unlined Moleskins, and a bulky collection of yellow legal pads.

Some of the older entries no longer make sense to me.  Oh sure, an insight probably existed at one time, but now they seem more suggestive than informative. Nonetheless, in the oddball self-generated advice department, the old notebooks come reasonably close to being entertaining.

            Build your own Aeolian harp.

            If you can’t hear the music, the words are too loud.

            There’s a lot to be said for a beautiful surface.

And my favourite, the one I never get tired of.

            Fresh excuses.

I also have scraps of paper lying around on my desk, some to remind me of projects I’ve been meaning to do (The Sound of Our Town: Kingston Poets Writing about Kingston) and some to remind me of the proper attitude to bring to the work.  Enjoy.  Let go.  Be wild. Trust.  Then there’s a sliver of the spirit of 1968, channelled through Chrissie Hynde.  Demand the Impossible!

Any advice we poets give ourselves is bound to be flawed, and it seems unlikely we could dredge up better advice for anonymous others.  What are the chances my judgement would actually improve, just because I have an audience?  Despite these misgivings, better stand back. Here it comes.

To start, you want to look for a poem-shaped hole.  Choosing a subject, looking for inspiration, doing piles of research, that’s all well and good.  But what you aim for is the poem and the poem is a wily, elusive creature.  Spend your time watching and waiting.  Look carefully at your surroundings.  If you’ve got the patience you will perceive a space where the poem ought to be.  Just the right shape, the right moment, the perfect environment.  For unexplained reasons, some poem that ought to exist, right there, doesn’t.   That’s what you’re looking for, the missing item.  The poem that deserves to be.

Now, listen.  You can almost hear the words breathing softly in the dark.

Forget that nonsense about finding your voice.  Who told you that you only had one?  Who said you’d lost it?  You are not finding your voice, you are finding your freedom.  The voice will be ready and waiting for you when you need it.  Trust.

But what if, deep inside, you are still finding yourself?  Well of course you’re still doing that, silly.  We all are.  The poets worth discussing are the ones always questioning themselves, always on the road to a different identity, always prepared to doubt and second guess.  In fact, the very talented Scottish poet, Kathleen Jamie, holds that we writers create a different self for every book we write. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/17/kathleen-jamie-writing-book-self   Before composing the poem, you should really compose yourself, in both senses.

While you’re composing the latest and greatest you, bear in mind the following tiresome, unnecessary identities. 

Although you love to party and tell yarns afterward, you are not Charles Bukowski.  There was only one.  He’s dead.  Trying to imitate him just makes you look like Rob Ford.

You are not Gertrude Stein.  Modernism is 100 years old, dude.  The phrase “Make it new” first appeared during the Shang Dynasty in China.  (Translation: a long, long time ago.)  Don’t worry about making it new, make it better.  Or better still, make it beautiful.

You are not Northrup Frye.  You do not embody the Great Tradition of English Literature.  Or if you do, you obviously don’t live anywhere near me.  Most of us are on the edges, far from Cambridge, Oxford, and the validations of pedigree.  The edge is now the middle, the minorities are the majority.  You and I and the places we inhabit are now the centre of the world.  Let’s just open our eyes and tell the truth.

You are not Emily Dickinson.  You will not be discovered when you are dead.  If anything is going to happen, it’s up to you and you must do it now.  Besides, post-mortem fame sucks.  There’s no sex, no conversation, not even any bookstores.  Eternity is a hotel room at the airport.

Lastly, for goodness sake loosen up.  It is a truth universally disparaged that a man who writes a poem has automatically put his manhood into question.  Deny it all you like, people.  Most of the world thinks we’re pansies, weirdos, and eggheads.  Know what I say?  Fuck’em.  Bring back beauty.  Make your poem the most gorgeous experience ever.  The sound, the imagery, the drama: put it all in and crank it up.  Self-expression is not a classroom assignment, not a therapy, and definitely not a sign of narcissism.   It is life and it should be alive, and we should shove it in their faces.

Expression and creativity make us incredibly vulnerable.  Some will hate it and us.  Ever notice any similarity between homophobia and the anti-arts attitudes of our contemporary philistines?  Could it be something beyond a mere coincidence?  Let’s not pander to the bastards by trying to write “muscular” prose, let’s not worry about whether our poems are virile. (Christ, whatever that would mean.)  You were born to sing, my darling.  Now, steady on. Breathe from your diaphragm, open your mouth, and sing.

                                                                                                27/11/13

Eric Folsom lives in Kingston, Ontario and currently serves as Kingston's Poet Laureate.  He has some poems in a chapbook, Northeastern Anti-Ghazals, from above/ground press.  He identifies as bisexual.  He doesn't understand hockey at all. 

On Writing #17 : Edward Smallfield

poetics as space

Edward Smallfield

Many years ago, when I was first starting to try to learn to write poetry (something that took me a very long time), I had an aversion to talking or writing about poetics. I now realize that my reluctance to talk or write about poetics was based on a misunderstanding, a fallacy. I was afraid that articulating a poetics meant that the poet was somehow bound by those poetics, so that the idea of a poetics became a restriction, a kind of straightjacket or fence.

I now realize that we make our poetics, we articulate our poetics, every time we write a poem. If our work is evolving, if our work is changing, our poetics is evolving and changing. A poetics can be improvisational, can open doors and windows rather than closing them.

If we think about the idea of “composition by field,” we might consider that our poetics is way of defining what the field consists of. (Just as we create the field by using it each time we write a poem.) Most of us would like to keep the field of our work, and of each poem, as open as possible, but the right kind of definition can help us see new possibilities rather than excluding options.

In thinking about this, I thought it might be interesting to take the conversation out of the contemporary realm and begin by talking about work that is really, really old. If I think about Archilochos—writing in something like the 7^th century BC, and usually thought of as the first lyric poet—I find a remarkably open definition of what poetry can be. Archilochos obviously has no idea that there is a “poetic” language and an “un-poetic language”, or that there are poetic or un-poetic subjects or emotions or states of mind.

After saying this, I realize that it would make sense for someone to ask me what makes Archilochos’ work poetry (and especially lyric poetry), when a prose writer could write about the same subjects using the same type of language. My answer—unsatisfactory, I suppose, to some—is that Archilochos is using very different language to make a poem about a battle, an insult, a curse, a love poem or an elegy, but that his relationship to that language is always the same—unbelievably intense, self-reflexive, aware of each word and each syllable.

If we return to the idea of composition by field, I wouldn’t want to say that someone couldn’t use the field of the poem to write a prose essay. (There’s nothing wrong with prose essays; I’m writing one now.) But, both as a reader and as a writer, I wouldn’t think that was the best use of the energetically charged space that the field of the poem presents us with.

Probably the best way for me to begin to articulate a poetics (other than writing a poem) is to think about the poets whose work has most engaged me, not just in terms of an admiration for particular poems or the study of particularly techniques, but in terms of an overall approach to poetry.

The two poets whose work I return to over and over again are Williams Carlos Williams and Lorine Niedecker. It might be fair to say that I can’t get away from them. I’m sure it’s important that one is a woman and the other is a man. I’m equally certain that for me they represent the two most essential polarities in American poetry, just as Dickinson and Whitman represent those polarities for others.

One of things that I can’t escape about Williams is the absolutely compulsive quality of his writing. In spite of his frustration about the distractions of his medical practice and family life, the sheer massive bulk of his collected works (not just the poems, but the novels and the plays) proves how often he was able—or was compelled—to return to the field of the poem.

On the other side of the balance we have Niedecker’s Collected Poems, which tends to balance by remaining unbalanced, because it’s perfectly possible to balance weight with lightness. For me, Niedecker’s approach to writing is as obsessive and compulsive as Williams, but the compulsion turns inward, towards revision (as she often says herself), rather than outward, toward production of new work.

Each is equally incapable of breaking out of her/his own particular method of writing, which flows from his/her particular preoccupation with language, which flows from her/his particular world and self and way of being in that world. Both are much more attentive to the music of vowels than most other American/English poets, for example, but it’s the very peculiar particular approach to language—which for me can’t be imitated successfully (though many of us have tried)—that delights me in both.

For me, this inability to escape from self, this way of making a poem, this unique approach to language (which seems to be in the DNA of each), gives them a particular freedom. When Williams tries to settle into a long project like Paterson the focus that we might expect in a long poem is absent—everything continues to come in. (But haven’t you forgotten your original purpose, the language?) For me, this is a great advantage. There may be a project, but the urgency of the moment can override it at any moment, which seems to be essential for an truly engaging project.

The same is true of Niedecker—there may be things that she wants to say, but her obsession with the language, its music and intensity, always overrides and balances them.

We all know that Williams and Niedecker are intensely local poets. For me, local in this sense does not necessarily mean “staying in the same place,” though both of them chose to do that (and Williams argued passionately and explicitly for that definition of “local”). What seduces me in both is the attention to the local—the bird calls, the language that is spoken, even the clouds and the wind.

I should say too that I don’t think we should limit our considerations of poetics to poetry. The way a painter approaches the field of a canvas could be equally useful as a example, though I admit that music has been much more important to me. (I remember Robert Creeley talking about his novel The Island in terms of the kind of music that he listened to while writing different sections of it.) I often write in public places, which have their own particular distractions and pleasures, but when I write at home I always listen to music. I like many kinds of music, but for writing the list is quite limited—Bach, Monk, Bud Powell and a few others. Obviously the improvisational nature of the work is crucial for me.

I started by talking about starting to try to learn how to write poetry. In some ways, I hope we’re all continuing to do that; if we ever decided that we knew how to write poetry, I don’t think our work would be very interesting any longer. When I was starting to write, there was much talk (perhaps even more among fiction writers than among poets) about “finding your voice.” I now find that idea more related to marketing than to creation. What I find in Williams and Niedecker is not a need to find a voice, but the need to write something, a compulsive, obsessive, inescapable need to make something in language, regardless of the result. A reckless, experimental impulse.

“Miles would rather have a bad band and play bad music than play the same thing twice.” It’s good advice.

Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), locate (a chapbook collaboration with Miriam Pirone), equinox, and, most recently, lirio (a chapbook collaboration Valerie Coulton). His poems have appeared in alice blue, Barcelona INK, bird dog, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, Parthenon West Review, 26, Wicked Alice, and many other magazines and websites. He has participated in poetry conferences in Delphi, Paou, Paros, and Sofia, and lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

BISSETT, KARASICK & NUOTIO - an A B XMAS!

A B Series 3rd Annual Xmas Party with BILL BISSETT!

Poetry by bissett & ADEENA KARASICK!

Music by GLENN NUOTIO
& MELODY McKIVER!

PRIZES!

8pm
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013

RAW SUGAR CAFE
692 Somerset West
Ottawa, Ont.

Buy tickets on Eventbrite: ab-xmas-14dec.eventbrite.ca

More info: abseries.org

bill bissett's charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate chanting, sound poetry and singing, the verve of which is matched only by his prolific writing career: over 70 books of bissett's poetry have been published. An energetic "man-child mystic," bill bissett is living proof of William Blake's adage "the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled."

Combining chamber music and folk, Glenn Nuotio delivers unnervingly complex pop. As Ottawa Xtra! notes, "he channels it through an indie musician's paper heart and the results are invariably stirring."

Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist, media artist and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory, and Professor of Pop Culture and Media Theory at Fordham University in New York. Writing at the intersection of Conceptualism and neo-Fluxus performatics, her urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard).

On Writing #16 : Sonia Saikaley

On Writing: Writing Before Dawn to Answer a Curious Calling

Sonia Saikaley

I wake up early. Really early. Before the sun has even risen, I’m awake, working away at my writing. Even when I’d rather hit the snooze button, well, over the years that alarm clock has become an internal thing, I get out of bed and start the day with a fresh perspective. Eager and grateful, I rise because I have another day to do what I love the most: write. I don’t have an alarm clock anymore but a routine. Rise early and write in the utter silence before dawn, before darkness gives way to light. This has become a necessity for me. We all lead busy lives. When others are still asleep in my household, I reach for the power button on my computer and begin the day with words. Some words may have come to me in dreams, but mostly they arrive in the velvety silence of the morning. I feel that being in front of my computer and writing before dawn is the most beautiful place in the world for me. The words on the screen have transported me in the past to a frigid day in Montreal, where two lonely souls shared their personal stories and fell in love. Now in the present, the words take me to the old Jewish quarter in Beirut, where the powerful scent of jasmine bushes floats down a cobblestone street destroyed by bombs and shelling, a sniper on the rooftop, and an eccentric poet, who reminds me of a flapper, a 1920’s woman in Paris, wears a grey sherwal, baggy trousers, and stares out her living room window in full view of the sniper. But I am in the safety and warmth of my room, leaning forward, yearning to hear their whispers. The quiet of the morning allows me to hear them and, gaining the trust of these characters, I write these murmured words on my computer screen. Maybe they speak in hushed tones because they know it’s too early in the morning to speak in abrasive words. Or maybe they haven’t yet had their coffee or green tea! As dawn slowly colours the sky, I create these people and places in my fictional worlds. I wonder if the sky would be the same in Beirut or Montreal on this particular Ottawa morning as I craft these scenes.

Writing before dawn is so beautiful and breathtaking that I am eager for the start of every day. Of course, it helps that I have always been a morning person. From those elementary school days of dashing down the street to meet my friends in the school yard before our first class to the necessity of rising early to prepare for an eight a.m. university exam, I have always been drawn to the quietness right before dawn. I have always had a nine-to-five job so rising early and writing is something that I must do in order to answer this curious call to write. Writing is a curious calling. Writers find various ways to answer this vocation. Some rise early like I do, some write during their lunch hours, and others write on buses and in coffee shops. They use laptops, notebooks, napkins, and so forth. Regardless of the method or time of day, the words still get out there.

A few years back during a period of convalescence, I was frustrated and feeling down with the thought of not being able to write for a couple of months. But I managed somehow to find a way to write in my journal while lying flat on my back in my bed. Like Frida Kahlo and her painting. Because writing is so much a part of my being, there are very few things that can keep me from it. Writing has always been a refuge of sorts for me. To visit with the characters in my stories or poems is like visiting with close friends. I lean in or sit back and listen deeply. Real life can sometimes be complicated and messy and there are plenty of things that can come in the way of writing. Family commitments, health issues, the everyday tasks like laundry or taking out the garbage, but when I read the stories of writers who have found great success in their literary careers, while still tending to other obligations or day jobs, there appears to be a common thread: these authors just carved out the time in their busy lives. Somehow found that precious period to write even if they were exhausted or worn-out from being awake all night with an ill child or an ailing parent or grieving the loss of someone or something in their lives. They just somehow did it. Either in those early morning hours, or late-night evenings when the world allowed them slivers of silence and solitude, given to them like thoughtful and generous gifts, these writers just did what writers do: write. I’ve been asked on several occasions where do I find the energy to rise so early to write and I say, smiling playfully, “I’m just answering my calling and this call happens to come at four in the morning”.

Sonia Saikaley’s first book, The Lebanese Dishwasher (Quattro Books), was co-winner of the 2012 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest. Her collection of poetry, Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter, was published by TSAR Publications in 2012. She is currently working on a novel called Jasmine Season on Hamra Street. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, she lives in her hometown of Ottawa. In the past, she has worked as an English teacher in Japan.

BLOOD IS BLOOD: THE BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN

ENDRE FARKAS and CAROLYN MARIE SOUAID are taking poetry to the next level! The two major Montreal poets have come together to create BLOOD IS BLOOD. Both a film and a book, BLOOD IS BLOOD draws on the authors' diametrically opposed backgrounds, whose cultural and personal lives intersect, clash and confront the truths and fictions that have become the destructive reality of Jews and Arabs trying to co-exist in the Middle East.

A B SERIES PRESENTS A SCREENING OF BLOOD IS BLOOD + READINGS & CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHORS!

8pm
Thursday, November 28, 2013

Ottawa Art Gallery
Arts Court
2 Daly Ave.
Ottawa, Ont.

Free
A hat will be passed.

More info:
abseries.org

The trailer for Blood is Blood:

Recent Reads: Marcus McCann and Christine McNair and rob mclennan

Labradoodle, An Essay on David McGimpsey by Marcus McCann

The Laurentian Book of Movement by Christine McNair and rob mclennan

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

It was an ill-fated combination of “firsts”: riding a Greyhound bus that was library quiet while reading Marcus McCann's stylistic tribute to David McGimpsey. Maybe I was being naïve – I’ll admit, literature isn’t my medium of choice when it comes to humour – but it bears repeating what so many people already know: McGimpsey is very funny. And for McCann's humour to stand up as strong in a pop-culture arena that isn't exactly his home-field, well – I was more surprised by my muffled chuckles than any fellow passengers were.

Comedy is an umbrella word harboring countless sharp divisions. For the same reasons the art-form garners cautious recommendations and brazen critiques, comedy as a term maintains its positive associations because of our subjective preferences. So it comes as no surprise that Labradoodle, An Essay on David McGimpsey eschews broad observation by targeting its key demographic: the creative class. If you noted the “on” in the title, you’ll know that McCann's punchlines are either bouncing off McGimpsey or self-inflicted, riffing constantly on the humble life of the poet. Here’s the sort-of title poem:

“Three years ago, I was not quite ready to use the word

labradoodle in a poem

It’s like that time I found, in the memo folder

of my Blackberry, the one word memo

Cocktapus. I thought about it for a long time,

how it got there, what I was trying to say

to my future self. Dear self. Cocktapus.

Much later, I added two more words:

Cocktipmus Prime. You can be physically

ready for sex but not emotionally ready,

I learned in grade eight. It was confirmed

the day I crossed out April on the office

calendar and wrote Cocktober. I just hadn’t

figured out what part of misery

“labradoodle” stood in for. Now I think I know.

Every day is a David McGimpsey poem,

and it’s half golden lab, and half whatever

“doodle” stands for. It is not good news.”

His comic timing not only registers on paper, it proves inseparable from his line breaks and I’ve sometimes needed reminding that McCann remains a poet first because of that fluidity. Beneath all of his wry, self-depreciating wit, however, is the insightful and inventive mind capable of catching fresh humour out of everyday rituals. Labradoodle contains many instantly classic, write-on-the-wall, one-liners that are best preserved in the hilarious logic of McCann's full verse and not necessarily in McGimpsey's shadow. All killer, no filler.

As someone with a background in music journalism, I find it difficult to approach The Laurentian Book of Movement without thinking of the many “super-group” bands whose results feel somehow less than the sum of their parts. That may seem like a ridiculous stretch but, across all mediums, the attempt to tug varying creative mindsets toward one communal goal often results in compromise. Thankfully the partnership of Christine McNair and rob mclennan amounts to a much deeper commitment than two songwriters opting to share a jam-space and that bond opens a gateway traversing nature and memory.

The lead poem delivers a history and relationship weighed in wet leaves; the mention of Augustin-Norbert Morin in 1842 forms a backdrop for the place itself, in a neat reversal. Caught up in the sensory overload of Lower Canada, late summer, McNair and mclennan traipse fresh language out of familiar, if rarely acknowledged, sensations:

“The skyline, black against the night blue. The first few pages of the

weather wrote a thunderstorm. The eaves were full of leaves. Rain

water overflowered the porch. We chomped out portions of late

summer, reckless portions of Aurora Borealis.

A thread pulls powder across various landmarks. We walk into the

Metro. This is not a pilgrimage.”

It’s a striking rumination of place made sharper by its unclear boundaries, its transient timeline. Nature, on its own clock. And as it becomes clear, the woods in The Laurentian Book of Movement bestow a burden just as indistinguishable. In “A red remark,” the landscape calms but yearns for exaggeration at the same time. A conscious distance also marks “salt seasons”, where the lowered stakes of luxury introduce twitchy desires. Inside there’s a peace that feels almost comatose; outside, an impetus to learn how one endures alongside nature.

As a guide, the most tangible history proves to be a personal one: “flash backward” illustrates in poignant, childhood snapshots how we grapple with our environment. Seemingly in agreement with the adage that we’re closest to nature as children, the near-prose numbers a series of trial-and-error memories, nostalgic only as a byproduct of being a reverent witness to nature – the lake and greenery cradling youthful confusion.

Due to its personal admissions, “flash backward” also calls long-overdue attention to the duality of authorship at work. Up until this entry The Laurentian Book of Movement has progressed bearing the styles of two writers entwined to a greater awe. Only in reminiscing about “cranberry stains along my dress” or being “conscious of my thighs. 10.” does the witness lean toward a particular sex and, even then, I suspect both parties are active in the composition.

“2.

French, based on the Roman actus. We systemize distance.

Generations, at length. A blunt object of decades. Sixty years ago, my

father, these hills. His own parents, too. My grandfather, his hands.

His generous smile. She is shaking out nothing.

My father, these hills. Ten years old. And a cousin, long lost.

Land division, we parcel. A district of ski hills, of trees. Shoved up by

the stands. We picture a river-front. We picture, a passable day.

Not simply some acres of snow.”

This above section taken from “Arpent,” presents a second example of McNair and mclennan’s hybridized style. It also, despite an early disclaimer, feels very much like a pilgrimage, even if their overlap of familial footprints is coincidental. The Laurentian Book of Movement was always going to be interesting; the merger of two such distinct voices assured it. But the autumnal journey taken across these pages has succeeded in nullifying my impish desire to dissect who wrote what and instead savour its bittersweet scope. A revisit of Prelude: selections from a collaboration is in order as McNair and mclennan have accomplished here what few super-groups are capable of: a project not necessarily beyond the sum of their individual powers (how would one quantify that, anyway?) but something unexpected, gripping and worthy of each author’s best work.

[Here's a supplemental reading (courtesy of Open Book Ontario) on the origins of this collaboration as well as some history on Sainte-Adele, Quebec, written by rob mclennan in 2011.]