Standard
Time
Reality appears within
itself:
a bunny turns to expose
a growth
irregular as an
asteroid with a faint pulse
Exiting a space
formerly occupied
by her right eye, there
are sciences
that claim to be
natural though nothing is
A false creek of
straightened hair
where Galapagos is a
seismic multitude
keeping time outside of
traffic
Getting ready for the
world atomic tour
28 neutrinos from
beyond the solar system
in an ice cube a mile
under the South Pole
Let the RICO of heaven
come clean
the mind’s eye an
antique stethoscope
constantly blindsided
Fifth station of the
cross, the backyard
stricken thermometers
of botany
cattails and long
grasses gone yellow
Either by diesel or the
particular season
we find ourselves in a
sonar encampment
of suffragette terns so
delicate and forgetting
What little there is
beyond impermanence
conspires with a half a
mind on the original
to sew us closed
Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-host/organizer Liz Howard’s long-awaited
first poetry collection is Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2015), a
“wild, scintillating debut” that includes her bpNichol Chapbook
Award-shortlisted Skullambient (Toronto
ON: Ferno House, 2011). Infinite Citizen
of the Shaking Tent is a collection of powerful and deeply personal lyrics composed
out of a richly textured language, one that revels in sound and collision,
comparable to the work of her mentor, Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. Pulsing
and gymnastic, her poems work to examine and articulate a variety of cultural
collisions—including gender, aboriginal culture and environmental concerns—much
of which is set in and centred around her home country of Northern Ontario: “Spent
shale, thigh haptic fisher, roe, river / delta of sleep-induced peptides abet
our tent / in a deep time course, in Venus retrograde // we coalesced into the
Cartesian floral pattern / of heritage where I hunt along a creek as / you pack
bits of bone away within a system” (“Terra Nova, Terraformed”). The poems hum
and thrum and sing, resonating against a backdrop of refusal, decay, stone and
totems, Canadian Shield, thieves and “a system of rivers.” “[T]he account of a
body in trouble could be / so beautiful,” she writes, in the poem “Epilogue.”
Every
Human Heart is Human
Ministry of the shaking
dress
I could call this
a streamlet a better
coordinate, simply
lamprey
in the trafficking
style no matter
any purple sky
or blue vapour
render pine
became women
working the real
number is even
higher
when I was
out already
cunting in the fields
for that fallow
had escaped me
in some marsh
of insufficient housing
laughin
all the time Christ
thought me
a fossil
I, Minnehaha, a small
LOL
fiction antecedent
to quarry a nation
I gave you this name
then said
Erase
it
Structured
in four sections—“Hyberboreal,” “Of Hereafter Song,” “Skullambient” and
“Hyperboreal”—the poems speak of Anishnaabe culture, western philosophers, and
the desecration of nature. As she writes in the poem “Foramen Magnum”: “what
else is a river but the promise of a text [.]” She describes the collection in a recent interview over at Jacket2:
Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is a text that has taken the entirety of one meagre lifetime to write,
what book hasn’t? It is an extensive rewriting of the thesis that awarded me
the tenuous title of Master and an edited revisitation of earlier work. It is a
book, a unit, although it appears to be composed of individual poems, evidenced
by unique titles, I intend for it to be experienced as a cohesive work. There
is generous crosstalk between “poems,” recombination, ideas/words/phrases
coming back from the death bed of prior reading. This is intended to highlight
the phenomenological aspect of reading; it is so multiple. Delicately, the
reader has an exquisite charge to answer: what is the nature of this
cross-contamination? Here, this here where all are invited, contains the urban,
the boreal forest, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Plath, Stein, Keats, Anishnaabe
cosmology, lumberjacks, punk rock, autobiography, the tension between
unintelligiblity and TMI, poverty and science. It’s a party, a séance, a
powwow, a wake. It is the most earnest and joyful thing I have ever done.
Her
poems are rage and force and declaration, and even reclamation, pushing back
against the breakdowns of family, culture, ecology and the individual, written out
of a fierce optimism and refusal to back down. As she includes in her “Notes”
at the end of the collection:
Henry Wadsworth
Longfellows 1855 epic The Song of Hiawatha
appropriated and confused Anishinaabe history and mythology and
inserted/naturalized a colonial presence within Anishinaabe cosmology. It is a
textual assimilation of Indigenous rhythmic oration into a bombastic trochaic
tetrameter, itself borrowed from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Minnehaha, a creation of Longfellow, was the spouse of
Hiawatha, whose death set the stage for the reception of settler influence
later in the poem. “OF HEREAFTER SONG” is something of a translational détournement
of The Song of Hiawatha, an
intertextual recombination, filtered through the sited embodiment of myself and
subsequent readerly selves; it engages the systemic tentacles of assimilation
as they unfurl within and possibly enclose the contemporary New World. I am
both settler and Indigenous, the text may contain the sweet horrors of my
diary, a girlish self-narrative that arose from the once-irreconcilable. Language
is also thrifted from ecological reports on the Lake Superior region, in which
the original text is set, and sociological reports regarding the injustices
lived by many Indigenous women, men, and two-spirit persons. These injustices
are an inevitable extension of the ideologies inscribed in Longfellow’s poem. “OF
HERE” is a linguistic performance that seeks to display/acknowledge its own
implication in the effects of assimilation while simultaneously revealing those
ideologies that underpin the assimilative program as it operates to this day.
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