Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory

 

The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resist assimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way, poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’ (Charles Bernstein)”)

I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?”

Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stop looking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipher in its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

The more I write, the more meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountain rising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)