Andrea Actis, Grey All Over

 

Well truly I think it is something that you cannot really measure in this present. The soul is something that is going to be eased upon death that goes back to how it goes back really goes. Goes into this whatever this plasticine this kind of playdough kids use. So it’s going to be fun again to be some other persons. Like is going to be transmitted and you should get a really big chunk of oh my. In their sadness or even health or what have you. See in the future it’s not you it’s not me. You might actually resemble Jeffrey just because by chance you took a piece of that playdough. But you know a well-defined shape? You know a random assimilation? You gotta be so so so good that that was truly the case no I know you put people in the drawer. You know gathering all kinds of ashes from people and giving them a line in a drawer in your apartment. (“SOUL ASH”)

Poet and editor Andrea Actis’ full-length poetry debut is Grey All Over (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021), a book titled after the email handle of her late father, assembling the accumulation and detritus of loss and what remains. Structured in nine sections, Actis examines the limitations and the excesses of the archive, including photographs, emails, handwritten letters, old receipts and other scraps as the structure, the scaffolding, upon which her texts stand. Dedicated “For my dead dad,” Grey All Over explores how and through what process one grieves the loss of such a complicated person and a complicated relationship. There is a heft to this collection, moving through the intersections between two whole lives—hers and her father’s—including conversations with the dead and the remains of the dead. This is less a book of ghosts than, quite literally, memory and the archive, how one impacts upon the other, and how both allow, in their own ways, for interpretation and uncertainty.

Messy, open and devastating, Grey All Over is composed as a poetry-memoir build as a scrapbook, both in form and in content: not seeking completion but an assemblage, where craft is less about the carved form than the consideration of memories, mementos and, quite simply, what remains, whether from him directly, or through her. This is a polyvocal book exploring echoes on addiction, trauma, memory and conversation, all around a beloved parent that she found, at times, extremely difficult to interact with. Grey All Over explores the ways in which death prompts consideration and reconsideration, and, as Sachiko Murakami writes as part of her back cover blurb: “When a loved one dies, there’s all this stuff to deal with, and in the midst of grief we begin to collection, sort, document, store, and discard.” As part of the extended “VOLTA: ONE POEM,” Actis writes:

To be honest, this is the first time
I’ve written a poem and been
able to hear myself saying something inside of it.
In listening, my own
exactitude takes shape.
Unmiraculously.
This isn’t a prize or a price.
We are labouring together
even though I owe you.
The fearlessness might be
surplus itself.
We will keep renaming everything.
I will keep fucking up.
I will keep not killing myself
for fucking up; instead
I will quietly grow loud
and finally learn to drive
so I can wait for you in the car
as you’re stealing your things back
to take us wherever
we need to go.
It will be
a better here, but here.

 

The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020)

Spiritual

We asked the world if it was alive. “Oh,” the walls said, “we aren’t religious, but we are spiritual.” We thought we must be hallucinating, but then the wine rumbled in our stomachs, our lamp reached back to Persia, and the bath tried to drown us. “Once the world turns on, good luck turning it off,” said the drugs in our palm. “Plug your ears,” the future said, “hold your hands in front of the screen, close the ancient texts, none of it will help. Good luck.” (Liam Siemens)

I spent a week away from my desk, which allowed me to catch up on a bit of my journal reading, including going through The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020). I’m always interested to see what The Capilano Review has going on, and this issue is their “open issue,” featuring multiple works of poetry, prose, artwork and interviews. As Matea Kulić offers in her “Editor’s Note” on this issue’s themeless theme: “We soon noted, however, even admits pieces we had initially considered light or humorous in tone, a shadow side—an uncanny edge, a surrealist blow. Mourning, both individual and collective, emerged as a major theme. While inevitably ‘there is this holding on’ (Andrea Actis), the contributors to this issue consider how one form of life must be grieved for another to grow. As Andrea Javor aka Mystic Sandwich writes, it ‘isn’t the end of the world; it’s the end of a world.’”

Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton and Toronto poet (formerly Ottawa, where he was part of In/Words Magazine and Press) Bardia Sinaee co-won the 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize and both have poems included in this issue. When Conyer is good, she is very good: “A crowd is a sharp cut in the rocks. / What came in on the air this morning? / Dung and past lives. Rejected // pollen, poor seeds, such statistics / for life, and we don’t even know how / water is drawn up.” (“Habitual”). I am very curious to see Sinaee’s full-length debut, Intruder, which is scheduled for spring 2021 with House of Anansi Press. “It was the summer of whippits and ketamine,” he writes, to close the third of his four poems in the issue, “Cadillac,” “Every other guy had a Goku tattoo // but only I could ride around on a cloud / because I was pure of heart [.]”

Otherwise, much of the work that jumped out of me from this issue were prose poems. For example, I’m gratified to see new work by former editor Andrea Actis, along with the discovery in her bio that she has a debut poetry collection out next spring from Brick Books. Having only seen bits and pieces of her work over the years, I am eager to see what this debut might hold. Her extended prose sequence, “Soul Ash,” is quite magnificent, and begins:

And you know you get everybody you want in there. And you can keep it and spread it. Yet I feel that somehow this might be just having no material parts of them. Like a really smart person making the argument for her. So then that’s blinded by his belief that it is soul to these people? So very. Dispersed. But what sense slews why soul might simply be what I remember of someone and love of them? I remind her why my love no I don’t have investments I’m looking to protect them.

Another highlight had to be the shorter prose sequence “DEEPING YELLOWS,” a piece by Sheung-King (an author with a novel out in October with Book*hug) that remained with me for longer than I had expected. The turns in the piece are quite compelling. As the piece begins:

I light a joint, which is illegal. Getting high in the shower with me is a bucket. The bucket is upside down. My phone is playing the song Yellow Magic (1978). Warm water from the shower lands on the back of my neck, runs down my chest, and drips from the tip of my penis onto the bucket, making an empty sound. Years later, I hear the same sound in the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017). In one scene, Sakamoto is seen standing in the rain holding a bucket over his head and listening to the sound of the rain landing on the bucket. His bucket is blue. Mine is yellow.

Montreal writer Gail Scott is interviewed at length by Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain, an interview conducted at the Quartermains during a reading tour Scott was doing last fall. The interview, centred around a newly-published revised edition of Heroine moves into some interesting territory, including tying Scott’s work and attention to more contemporary engagements, from Robert Glück and San Francisco’s New Narrative, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Richard Wagamese, Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?. The interview closes:

MQ: You’ve mentioned that avant-garde practice has risen up and fallen back at various points in the twentieth century. Can you talk a little more about that?

GS: The avant-garde reappears cyclically, in conjunction with other factors. Often you hear people referring to the notion of avant-garde as dead or passé. I agree that the term is problematic, but it is useful for demonstrating that the emergence of radical poets, those whose sense of urgency is forcément in relation to the socio-political situation of a given era, is inevitable. The avant-garde emerges in company with radical social movements that, themselves, advance and recede. Its lessons are eventually partially absorbed, as are those of social contestation. I started writing in a period of significant social change that spawned artists and writers looking for new modes of expression. In art and politics, there is reform and revolution. The former is well-meaning, liberal, and not prepared to give up profiting from power structures such as capitalism and racism. Then there are movements, and they often come from justice-seeking minority groups, that understand huge upheaval is required for there to be real, systematic change. I believe we have come back to that time again, and with it a new generation of artists, a new sense of urgency.

And did you know that there’s a new biography of Robin Blaser? I’m still trying to get my hands on a copy, but Jami Macarty reviews it, at the end of this issue: A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor, by Miriam Nichols (Palgrave, 2019). As she offers: “Nichol’s biography vitalizes Blaser, the poet, and his poetry, while also offering particulars of his life in his words, such as the first time he opened ‘the door to a mysterious man with a mustache, dark glasses, a trench coat, sandals, his feet painted purple for some incredible reason.’ That ‘mysterious man’: Jack Spicer. When Blaser and Stan Persky broke up, Blaser complained that Persky ‘took the curtains.’ Nichols also shares particulars from her personal history as Blaser’s student, colleague, and friend, such as ‘Blaser’s preferred white’—Chablis, and his penchant for shopping—‘he found a pink jacket that became a favorite.’ All the while, Nichols stays wholly true to her intention to offer a literary biography, pairing Blaser’s ‘distinctive discourse of poetry’ with her distinctive discourse of biography.”

The Capilano Review (Fall 2016): 3.30

Wrapped in her shell I thought this is what love is

When misrecognition sticks we call it that

& it is true that capital birthed me too

Glued to a hull speeding off beetle-like

On the Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) website,

for “Awareness of Global Citizenship”

a Korean girl holds up an empty frame

for “Customer Appreciation”

a white family with two children on the beach

the website copy reads:
“The symbolic meaning of oceans is sometimes a challenge”

The longer I tried to avoid the apocalyptic

the harder it came

skipping work stoppage and flagging sale

into full oceanic duress (Oki Sogumi, “Motherships”)

I’ve really been enjoying the direction editor Andrea Actis has been taking The Capilano Review since taking the reins, one that explores a deepening social and political awareness throughout the pages of the journal, as she ends her “Editor’s Note” to the most recent issue (Fall 2016; 3.30) with the question: “So what additional tools can we wield, together in our different vulnerabilities, to help rebuild those houses that are structurally built to burn?” Her introduction opens:

I’d been thinking of this open issue as a “burning house” issue since that week in early July when Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were murdered by cops in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and a few of you were sharing that Kris Straub comic on your Facebook and Twitter feeds: “all houses matter,” the one stick figure says to the other stick figure; “we should care exactly equally at all times about everything”; “my house isn’t on fire, but i have dry rot. are you saying it shouldn’t be fixed?” The absurdity of such reasoning and of the sense of justice it all too commonly invokes is driven home in the final panel when the second stick figure wearily suggests that such objections are pointless since the people in the burning house have already died in the fire.

How do we make things better? Its an ongoing question, and one that will require a constantly updating series of responses, some of which is covered by a number of the remarkable works included in this new issue. The Capilano Review is one of the very few Canadian literary journals that give me the sense of existing on the “front line” of any kind of deep engagement into what is occurring around writing, poetry, language and politics, and some of the highlights of this new issue include new writing by Marie Buck, Maged Zaher, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Jen Currin, kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff and Monroe Lawrence (the last two being the winners of TCR’s sixth annual Robin Blaser Poetry Award competition, judged by Aisha Sasha John), David Geary “on Truth and Reconciliation Week at Capilano University,” Natalie Knight’s review of the second edition of Mercedes Eng’s Mercenary English, and artwork by, plus an interview with, artist Marvin Luvualu António (conducted by Merray Gerges):

Merray: You say you’re a painter, and the next work in this suite is a JPEG image.

Marvin: The bottom left is a glitch that I screen-capped then collaged into the rest. This symbol at the top represents the Golden Horde, a Mongolian faction that overtook Russia before Russia became Russia, in a war that ruptured Russian territory. I appropriated that symbol to speak to historic, global, geographical, and cultural ruptures, to say that things haven’t really changed. This image has a kind of urgency, a nature-versus-tech vibe. At first I’d wanted to call it War is coming but then I was like, “I’ve already named something War is coming.”

Merray: Everything is “war is coming.”

Marvin: Everything is war.

I’m rather fond of the suite of thirteen poems titled “Men” by Tucson, Arizona poet Tim Terhaar, a poet I can’t find much information about online (I would like to see what else he has done). His curious, and occasionally quite funny, suite includes:

Men and Their Terror

Every man drives a hearse until he retires, at which point he asks his policeman friend to give him a handgun so that he can protect himself from the dangerous young families of suspect ethnicity who have overrun his neighborhood like a horde of people who expect to survive in the world.

Vancouver poet Jordan Abel’s “the tumbling water washes bones” extends and furthers his ongoing reclamation projects, some of which have already appeared as book-length works. As he writes in his note that accompanies his text:

This piece is an excerpt from an ongoing (and largely unfinished) project of mine tentatively titled Timeless American Classic. The pieces in this project are all derivations, reinterpretations, and creative distant readings of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, and are inspired in part by Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz’s argument (in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States) that Cooper’s novel played a role in reinventing the colonial origins of the United States and in creating a narrative that was “instrumental in nullifying guilt relating to genocide.” My project seeks to disrupt the colonial logic in the novel by displacing and reorienting the text itself in order [to] expose the problematic representation of Indigenous peoples. This particular piece responds to (and perhaps reflects) the deeply troubling fascination the novel has with the concept of terra nullius and empty, uninhibited land. As such, “the tumbling water washes bones” is an impurely conceptual piece that draws heavily from Cooper’s descriptions of blank land but also includes many of my own translations and reinterpretations.