Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter

 

In Fez, my grandmother, still a child, feared the scarred faces of the men who had been placed on the front line, the cannon fodder recruited from the French colonies. Still, in the Montreal winter, she regrets her fear, remembers the sadness of those disfigured men when she whimpered in terror as they waved at her on the bus, and then her mother, that orphan from the mountain who threatened her if she didn’t behave. Be careful, I’ll hand you over to the Senegalese… My grandmother tells me this story and cries over her dumplings, so I tell her, Mamie, you didn’t know, you were so little and she repeats, but poor things, poor things, after all they’ve seen…

The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Uninhabitable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.

I speak to you of buried flesh and names that can’t be found. I speak to you of the limits of literature, and of its tentacles. What do you want me to say? The premature sacking, the cannibalistic maternity, the coffee the rapist pays for the day after, the colonization of Algeria? Where does the wound begin? I’m trying to find out whose ghost I am. I know how to inhabit other people’s childhoods, not this inherited void, not the crossed-out names of those who came before me. I’m ashamed, disarticulated. I repeat the crime the way one learns a lesson.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster responds to my email on the death of Joe Blades, saying that even though she didn’t really know him that well, she and her husband were both finding themselves affected by the news in ways she found unexpected. Joe wasn’t that much older than she or I, which I suspect is a factor, but Christine suggests it’s the crisis itself: one more thing on top of one more thing. She’s right, of course. Concurrently, the Boston Globe runs the headline “Sunday’s Boston Globe runs 21 pages of death notices as coronavirus continues to claim lives.” As William Wan, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach reported last week in the Washington Post:

By the end of the week, residents in Georgia will be able to get their hair permed and nails done. By Monday, they will be cleared for action flicks at the cineplex and burgers at their favorite greasy spoon.

And it will almost certainly lead to more novel coronavirus infections and deaths.

We’ve been on lock-down long enough that the expected ways of speaking on it, and speaking to it, fall away. At nearly six weeks, we enter into uncharted territory. In some corners, re-openings begin, even as polls show that the larger percentage of the population are concerned about opening too early. Christine is in the bedroom, talking to her father on the phone. The children are downstairs, watching Nature Cat. The sun is out, although there’s rain in tomorrow’s forecast. We will have to send them outside today. What else can one say of silence? In an essay on the subject of “No” in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), Anne Boyer writes; “Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.”

Refusal, which is only sometimes a kind of poetry, does not have to be limited to poetry, and turning the world upside down, which is often a kind of poetry, doesn’t have to be limited to words. Words are useful for upending the world in that they are cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous, and they don’t mess us up too badly if we use them wrong, not like matches or machetes, but poetry is made up of ideas and figurations and tropes and syntaxes as much as it is made up of words. We can make a poetry without language because language as the rehearsal material of poetry has made the way for another poetry, that of objects, actions, environments and their arrangement. This is not saying to be a poet means you can only rehearse turning over the world: now try putting the chair on your head.

That, certainly, is a different kind of silence. Silence, as absence, comes in multiple forms, in multiple levels and flavours. Silence, around which sound forms, thereby providing silence its shape. As Fanny Howe wrote of St. Francis of Assisi, and a period of six months through which his movements are unrecorded, in The Needle’s Eye: Passing through Youth (2016): “It is possible that Francis, like others, fell in love with the silence of the desert, with the gardens and fruits and palm trees and fountains and marble buildings, sidereal skies.”

Ours is an alternate silence, one that emerges through agreement, the terms of lock-down and social distancing, but one that brings with it an absence of regular interaction. And yet, we exist as a household of four-plus-cat that haven’t torn each other apart, content and comfortable in our isolations. We are fortunate in this, I know. But we have further to go. In many ways Boyer is the perfect companion for lock-down; for her steadfast refusals and defiant stance on isolations, disappointment and imagination.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Jennifer Nelson, CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY

NORMAL SONNET

There’s a book people write by pretending

to be another author. It’s called life.

Conceptual art’s about goaltending

more boring arcs of self toward meaning. Life,

how far north am I of New York City?

A brief snow held by buzzed grass means pity.

The wall of want and should grows soft and fat.

I’m tired of lacunae. When my cat

licks itself in front of old jewelry

it performs confessional poetry,

which, like one’s historical cruelty,

no one escapes. I say potpourri

for two thousand and bury my parents.

I repeat the parable of the talents.

Winner of the 2016 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, as judged by Anne Boyer, is Chicago poet and art historian Jennifer Nelson’s second collection of poetry, CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017), following her Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Even from her book titles alone, one can see the overlap in her interests between art history and poetry, and CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY is thick with influence from and engagement with history, art and everything in-between, something she discussed in an interview with Jessica Tolbert, following the publication of her first collection:

I saw you are a professor of art history. Which came first, your interest in art or your interest in poetry?

This is a really great question, which I think (because of the verb tense of “came”) ends up being about class. Like many people, I’ve participated in a lot of different classes in my life. But when I was little, the sort of “culture” things in my house were the piano, watercolors of golf courses, Egyptian hieroglyphs on papyrus, and those leatherbound books with the gold letters on them and the gold page-edges. The piano, a Chickering upright, was probably the most “authentic” of the objects. It was kept in tune and I took it pretty seriously, as a small kid.

My parents were in full-blown aspiration mode. Our class, as a unit, was shifting, and our culture things reflected that. I’m not ashamed of that, but it’s a real factor.

But the hieroglyphs were in my parents’ bedroom, so in any contest between poetry and art, the leatherbound books were going to beat the golf course watercolors every time. Keats, HUGE in my early life, then weirdly secularized for me when I took Helen Vendler’s Keats seminar as a first-year in college. (Was so saddened by her race-blindness in recent years, and I mean that term in both sad senses.) Who else. I never read Tristram Shandy but I opened it a lot. Anyway, that’s not poetry. Donne was there, too, I think? Definitely Shakespeare, Pope, a rhymed version of some Homer. In any case, poetry, definitely, was first.

Thank you for not asking which comes first now!

By taking on “civilization,” Nelson’s poems, in their own way, take on fragments and elements from throughout the whole of human history, and the poems in this collection engage with references ad threads including Roman protests, the City of God, Coleridge, Icelandic names, ekphrasis and Renaissance paintings. In certain ways, her poems can be seen as sketches or research notes from her day-job, but just as easily playfully expand and further explore ideas in ways that being an ‘art historian’ might simply not have space for. Her poems are sharp and witty, and exploratory in a way that seeks out knowledge from unlikely connections. The title of the collection, incidentally, comes from the first couplet of her poem “LET ME BE LONELY,” that reads: “The first noble savages were German / Civilization makes me lonely [.]”

ARS ACADEMICA

Leonardo’s studies of fluid motion are an exception. Mostly it’s people bad at math taking calculators to whirlwinds. Sometimes murder is beautiful. We have to drink blood. I admire the people who never get caught. But I keep trying not to kill