The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar

At the Lunch Poems reading series we have featured up to twenty poets a year since 2012. (Though at the time of publication our Lunch Poems series continues, this anthology could only include poets who read for us in 2012-14.) Some of the poets are local and some from afar, some with their first manuscript or debut book in hand and others who have written dozens of books, some lyrical, some experimental, and none of them fitting easily into any simple category. Each poem presented here is followed by the poet’s discussion of its creation. Our goal has always been to be aesthetically ecumenical: to feature poets who are pursuing form from a variety of positions, concerns, and cultural perspectives. (Wayde Compton, “Introductions”)

The poets in this collection take us both inward, into the private joys and hurts of the individual and the family, and outward into a world of conflict and connection, a nexus of locations: past, present, the future. In concept and form, these poems investigate belonging/not belonging, and in so doing, pinpoint markers for our greatest challenge: how to live without destroying ourselves or this planet, all this taken on within the realm of that endless field, a page of words. (Renée Sarojini Saklikar, “Introductions”)

The new anthology The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/Simon Fraser University, 2015) is an intriguing array of work by predominantly western poets, all of whom have performed as part of the Simon Fraser University Lunch Poems reading series. Each contribution includes a poem as well as a short statement on the piece by the author, allowing an illumination into an element of the composition process, ranging from the structural to the biographical to the incidental. As Daniela Elza writes on her poem “getting the story/line in order”:

This poem is an excerpt from a longer sequence written to the photography exhibit Story/Line by Larry Wolfson, displayed by the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in Vancouver (December, 2013). The four fragments here incorporate a number of the images from the exhibit. When I walked into the gallery I was doggedly followed by the grief of a separation. I was coming to the realization that my efforts to keep my family together were to no avail. I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me. The images apprehended me, leapt at me, and in that moment became vehicles for loss. They helped crystallize the conflicted feelings about where, and what, is home. For years I heard what my mind had to say, those were default thoughts of the day. Now, I wanted to learn what the heart thought. It was circling in these sensations like a puppy looking for a place to lie down. It was happy to locate itself in these images. They became containers. I kept filling them. The initial piece was written on the spot, followed by a week of intense editing. One row of words, one row of tears. Reading it in public a week later in the gallery for the art and poetry event was terrifying. Writing, for me, has always helped me make better and more compassionate sense. More importantly, it helps me reimagine new possibilities.

The anthology includes poems and corresponding statements by Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli. Of course, the appearances of both Peter Culley and Jamie Reid, poets who died this year, are bittersweet, but admirers of the poets and their works are allowed one more glance into their composition. Culley’s statement, for his “Five North Vancouver Trees,” originally composed for the “Moodyville” issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here], includes: “Coming into North Vancouver to attend an opening at Presentation House Gallery I got on the wrong blue bus and instead of travelling ten minutes from Park Royal to the gallery the bus kept going uphill for a long, dreamlike time, and the thick hedges and dim lights of those misty upper reaches stuck in my mind. North Vancouver had always been a mysterious, dark place to me, and the poem works if it gets some of that over, folding into the larger narratives of Hammertown without too much strain.”

The collection is intriguing in how the various statements by a group of poets that wouldn’t have much in common, but for a varying gradient of geography, begin to coalesce, overlap and echo each other. The styles and poetics might differ, but the insights and conversations have much in common, and provide valuable insights. As Jen Currin writes on her poem “The Oceans”:

This poem was written not long after Fukushima. I was thinking a lot about the people in Japan and the oceans, about radiation—how radiation knows no borders. I was thinking about communities, relationships, neighbourhoods; experiments in kindness and unkindness; about the effects of radiation on bodies, plants, water. I was thinking about English as a sort of radiation, its role in pushing forward a global capitalist ideology, and how the speaker of the poem, a teacher of English, is complicit in this, yet at the same time wishes to make connections with her students that are not based on this ideology. I was thinking of how students teach teachers, a common theme in the book School, which this poem is taken from.

The cities are Vancouver and Tokyo, but really—all cities where people struggle to live connected lives.

filling Station #57 : showcase of experimental writing by women

Vancouver For Beginners #4: Public Transit

Walk into the people rivering stripped to the waist, never look back, door lasered neat in aluminum surf, flesh striving to dinner tables, sloughing intent. We plunge to airborne chambers, I wonder if there will be people farms after all the fish farms run out, a child demands of the commuters, we claw at rubber loops, we sway like reeds whipped rush hour raw. The traffic does not seal behind you, swing, swing to diurnal clock. We are called a city of transients, you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here, but seaweed knots in our elbow hinges, sand coagulates when dampened with our sweat, we ride each other’s blasted auras at high slack. More of an intertidal zone than a holding-ground. A woman panhandling at the commuter train station snarls at me, one day you’re gonna get it. Coins bless our foreheads as we board the lightrailed basket across the river filleted by another morning, puzzle-horizon of logging from our islands, matchsticks mapping out the water, squint hard into the Western light before the plunge into the tunnel through the undercarriage that workers walk at night with tightrope raccoons. A friend comes and goes from his city of birth-canal streets, I lean through the gateway and say, from here on in it’s all death and babies. He goes to a dry place. This train is for Waterfront terminus station. On morning radio the hosts marvel. A whale has swum under the Burrard Street bridge, fooling us again. (Alex Leslie)

An interesting response to the VIDA Count and CWILA over the past number of months comes “Calgary’s experimental literary magazine” filling Station’s #57, as a “showcase of experimental writing by women” (before these lists existed, other responses to the same frustrations included Nate Dorward’s ANTIPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada, published by The Gig in 2008 [see my review of such here], and Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn’s Prismatic Poetics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, published by Coach House Books in 2009 [see my review of such here], as well as the more recent I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, published by Les Figues in 2012 [see my review of such here]). I know some would rather see work by any group—whether through gender, racial or geographic lines—selected by a criteria of quality before anything else, but with the terrifying disparities exposed throughout American literary publications by the VIDA Count, and subsequently throughout Canadian publications via CWILA, to produce an issue (or three or six or eight) of work by women serves to further show the ridiculousness of just how few works by women (in comparison to those by men) are critically reviewed. So much of the literary work done by women is magnificent, plentiful and wide-ranging in style, tone and subject matter; why is there such a gap in criticism? Fortunately, CWILA has been pushing hard to remain positive in attempts to open up conversation on and by Canadian women, and have even founded an annual critic-in-residence position (the inaugural critic-in-residence, for 2013, was Sue Sinclair, followed in 2014 by Shannon Webb-Campbell). As filling Station managing editor Caitlynn Cummings writes in her introduction to the issue, “Stage Fright and Muscle Cars”:

Through not directly addressing CWILA’s object of tracking statistics on gender representation in reviewing, issue 57 does speak to their second mandate: bringing relevant issues of gender into our national literary conversation. By publishing a showcase of experimental writing by women, filling Station aims to provoke discussions in our readership about gender disparity, to exhibit some of the most phenomenal experimental writing Canadian and international women are creating, and to directly reach out to women, encouraging them to bring us this writing on a more regular basis.

There are some great pieces in this issue (such as the Alex Leslie piece, above, that manages to bring up an issue of geography that so many citizens of Ottawa hear as well, the needlessly dismissive “you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here”), including poetry by Sonnet L’Abbé, Daniela Elza, Kimberly Campanello, Anne Germanacos, Kelly Malone, Allie Marini Batts, Sasha Krioutchkova, Catherine Greenwood, Kristin Hannaford and Fazeela Jiwa, fiction by Meredith Quartermain, Susan Sanford Blades, Kyeren Regehr, Vanessa Farnsworth and Alex Leslie, non-fiction by Kathleen Brown, Tricia McDaid and Sue Sinclair, and artwork by Natascha Stellmach. The text-spaces of the works included by poets Daniela Elza, Kelly Malone, Catherine Greenwood and Kimberly Campanello are quite stunning, most of which would be nearly impossible to replicate here. New Zealand poet Kelly Malone’s “SOS Olson,” for example, utilizes Morse Code in truly inventive ways (which can be heard, also, on the filling Station website here), as she writes in the introduction to her section of five poems:

This work, visually, or as both page and sound poetics, considers breath and code in relation to the semiotic gap.

Through using the breath as code (the ‘human’ aspect of language whereby humans require breath for the spoken word) Charles Olson’s manifesto for open verse is explored in a new way. (The recordings of SOS Olson and the heart by way of breath are ‘projective verse Morse breath and ‘the heart by way of breath’ respectively.)

This aspect of breath as code and its function within spoken human language is then contrasted with computer code through the works titled, ideophone, phonosemantic / remorse scale and remorse moves.

Pure Data (PD) programming is seen in the (poetic) image phonosemantic / remorse scale. I have used PD to form an ideophonic language or a type of phonosemantic poetics through programming the computer keyboard to play a note simultaneously while the letter is being typed.

The poem ideophone is typed and the subsequent sound that occurs is the result of the scale (in this instance the remorse scale) I’ve programmed through PD (the recording being ‘ideophone note’). The possible semiotic gap between computer code and a user’s desktop screen is thus heard in the playing of ideophone. Additionally, I show the semiotic gap between the code and screen: programming language/algorithm/code is seen in the poem remorse moves which uses the ‘remorse scale’ programming language of PD; the image of the PD desktop application is seen in phonosemantic / remorse scale.

At the start of ideophone, the ideophone OM (aum) is played by the ‘remorse scale’, typing the letters ‘o’ and ‘m’ in Morse (-- ---). This draws together the Morse code, while playing the semiotic gap, and alludes to the breath through the practice of chanting ‘aum’ itself.

I include one of the poems she discusses, here:

the heart by way of breath to the line

- …. .

…. . .- .-. -

-… -.--

.-- .- -.--

--- ..-.

-… .-. . .- - ….

- ---

- …. .

.-.. .. -. .

Going through the author biographies at the back of the collection, one realizes just how wide in geographic scope the issue has managed, with contributors from New Zealand, Victoria, Vancouver, Dublin, San Francisco, Fredericton, Calgary, Australia and Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and I wonder how deliberate that might have been; part of me is thrilled for the wide geographic range of incredible work, and another part of me wonders why there weren’t more Canadian contributors to such an important project, showcasing “experimental writing by women” (there are more than enough to produce dozens of issues on the subject). Should I be thrilled with opening the floodgates of international experimental work, or sensitive to the percentages of the issue that could have been filled by the work of worthy Canadian experimental writers? Or both?

FRAGMENT 147

]

            ] sobs [

]

Soft [

]

]

]

            ] useless [

]

pelts of small animals. (Catherine Greenwood)

Really, there isn’t a low note in this entire issue (although there are always names I would have liked to have seen also included in such a collection, which can’t help but be the nature of the beast: Mercedes Eng, Brecken Hancock, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Christine McNair, Fenn Stewart, Judith Copithorne, Shannon Maguire, Sandra Ridley, Marie AnnHarte Baker, Liz Howard, Margaret Christakos, Maxine Gadd, Amy Dennis and so many, many others). Exactly what is the problem, literature? Why aren’t more literary works by women being discussed?

Let’s say that poetry is a method of transmitting information in tones, light, clicks or echoes.

Let’s say that narrative is human speech.

Because it can be heard by humans without a decoding device, narrative is sometimes a useful alternative to generative metaphors for sending analog data to listeners.

It can be said that poets will identify with narrative as a possible point of fusion between the thresholds of physical, cultural and experimental material that generates the body of poetry. (Kathleen Brown, “RECURSIVE PROOFS: Analysis of This Narrative’s Imagination”)

I’ve been very taken with the work Vancouver poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé has been doing the past few years, ranging from language to visual works (as well as a recent above/ground press broadside), and this issue includes “Three Properties from Sonnet’s Shakespeare: 154 Ecolonizations.” As she writes in her brief introduction:

The following poems are part of a book-length materialist rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnets that take both a postcolonial and ecopoetic stance toward the textual “common ground” of Shakespeare’s poems.

Experimenting with a voice that is at once subaltern and colonial, I play with the ideas of colony, ecology, and the agricultural practices of imperialism by treating Shakespeare’s material as resources available for my extraction, repurposing, or “development.”

The full text of each corresponding Shakespearian sonnet appears in each of the ecolonizations VIII, IX, and LXXXI.

There really does seem something that struck in L’Abbé between the publication of her first trade collection, A Strange Relief (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), and her second, Killarnoe (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), that opened her work to ideas of the experiment, visuals and non-linear narratives that makes her work increasingly engaging and interesting (and which makes me more and more eager to see any subsequent trade collections). The first of her three pieces in the issue reads:

VIII

Muse! Sick to heart, what yahoos earn, sweetest house, oh, Muse! I curse badly. Sweat bets to win, though sweat gets warned: don’t join yards with elites. Ghettos sing, enjoy wheat-yellow cast throats, but gut hate. How high, chant house-hires. Cell lives. Attain other angles, mad lonely. More loss, eros. Crushed secessions rein vast widths, maple a measure; they morphine annual ploys. Wife other truants, economize accords, offer wells of tungsten; do so under stars. Baby uniforms win some margins. Right education does soften defense; delivers this net-earning. Oath-eyes adore butter. The swing set quiets lonely children, then sews chocolate-uniform sounds. Sin sing single idleness, other parties threaten thought. Shoulder someone’s tab. Earn market showers. Conical beast, brass ring, sworn meeting. Thus broadband atones in a note to her, stricken. Search into breach of goodbye. Mute the dual-border ingratitude. Assembly-line godsons fire handsomeness at each wild androgyne, happening yum yum yum. Other whores ball in the zone, hormones ripple as they bring bank. Notify the dormouse: this thing’s who’s who. Especially special, hairless sons. Go before God, young beings. Man yesses the seemings, the ones, and the abusings. Thread this tonal truth, free the you sinning in league with adults, approve a no-body bone.