Don McKay, Lurch

 

SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK

If you hear a robin who’s had voice lessons,
Roger Tory Peterson suggests, it’s probably him.
OK, but not a robin who’s gotten uppity, not
the pop star doing it to the anthem,
adding spangles and boosting the bombs
already bursting in air. Imagine
Ella Fitzgerald in the shower singing
“You are my sunshine,” loving the notes,
but letting them swell into surprises
all their own, music with mischief in its back
pocket. While he’s filling the morning with rose-
breasted ease, the missus,
perched nearby in her polybrowns,
isn’t overly impressed. For her
it’s the usual. Up in their nest
she’ll lay three whole notes:
silent        potent         perfect.

Over the years, and across more than a dozen poetry collections—including a volume of collected poems and a selected poems—since Air Occupies Space (Sesame Press, 1973), Canadian poet Don McKay’s poems seem to have become quieter. They were never exactly “loud,” I suppose, but there’s a level of quietude, almost zen-like, that his work has achieved over the past few years. To paraphrase McKay himself, he’s been composing poems enough that any bird would trust to light upon. His latest collection is Lurch (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2021), a collection of lyrics that write of what we are in severe danger of losing entirely: of rhizomes, fungi and birds, examining a landscape that begins just there, at the edge of the bush, at the edge of the water. “Let’s pause and listen for what’s happening / underground,” he writes, to open the poem “RHIZOSPHERE,” “with the roots, the rhizomes, and / their close associates, the fungi and the worms.” There is an attention he puts enormous energy into, seeking clarifications on geologic time and the mechanics of birds. His interest in birding is well-established, going back to Birding, or Desire (McClelland and Stewart, 1983), with the evolution of attending the earth’s geologic shifts and consciousness within a decade or two, such as Another Gravity (McClelland and Stewart, 2000) and Strike/Slip (McClelland and Stewart, 2006). I mention all of this because of how the poems in Lurch extend everything he’s done prior, furthering conversations and concerns around nature’s frailty, both human and environmental, concerns around ecological disaster and the length and breath of the earth’s own history, even well before the emergence of human civilization. As he offers to close the poem “PROBLEMS IN TRANSLATION #23: BACK DRAG,” writing: “the back drag at my feet will not translate / as either fate or misery but / chuckles to itself—mountain / to boulder to cobble to / sand, affable and unhuman, the ancient / geologic joke I almost always / not quite but very nearly get.” He writes for the extinct, including the Passenger Pigeon and the Eskimo Curlew. He writes out the losses and those still to come, as he explores his certainties and uncertainties, and the long, slow process towards a particular kind of enlightenment that might never emerge. As he writes to close the poem “WIND’S INSTRUMENTS”: “Until here’s a little skirmish / come to ruffle your hair and lift / the fireweed fluff, to loft a pair of ravens / into aerial duet and hang plastic bags / in trees like shredded / non-biodegradable ghosts.”

Another echo from Strike/Slip are his “Song for a Song of the _____” poems, including SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE CEDAR WAXWINGS,” “SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK,” “SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE CATBIRD,” “SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE SPRAGUE’S PIPIT,” and even “ANOTHER SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE SANDHILL CRANE,” that opens: “Such a distance it carries, / bearing such old reptilian weight, / it arrives as a last post, / an echo of Archaeopteryx. Everyone stops / and looks up, troubled, as though / hearing a smoke alarm go off / in the Triassic.” In certain ways, he composes his silences, his quietudes, as tethers across those great distances, attempting to articulate those connections between where and when he sits, and the world around him, whether geographically, metaphorically or temporally distant. It is as though he has the gift of seeing in such great distances, but simultaneously the assignment of attempting to articulate the connections.

Don McKay, All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems

Poetry—any poetry—is always political and subversive because it uses language, our foremost technological tool, against its powers of mastery and control. In poetry, language discovers its eros. In poetry, language is always a singer as well as a thinker, a lover as well as an engineer. Language delights in its own being as though it were an otter or a raven and not just the vice president in charge of making sense. (“Why Poetry?”)

I’ve long appreciated the slow lyric across which Canadian poet (residing in St. John’s, Newfoundland) Don McKay contemplates, something I’m reminded of through his recent All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2020). Over the years, and across multiple books of poetry, essays and thinking, McKay has developed a meditative way of approaching and considering the physical world, which for him includes the written word, specifically poetry, as physical to his considerations as pebbles along a shore, the development of the Laurentian Plateau or an outcrop of trees. As he writes in the opening piece, “The Path Between Bewilderment & Wonder: Contemplating Lichens,” “Another way to put this: lichens are naturally occurring koans, puzzles placed in our path to shift our paradigms of thinking and help us into fresh spaces in the contemplation of life forms, natural systems, language, and ultimately the organ we are contemplating them with.”

Across six essay sections, two of which are broken up, further, into pairs, McKay contemplates the works of Joanne Page and Margaret Avison, linguistic study, the grotesque, geological time, confronting grief and the clarity of the lyric. What I appreciate about this collection is that, occasionally, McKay responds via a poem over the exposition of prose, and occasionally poems are included here to illustrate his thinking. Through both forms (and what are “stretchers,” exactly?), his meditations and lyric concerns remain, moving from birds to geology to geologic time, but through what prose might offer, as though his best thinking form has expanded from the seemingly almost-exclusive realm of the lyric poem and further into prose.

Everything he writes, one might suggest, revolve around connection, whether through and with language, family, literature, meaning or nature. Move through his prior collections of essays—Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness (Gaspereau Press, 2001), Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press, 2005) and The Shell of the Tortoise: Four Essays & an Assemblage (Gaspereau Press, 2011)—his concerns within are largely an extension of where his poetry has shifted over the same period, from Another Gravity (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2000), Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 2004), Strike/Slip (McClelland and Stewart, 2006) and Paradoxides (McClelland and Stewart, 2012), as well as the collection Lurch (McClelland and Stewart, 2021), due out later this year. It would be interesting to hear from McKay about what prompted his evolution into the essay as an extension of his poetic, and how this may or may not impact the poems he’s been composing throughout. Is there a difference?

            When a person considers all the indexical and iconic messages being sent and received at every instant in the natural world, she/he/they risks being overwhelmed. How many communications within my endocrine, circulatory, digestive, immune, and neurological systems are going on as I inscribe these symbolic glyphs in my notebook? Last week I ventured to address my blessèd immune system, iconically, through my doctor and her hypodermic needle, presenting it with a small sample of this year’s flu virus, which I hope it will see fit to recognize when it arrives in greater numbers and, if it is all possible (“I realize you have a very busy schedule and many pressing obligations”) disable. Could it be that we embrace, endorse, and live by symbolic language not only out of our hubris as the symbolic language not only out of our hubris as the symbolic animal, but also as a defense against infinitosis—the disabling cognitive overload that could occur if we truly registered the iconic and indexical messages swirling around and within us? (“[     ] OR ICONOSTALGIA”)

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

Avery Trufelman @trufelman posts to Twitter: “In the 1300’s Italians believed that people with the plague died within 37 days. So people and shipments coming to Venice had to wait outside the city gates for 40 days before they could enter.  The Italian word for 40 is quaranta. Hence ‘quarantined.’” When I offer this new discovery to Christine, she says she already knew that. I didn’t. Has it been forty days? March 13 was their last day of school and preschool prior to March break, from which we quickly learned there would be a two-week break from school to follow, and we’d a visitor stop by on March 14, which brings April 23 as our fortieth consecutive day of self-quarantine.

Writing from, and of, as Dani Couture, also via Twitter, coins it: “the small hours of self-isolation.”

Forty days, and forty nights. April 23, 2020. Forty days since we had any interaction with anyone outside our immediate circle. What have we learned through the process so far? Just how far have we come, and how much further have we to go.

I’m rereading Brian Michael Bendis’ Age of Ultron graphic novel. Perhaps this isn’t the time for such apocalyptic stories, although where else do I turn, now that new comics are no longer appearing weekly? Depicting when the world ends. Depicting as the world gets devastated. Perhaps I should move in a different direction, alternately through other stretches of his incredible run on The Avengers.

If one wishes to regain and retain ground, one could do no better than through poet Don McKay, a poet who maintains a foot in Glengarry County, even from his home base of Newfoundland. Listen to this excerpt from his Deactivated West 100 (2005):

How can you be lost? When the incredulity fades, when the anger damps down, when the fear diminishes from clamour to drone, the question may be open to receive other inflections, other echoes. The question may finally be a question. You think of Hamlet telling Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy, how entire readings of the play can depend on which word receives the emphasis. Sitting on your stump in the middle of a clearcut-to-come, you reflect on the paradox embedded in the common expression ‘to get lost’: you can’t get lost any more than you can fall asleep. Lostness gets you; sleep gathers you inward to itself. But being lost – can a person dwell in such a space, somewhere outside the ubiquity of plans, the falling boundaries and logging roads projected into the future? Deep in your backpack, Tomas Tranströmer murmurs of that nearly-discovered country between wakefulness and sleep, of Schubert’s music catching an entire life in a few ordinary chords, of a clearing which can only be found by someone who is lost.

Again, we speak of silence, and the boundaries of sleep. I think back to those first few days, those first few hours, after September 11, 2001. There were such unnerving silences broadcast across my Somerset Street West-facing front window. Such silences throughout Chinatown, and further east, into Centretown proper. We were glued to our televisions, afraid for what might come next. Office workers sent home, the Rideau Centre shut down, everyone on Parliament Hill sent home. Wondering if Parliament Hill might be a target. Wondering if I lived close enough to be affected, if something did happen. We could walk around, and interact, but everyone shocked into muteness. We broadcast our silence, increasing it. Making it larger, until we were finally forced, eventually, to speak. For our own safety. For our own sanity. How we had to return, led out of silence and back into speech.

The twinge in my stomach a few days later, when I saw that first airplane soar overhead.