essays in the face of uncertainties

The children have spent the morning setting up what they’re calling their clubhouse, in the centre of our living room, relocating pillows, blankets, and furniture. They remain in the dresses they insisted on sleeping in. Christine makes coffee, far different than mine. I am rereading Emmanuel Hocquard, from Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000), edited and translated by Norma Cole: “The fragment deserves our attention for a moment, if only by virtue of the fact that for some it causes a technical discomfort.”

Our six year old strolls into my office, and asks: “Can I have an apple?”

I was gifted this anthology by Toronto writers Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, a decade after the book had been published, and I latched onto the prose of Hocquard’s poems, and the shapes of the silence he managed to articulate. As part of the catalogue copy for another of his English translations, The Invention of Glass (2012), reads:

This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory’s particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.

I am thinking about silence. And space. And the concurrent possibilities and impossibilities of both, especially while home with two small children. I am thinking of silence, and the gift of silence. I listen for the happy laughter, and the complaints, of our two girls, even amid their occasional interruptions. Before I leave my desk and attend to their needs. An afternoon of crafts, and the possibilities of a walk around the block. Their small boots covered with springtime mud.

Our three year old asks: “Can I have some milk?”

Earlier today, Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis tweets out a series of small explorations, asking similar questions about distance, silence and distillations:

More from work in progress: 1 / I realized then how rarely I thought of other people. The concept was abstract, a part of some other non-monadic world, where multiplicity and the swarm were normal. What did people do with one another?

2 / What was small talk? What was communicated beneath the words they exchanged—in gesture, in glance or stare, in proximity, in display?

From Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude (2000), as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop:

I write that in order to write this.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Four poems for Emmanuel Hocquard

(1940-2019)

1.

As if it could be taught. Sedimentation, the ruins

of elegy, light. So lush. No words

but the imagination.

2.

A word at the heart of it, Runcible Valley deep. A lemon

is difficult. This thread

of disappearance, truth and failure. Thirteen blackbirds.

Distraction. We might be

writing, folding laundry, tending

the orphaned moment. Wait: I am

inventing a machine of usable atoms. It is

those feet, in snow.

3.

How I learned to stop worrying,

and. Fill in the blank. A poem

less than portable. I keep these portraits

of material. Say, a silence. Whittled

to a hush.

4.

Foot paths

confuse the wilderness. The wood:

a sentence, divided. Speak to me. A book

I might forever write. I am

alive, I am alive, I am

impossibly alive. I am most likely dead.

from Hark, a journal: 1864-1967 : poem and an essay,

from Hark, a journal: 1864-1967
for Christine,

The world, with all its events, erects itself between the subjectivity and the objectivity of language.
        Joë Bousquet, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France

Halifax, 1917

Paused, in a delicate mode. Trapped, carried fragments. Water makes us a pedal. What confidence. The question behind parabolas, collided with minutes. In minutes. Dawn surface, unwinded. Revised. At the front of the book is a further problem. Air a hideous fractal. The suppression of genes. I am no longer living, myself. Everyone in the car is driving.


Tokyo, 1868

Edo, a meaning. Open, her soft voice. Each fold of the city, prefecture. When I claim I am present.. Rails of meaning, undamaged. A blossom, a wonderful scribe. Eaten. This death, microscopic. Sending best wishes. What can you tell me. Illuminate, earth and white powder. The mind meditates, fishing. A castle of wonders. I hold two family portraits. A resident plum.


Saint-Adèle, 1914

Calamitous, a ski resort. Chalet Cochard. In the beginning, I don't know. Stakes deployed to language. I can't tell you now who said that. What particular abyss. The hot tub, decommissioned. Stripped of fiction, sheets. A hotel, and its ambiguous relationship with desire. A cottage, blends. Municipal. Is taxing, taxes. Parkland sky. Demands the right of secession. In writing, must locate yourself in writing.


Paris, 1919

Nearly cliché. John Cale, the Peace Conference. Losing sight of divergence, stretched into the hinterlands. Dogs of war forcing opposite. Polar, so far. Even terror is sensual. Stravinsky in furs. Songs agree with my step. Mosaics, a Latin inscription. Rusted-out lyrics sent in on the half-shell. I will tell you why I don't like oysters, escargot. Facades get replenished. The pure products of Versailles.


Vancouver, 1886

Means love, and I am presently. A settlement named Gastown. Will I write you this letter? Arranged as memories, the story of a man, increased dramatically. Sequences reversible. An urban centre made of miles, kilometres-long. This Sunday marked with June. Tracks rode all the commentaries. This great fire, transcontinental train. The written word, still creeps. Such regulated sense.  

Iqaluktuuttiaq, 1955

Policy, a word. A dread of nearness. This Distant Early Warning Line. Transforming pronouns, at your service. If one were born of man. Caribou hunters. A stone made out of stone. The dream of people you can't know. Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, Bay. We know you, myth. What lifestyle will not allow. String of divine conclusions. Who hold the meaning. A copper tool, a char. A row of stone.


Cobh, 1920

The future tense, an elegy. Delayed a happy interaction. No fixed direction. Stealing ships, a passing bow. The pitch of censure, simple. I will never see you smile. This spiral, gnawed bones. Queen, we would not mention. Royal at the water. Annie Moore. Passage West, we arrow, sharp. A depth. We pull the pints there, Stephen. Sirius, they say. This was, something. This was something more.


Cavendish, 1908

Start from swells, a fragment. Field Marshall, provincial coastline. Footage of a satisfying taste. Imagined. Grounded, broke apart. Desire from an echo, raincoat. Am frightened of these actions. Marco, Polo, Marco. Lament, into available. Torn apart at sea. An exploration of the tenor, void. Can speak of drive the moment, knowledge. Choral, or an ancient. Say, she wrote.


Poughkeepsie, 1799

Of municipal designations, drawn white chalk. Reveal, a drawbridge. Adorn itself. I speak through anger. Lament, the union. Spared from Revolution arms, the classical elegist. 80 miles. From this leaf too white. Cut off from the world. A song that caught attention. My secret means, something escapes. From this leaf, too, white. Blindness. Discourse of sopranos, Hudson. The first house of record, eleven honeybees.

On “from Hark, a journal: 1864-1967”

It follows that if one speaks of literality, one is talking about a position already formulated, orally or in writing, whatever be the truth of the phrase.
        Emmanuel Hocquard, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France

From February to August, 2011, one of my main writing projects was the poetry manuscript “The underside of the line,” subtitled “[a book of certain days].” In this particular work, I wanted to return to the poem as my compositional unit, or at least move somewhat closer, after years of composing full collections, and beyond. Perhaps I could return to a collection of poems of the occasion, as Robert Creeley suggested, in that books and authors merely the accumulation of such individual moments, movements, occasions and pieces, striking from step to subsequent step, even before the event.

There are three sequences that make up the “Hark, a journal” pieces in the manuscript—“from Hark, a journal: 1599-1863,” “from Hark, a journal: 1032-1863” and “from Hark, a journal: 1864-1967.” It was around this time, or just before, that my partner, the poet Christine McNair, and I had started exchanging small postcards and letters. We were relatively new in our relationship, and still circling each other, hesitantly reaching out, attempting to learn as much as possible. These were small, secret missives, slipped into luggage, pockets or purses before trips, to be deliberately discovered later. On a Greyhound Bus, I reached into my jacket pocket to find three new postcards; halfway between Ottawa and Toronto, little gifts she’d tucked away without my knowledge.

Christine’s notes to me were usually composed on postcards she’d picked up years earlier, and written as though from not only the postcard’s point-of-origin, but that time as well, dated months or even years before we’d met. She wrote me from the Royal Opera House, “Feb 2006,” The Music Room, Royal Pavillion, “c. 2005,” and The British Museum, “circa 2003/2004,” where she wrote “The reading room (once used for the British Library) is beautiful + full of history, but dead. All the writers who wrote here and now it’s only a shell, book-lack.” I was fascinated by the idea of letters written from foreign geographical and temporal places, sketched out as short postcard pieces.

The title is borrowed from Kate Beaton’s “Hark, a vagrant,” a magnificent comic strip writing extremely smart and funny perspectives from history (focusing, it seems, on Canadian and British histories), and I liked the idea of each piece written as a semi-diary or journal entry. I thought of 19th-century handwritten letters slipped into a rider’s hand, along with a bottle as payment, as the missive went sailing off, galloping through the moors.

During this period, I was heavily influenced by Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2000), an anthology edited and translated by Norma Cole [see my related essay on that book and its influence on me and my writing, here], and each of the three sequences begins with a different quote from the collection. Written as a direct result of the prose poems I had discovered there, each piece was written relatively quickly, incorporating as much information on the host city as possible. I wanted each poem to be grounded in real fact, engaging with each city as much as possible, in small spaces. I wanted each poem centred in a different city across the globe, scattered geographically and temporally as well. How far could a poem go?

I wanted these short poems to read as conversations, between writers, partners and cities, as a handful of postcard-poems from, for and to their particular locales. Composed as responses to Christine’s postcards, perhaps the entire series is no more complicated than their original trigger, one distance reaching out to another, at the beginnings of our ongoing conversation.

Letter to Norma Cole (some notes on the prose poem)

July 17, 2012

Ottawa, Canada

Dear Norma,

It’s been two years since I stayed in the nearly-former apartment of Toronto writers Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, after helping them move into their new house. They had a box of books they were sending to Goodwill, and I picked out a couple of items, including the anthology you edited and translated, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2000), along with some other titles I probably shouldn’t mention. They had too many books. I’ve been meaning to thank you, and thank them as well.

The anthology contains works by sixteen writers, which the introduction describes as a series of “Texts, interviews, critical pieces, journal entries, letters, worknotes and at least one simple list make visible and audible an openwork of embodied voices in conversation, in the deliberate breaking open of intentionalities, isolating single elements at one extremity, multiple folds, complex rhythmic architectonics in the process of being constructed and deconstructed at the other.” You translated from the French works by Joë Bousquet, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Raquel and others. It would be hard for anyone to not get caught up in the lyric prose line being presented. The lyric flows like water, here; why do so many lines of prose by English-language writers fail to float so smoothly in comparison?

The activity of writing is more than activity, as you wrote in your introduction, “Writing is action, the phenomenological self entering language, already a specific set of conditions within conditions.” I would enter the language, during daily writing sessions at The Good Neighbour Café on Annette Street, just by the Junction. The cadence and the lyric of the French abstract in some of the pieces immediately struck me, especially the work of Emmanuel Hocquard, which slowly began to impact the short short stories I’d been working on, and later, the prose poems I was only beginning to compose. Here is one of those stories:

I am writing a novel called ‘James Joyce in Montreal,’ to accompany the drawing you left. Ten chapters each featuring an entirely different character, but all sharing the same, ordinary name. There are no coincidences. In Labyrinths, Borges repeated, what we seek, is often nearby.

I admired Hocquard’s series of compact, straightforward lines that accumulated to become something slightly less concrete, and yet, far more than their sum. There was something to the connections made between and amid the disconnect that was astounding.

By that point, I’d been at least half a decade reading examples of the American prose poem, something far more prevalent than its Canadian counterpart, from writers such as Sheila E. Murphy, Lea Graham, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Kathleen Fraser and Rosmarie Waldrop. My own poems had been years experimenting with rhythm, sound and line breaks. I was in the midst of the “Miss Canada” manuscript, a book that stretched the length and breadth of 2010, composing poems that held and broke breath. I knew that once I had finished that collection, I wanted to move in another direction; I wanted to see what might happen if and when I stopped relying on line breaks and spacing. I wondered, what surprises might the prose poem hold? Once you learn how to do something, the painter Diane Woodward told me, move on.

Before this, I’d been intrigued by the use of the poetic line, and the sentence, through the work of Americans and Canadians alike, such as Cole Swensen, Lisa Robertson, Lisa Jarnot, Erin Mouré, David Donnell, Nicole Markotić and Robert Kroetsch. There is so much untapped potential in the sentence. How does one even start to approach the possibilities? I had long filed the prose poem away in the back of my head, waiting for other writing and editorial projects to come to maturity; to be able to bring my full attention to the form. I don’t need to completely understand a form to begin, but at least some kind of initial comprehension is required. Often, I know, the best way to understand is to simply begin. Specifically, I was struck by the way Hocquard’s prose-pieces blended elements of poetry, fiction and the short essay, opening up the form to a kind of “catch-all,” able to hold just about any idea, concept or subject matter.

ROBINSON METHOD

When Crusoe landed on his island after the shipwreck, he was not yet Robinson. He would be Robinson from the moment that, finding neither pen nor pencil in the jetsam, he liberated a cutter and some books. from these found objects would be born the method that names him.

            Robinson speaks alone (V. Solitude), in words he learned while he was still Crusoe, words he arranges as memories, that is, as objects of memory-language. Robinson on his island acts like Crusoe before the shipwreck but makes the same thing resonate differently.

            The island is elegiable. Cut off from the world, with the fated means that are his, Robinson will reproduce Crusoe’s world. He is a copier. And every copier, even the little classroom copier ripping off his desk partner, is an islander. Oliver Cadiot’s Future, ancient, fugitive is, just like Perec’s I remember, a splendid elegy. (Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Norma Cole)

The French writing I’d predominantly been aware of previously had been Canadian, including the work of Nicole Brossard and AnneHébert, but remarkably little else in regards to poetry. Despite a series of translations through Coach House Press from the 1970s onward that focused on fiction, the divide between French and English Canada remains. Perhaps for this reason, it was the prose out of Quebec that resonated most, the novels of Dany Laferrière and Daniel Paquin informing my writing far more than any Quebecois poets. It’s an interesting difference, to be influenced by the French writers of Canada versus the French writers from France. As you know, it’s an entirely different vocabulary. To understand the difference of influence might mean comprehending the mechanics of the language, and the divergence from European to Quebecois French. Something about the limits of translation or the delicacy of translating these differences. I have no idea; haven’t even begun.

Today I am not writing, I am seeing to the house of writing, and you are there, in the garden light. (Edith Dahan, from “Giudecca,” trans. Norma Cole)

In these works translated from French, there is such a lovely abstraction of subject and meaning the prose allows. It wraps around ideas as opposed to the physical. In contrast, I’ve been quite baffled reading Russell Edson, having heard he is considered the father of the American prose poem, and how much writers such as Deb Olin Unferth and Sarah Manguso (a writer I greatly admire) are influenced by his work. His poems read like short stories, known by Geist magazine and others as “postcard fiction.” Lydia Davis reads more lyric than these. Where is the poetry in Russell Edson? Whereas Unferth and Manguso have far surpassed him in quality and vigour, turning the influence of his prose poems into spectacular prose. I don’t understand the appeal. I suspect in some parts of the United States, this might be akin to a heretical statement.

This collection of yours has informed pieces of mine in various poetry manuscripts, an influence running through the length and breadth of my poetry since. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France taught me how to begin. Does that make sense? Perhaps it came at the right time. Perhaps I give the collection itself too much credit. I have been learning, learning and re-learning the sentence. There is a fragment of an interview I keep repeating, conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review (51:4/52:1, spring 2006), as Lisa Robertson responds: “I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.”

The Sentence

The sentence always translated from an other language, the sentence unfounded, the sentence of liquid shadows beyond which we do not look, writing it, (Dominique Fourcade, trans. Norma Cole)

In your collection, the distinctions between genres don’t seem to even exist. My explorations in short prose and the prose poem overlap so heavily, and yet, a line divides the two. Some have suggested my short stories might do better if I called them poems, but they aren’t poems; they’re stories. Despite their brevity, they each tell a deliberate narrative in a linear fashion. In the poems, I’m interested more in what I’ve long been exploring through the form – movement, sound and abstract, lyric exploration, composed more as an accumulation or collage. The logics needn’t be apparent and the narrative is non-existent. It might not be how I distinguish the forms generally, but its how I do for my own writing. There is no story, but instead, a series of sweeping gestures, such as this piece from the sequence “Escarpment pages,” a prose poem sequence from “If suppose we are a fragment.” The twelve poem sequence opens with a quote from Kathleen Fraser, “Dear other, I address you in sentences.”

The invention of writing

Ingrained, this resistance to struggle. Mathematical points. I repeat the arousal song of her borders, even as I step back. Sometimes I get turned around. Snow squalls, threatening daybreak. Had you ever wondered. Had she. We were marking up hours. Filament of the speed that the brain changes colour. We have not arrived. We are here. An experience of spiders. Saw you last from those uppermost branches. Or was that her. Words trickle down into feeling. New paper we press with first language, our hands.

I sound obsessed with boundaries, and perhaps I am, but as a series of guidelines as opposed to strict rules. I want to know where to blend one into the other. The works in Crosscut Universe, on the other hand, define no line at all. Have you read any of the work of Vancouver writer Michael Turner? His work manages the chimera between what isn’t entirely a poem, and isn’t entirely a story, but something else, entirely. I am seeking to open a series of possibilities. Or perhaps, I wasn’t listening in the right way until now. I’ve been interested, too, in discovering more of your own writing, the influences that some of these texts may have had, along the lines of influence I’ve seen from the Galacian in Erin Mouré’s poetry, or the French in the poetry of Cole Swensen and Rosmarie Waldrop. Perhaps I should start translating. Is it essential to know a second language to begin?

best,

Ongoing notes: late February, 2013

You probably already know that we were in Boca Raton, Florida recently [see my report on such here], but here’s another photograph from such. Our final morning on the beach, in the midst of a spitting rain, and high waves from the wind. Someone suggested that this might be a perfect cover for a Victorian-era novel. Wuthering Heights in South Florida?

Our pals William Hawkins and Greg “Ritalin” Frankson are receiving the first ever VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour Awards at a ceremony as part of the third annual VERSeFest, March 17, 2013. Congratulations to you both!

Oh Canadians, why do you send me so few chapbooks?

Atlanta; Philadelphia; Northampton; Jerusalem; Madison; New York: The only problem with a collective, is that you can’t tell where they’re situated. Perhaps this is their selling point. From the Agnes Fox Collective comes the short chapbook Luminous Terrene (January, 2013) by Matthew Gagnon. I’m taken already with any work that begins with a quote by French writer Emmanuel Hocquard. This ten page poem is composed as a generative abstract: generous, open, subtle and remarkable. This poem withholds more than it contains, and surprises as much as it reveals. I am intrigued by this work, and wonder if this is a single piece, or part of something larger.

            A gyre of minerals is visible from the outcrop, but can we really say we’d rally behind the visible?

            I won’t be extracted from a custom or assembled into the fold of a wave.

            A flock of fish is breathing on dry land. There’s nothing modern about the way we cook fish.

            An aggregate of water over a film of water. Do we tread the water’s timetable, survey the riptide’s antimony?

            Read the night as if the night is read, and in stoking the night, order it: punctuated.

            Fastened to the umbrage of what’s missing, my memory’s adrift in a receding tidemark.

Milwaukee MI: From plumberries press I received a couple of chapbooks, including Connor Strathman’s Some Were Awake (2011), chelsea tadeyeske and edwin r. perry’s suddenly you’re naked and wandering through pasturage, on the farthest point of the peninsula, they say, the form has failed. you’ve left so many of your things, left for more favorable destinations. (2011), cynthia spencer’s In what sequence will my parts exit (2011) and chelsea tadeyeske’s HEELDRAGGER (2012), as well as the fifth issue of Humble Humdrum Cotton Frock (summer 2012).

THE ONE ABOUT PUBLIC SPEAKING

A moron walks into a bar. He clinks a butterknife against a glass to get the room’s attention. He carries a butterknife always, in a special handmade holster. Night is the most mysterious time of day, he says. It’s 11:30 a.m. Like I said, he’s a moron. Stupid women are at least attractive; this guy’s only funny on accident. You would not exchange the word “love” for “power” in the adage “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” but the moron would. Somebody told him that “verb” means “word” and he interpreted this too broadly. Luckily, the moron lacks all capacity for embarrassment. You have to learn shame, along with algebra and how to hug. The moron loosens his tie. He’s on his way to a funeral. (kathleen rooney and elisa gabbert, Humble Humdrum Cotton Frock)

There is something about the simple yet attractive design and production that appeals, and some of the work as well, despite being highly uneven. Even in the collaborative poem by kathleen rooney and elisa gabbert, there are some striking lines and images, in a piece that otherwise could use some editing, and time. There is something reminiscent here of Carleton University’s In/Words [see my recent article on them here], of a group of young writers producing and encouraging and publishing, a number of which just aren’t there yet, but are awfully close. Not there yet, but worth watching, to see for when they do.

The smell of the street

is now dusted in static

Salt lips and naked leaf

buoying in the sprung wind

court of lightning window

            you lick your teeth

shows the image

of towels hung

on the ledges

Give me a heart of cloth

and a limit of tin

to protect it from the rain (Connor Strathman, Some Were Awake)