Social Poesis: The Poetry of Rachel Zolf, selected with an introduction by Heather Milne

Trapped in this high-performance culture, let’s suspend,

all disbelief, ignore the elephants in the room.

I won’t remember that avant-garde chaos frees the writing

machine’s choked circuits.

Our abstractions stink of pure gibberish and no one

notices the false pundits.

Look through the mirror, it’s the information Age, where

every surface is 1793 brilliant urine requests scum wolf,

and nothing shines. (“Human Resources”)

The past few days I’ve been going through Social Poesis: The Poetry of Rachel Zolf, selected with an introduction by Heather Milne (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019), the latest title in the expansive Laurier Poetry Series of critical selecteds. Editor Heather Milne assembled the collection Social Poesis by selecting from Canadian expat poet Rachel Zolf’s five trade poetry collections—Her absence, this wanderer (Ottawa ON: BuschekBooks, 1999), Masque (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004), Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), Neighbour Procedure (Coach House Books, 2010) and Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House Books, 2014)—as well as from her online digital poetic project The Tolerance Project (http://thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com). I’ve long been fascinated by Zolf’s project-based work, something that has become more overt as she continues to publish, utilized to examine human interaction, and a variety of social and cultural histories. The book-length Human Resources, for example, was a magnificent examination of human interaction and dislocation through the corporate language; a language, it would seem, deliberately constructed to dehumanize. Zolf might utilize external means to produce work, but her concerns are deeply human, from the intimate to the professional to the historical, and the dark elements that so often are deliberately set aside, as Milne writes as part of her “Introduction” to the collection:

            In one of the poems in Human Resources, Zolf cites fellow Canadian poet Anne Carson, who asks, in relation to Paul Celan’s severely redacted poetry, “What is lost when words are wasted? And where is the human store to which such goods are gathered?” Zolf responds to Carson’s question with a question of her own: “When you ‘cleanse words and salvage what is cleansed,’ so you collect what’s been scrubbed off or what remains?” In other words, do you salvage the grime that has been removed, or do you valorize the beautiful language that has been scrubbed immaculately clean?”

What is helpful in this collection is the sequence of notes presented at the opening of sections that provide some context to the book/project being excerpted, such as the note on Masque that informs that “Zolf has compared this book to a play in which multiple characters are trying to talk at the same time, creating a polyphonic series of poems.” to the note on Janey’s Arcadia, that opens with: “Zolf makes use of optical character recognition software (OCR) that scans PDFs of archival texts into Word documents. OCR often misreads words and inserts strange symbols and characters into the text. Rather than correct these errors, Zolf embraces them as part of her compositional strategy. The glitches disrupt the poems that make them difficult to read, but they also become a site where meaning is generated.” This book exists as both an impressive overview of Zolf’s ongoing work, and a wonderful introduction to what she’s accomplished so far, much of which, I would argue, hasn’t received the attention it so clearly deserves. As Zolf herself writes, to close her “Afterword”:

            One wag famously suggested that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition,” and I’ll wag back that the writer of any composition ought to take responsibility for the stance they are writing from and how what they write relates to the world they live in. I am a white-skinned, middle-class, Canadian, secular Jewish, genderqueer lesbian poet and thinker and educator and lover and abuse survivor and also sax player and other identities as well. I am here (like and not like Abraham) cloaked in ambivalence. Do these words matter when forty-nine mostly Latinx and black queer and trans people are massacred in Orlando while they dance? There is the so-called constative and the so-called performative. There is testimony and there are four chimneys blown beyond knowledge to deformed freedom. There is author, vendor, rhetor … all witness and sometimes survivor. There is a poem and there is un essai, a try, a poethical wager. A traviler is made. There is a monster in the neighbour’s face. That alien traumatic kernel of Das Ding in the Nebenmensch adjoins and hystericizes me as the both/and that exceeds and opens thought. yes and no are unsplit neighbours housed in abrasive proximity in the poem. Du liest is you read and you glean. There is a thinking encrypted in silence and a thinking encrusted in noise. There is a listening to what is unsayable. There is blur when I try to see one thing. There is a reach, a touch, impress. There is a limit and a limit and a limit and, peut-être, a threshold, break. As the impure products of America go crazy, there is un éveil, a queerly errant arousal. There is a veil, (im)ovable. No One arrives to witness and adjust. There is an experience that cannot be translated. No One can drive the car. There is an experience that cannot be undone. I am undone. There is a time that could have been then and a time that will have been now and a time always already to come. These coincide. We are what we gain from this disorientation.

Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne

I’ve been stunned by the recent work by Kate Eichhorn and her collaborators, from the recent Open Letter issue [see my review of such here] to the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009), each dealing with a number of innovative Canadian women poets whose work hasn’t been dealt with nearly enough, if at all. Showcasing fifteen writers of poetry and/or poetic prose—Nicole Brossard, Susan Holbrook, Nathalie Stephens, Gail Scott, Margaret Christakos, M. Nourbese Philip, Karen Mac Cormack, Rachel Zolf, Erín Moure, Daphne Marlatt, Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Sina Queyras, Rita Wong and Lisa Robertson—each section includes a lengthy critical interview with each author, as well as examples of their work, making this collection an essential part of any discerning reader’s bookshelf. Why is it so much of this writing gets ignored critically, even from those who spend so much time engaged with the practice as writers? As the editors explain the anthology in their introduction:

Much of the writing in this collection is the product of working in and against systems – linguistic, libidinal, affective, technological, economic and ecological. As with all systems, the import or redaction of elements has profound effects on flow and meaning. Meaning is produced through the processes of circulation, recirculation, recombination and procedure and as such, this work must be understood as enacting a poetics of flux not stasis. Rather than bring the reader to a single or fixed truth claim, this writing asks the reader to become an active agent in making meaning and more importantly, to abandon ‘getting it’ as the only or primary objective of reading. Writing through and across multiple languages with varying degrees of fluency, Erín Moure reminds us that fluency cannot be easily understood as a singular achievement or point of arrival. Her translations and transliterations invite the reader to enter linguistic economies where no degree of fluency is sufficient, but there are still many ways to navigate Moure’s poetic terrain. The ecologies of Rita Wong’s forage demonstrate the grave dangers and rich possibilities of living in systems where the animal elements has become the norm. These ecologies do not always ‘make sense’ but neither to the ‘logics’ of late capitalism, globalization and genetic modification Wong investigates in much of her writing, and as she emphasizes, such material conditions also ‘disrupt syntax,’ necessitating new approaches to writing.

Any work like this should be an opening, a beginning of not just reading but further critical inquiry; will someone else work a follow-up to deal with some other writers that deserve the same kind of critical attention, including Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Rob Budde, Anne Stone, Wayde Compton, Phil Hall, Stan Rogal, Judith Fitzgerald, derek beaulieu, as well as innumerable other writers who seem to have done all the required work, but still get the short shrift of critical dealings? What’s happened to criticism in Canada? Where did it all go?

The interview with Margaret Christakos is particularly interesting for her talk of Toronto since the 1980s, being one of the few poets continuing to work in innovative writing to bridge the gap between then and now, talking on the shifts in critical response to writing, both locally and nationally, moving from her first collection in the late 1980 to her current (and spectacular) work through her Influency course.

HM: It occurs to me that there is not as much of a body of criticism around your work as there should be.

MC: And I don’t know if that’s more about the fact that by the time I had published a few books, nobody was really writing criticism. The reception happened in the ‘80s. My first book had only three reviews. I’ve never really known what to attribute that to except that I guess it wasn’t very good and I guess it wasn’t very interesting and I guess it wasn’t doing what people what poetry to do at that point. The benefit of being almost twenty years older at this point is to celebrate the fact that I am still writing despite the lack of reception. It didn’t inhibit my production to such a degree that I stopped writing and I have to really question how it is I maintained a writing practice through the ‘90s. I just had to write. And I know that there is some bizarre thing that keeps all of us writing despite the fact that there is a resounding silence critically. Maybe that is changing though. There are new conversations. And there’s the internet. There’s all this online discourse that didn’t exist in the ‘90s. And I think that audiences are much more savvy in terms of polyphonic narrativity and they’re actually more plugged in to understanding the relationship of history and theory. There are a lot of very smart readers out there.

And anyone able to get not only an interview but new writing out of Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk has to be commended.

KE: You have this line in Redactive – in one of the poems that also appears in this anthology – where you say, ‘from what level could I abstain from inventing.’ I love that line, because it seems to me that it’s a way to sum up your own poetics. There’s no level from which you could abstain from inventing, because it seems that you get easily bored with your own voice.

DL: I agree. I think that’s the closest I’m going to get to making a poetic statement.