Marita Dachsel, There Are Not Enough Sad Songs

spring

Each year, too early

the instinct to burrow

hands in the soil.

Cold cramps joints,

Freezes movement.

Persist, this benediction.

Like all things miraculous,

it is the most banal of actions:

slipping seeds beneath.

the garden is alchemy

and prayer: can sorrow

be transformed? Can this plot

of land, so small, crawling

With life, be a chrysalis?

The bursts of leaves,

the helixes of vines,

do they transform?

An answer, the answer

pushes through.

I was curious to explore the lyric monologues of Victoria, British Columbia-based poet and playwright Marita Dachsel’s third full-length poetry collection, There Are Not Enough Sad Songs (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2019). Dachsel is the author of two prior full-length collections—All Things Said & Done (Caitlin Press, 2007) [see my review of such here] and Glossolalia (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2013) [see my review of such here]—as well as a small handful of chapbooks (including one of the earliest above/ground press titles). The back cover offers that Dachsel’s work exists in “the tradition of Karen Solie and Suzanne Buffam, and with a hint of Canadian Gothic […]” but I don’t really see the linkages to Solie or Buffam. Long attentive to the perspectives of women, much of which she salvages from being completely lost, Dachsel’s work offers something else, instead; hers is a lyric that narrates with a similar lean towards precision, but more interested in examining the emotional and spiritual messes and complications and impossibilities that come with growing up and of youth, that come with being female, and that come with experiences beyond one’s control. Her poems are less studies on or around subjects than acknowledgements of events that might not otherwise be discussed. “Loss is becoming commonplace,” she writes, in the opening poem, “after the funeral,” “but this one, / this particular death, rattles.”

Her poems do feel like monologues, one that could be performed on stage as easily as they could be read on a page, or at a podium or microphone, and Dachsel’s poems also offer a kind of spiritual clarity, navigating a sequence of uncertainties with a careful confidence, considered step and hard-won experience. “When we were pregnant,” she writes, to open the poem “grown up,” “we thought we were finally / adults. Such babies, / making babies. We glowed / with hope, stupidity. / As if life was that easy.” Just as the poems of her prior collection, Glossolalia, wrote of the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some of the poems in acknowledge women otherwise forgotten to history, such as Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753 – December 5, 1784), a former slave who became known as “the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry.”

for phillis wheatley

Phillis, what was your name, your real name

your mama whispered as you drifted to sleep,

what your father screamed, reverberating deep

through forest, across the ocean? Your name

you held as most sacred. We could not blame

you for not sharing who you were, to keep

some part of you whole, your own. Did strength steep

from this private word, help you navigate fame,

that blip of light, a gash in servitude?

Was this what your husband groaned late at night,

your bodies cleaved in solemn gratitude?

Did you pass your name onto your babies, bright

love for those, like you, whose lives were taken

too soon, leaving the world longing & vacant.

Connotation Press online: Canadian Poetry Feature, including rob mclennan,

I've two poems in the (slightly delayed) Canadian Poetry feature in the October 2013 issue of Connotation Press online, guest-edited by Edmonton poet Jenna Butler. Thanks, Jenna! Other poets in the feature include Dennis Cooley, Erin Moure, Douglas Barbour, Catherine Owen, Marita Dachsel and Gregory Betts.

Glossolalia, Marita Dachsel

Delcena Diadamia Johnson Sherman

His floods. His tornadoes.

Plagues. Drought.

Over nothing.

It’s never personal.

A cracked bowl. Torn pants.

Dropped food. Smeared shit.

Five crisp crescents

on a chubby thigh;

a taut hairbrush;

a smothering embrace;

a clumsy constellation

from rough diaper pins.

A mother has only

so much patience,

so much time

to clean & care,

for goodly work.

God knows.

I forgive

His outbursts

of destruction

& damage.

I understand

prayers ignored

cried out

in a cold night

needing to suckle,

desperate in faith.

In her second trade poetry collection, Glossolalia (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2013), Victoria, British Columbia poet Marita Dachsel has composed a polyvocal work of poetry as “an unflinching exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, and sexuality as told in a series of poetic monologues spoken by the thirty-four polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ ofLatter-day Saints.” Most poems written out of biographical/historical materials are painstakingly dull, doing little to add to what is already known, but Dachsel manages to bring a life to the material, a fine and sparkling energy, something she brought to her first collection, All Things Said & Done (Caitlin Press, 2007) [see my review of such here] as well. Akin to Robert Kroetsch’s chapbook-double The Lost Narrative of Mrs. David Thompson (Edited by Robert Kroetsch) / Ten Simple Questions for David Thompson (Recorded by Robert Kroetsch) (Windsor ON: Wrinkle Press, 2009) [see my piece on such here] and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) [see my very brief review of such here], Dachsel’s Glossolalia features and focuses on a series of voices that are largely absent from what is already known, writing out fictions from the surrounding facts (or lack thereof) of the multiple wives of Joseph Smith.

I was 17, newly married

when I first put a woman to bed,

her new babe in arms.

Awaiting death, I’ve tallied,

attended 3977 births. Midwife,

my eminent title.

Pride is a sin,

but I think I will be forgiven

for the surge I feel

when I consider my record. (“Patti Bartlett Sessions”)

A few years ago, a selection of her work-in-progress was published in chapbook form by Trisia Eddy as Eliza Roxcy Snow (Edmonton AB: Red Nettle Press, 2009), a poem that survives revision to appear at the very end of the collection. The poem exists a series of unmarked photographs, a series of flashes and flickers in an odd kind of collage. But one single voice in what would become an array of voices, the back of the chapbook explained:

This is a work of fiction, inspired by the real Eliza Roxcy Snow, polygamous wife of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church. It is by no means meant to be read as a biography of the woman. For factual information on her, I suggest reading In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith by Todd Compton.

The sharpest poems in the collection are the ones composed less narrative and far more pointed in their approach, including “Patty Bartlett Sessions,” “Delcena Diadamia Johnson Sherman” and “Flora Ann Woodworth.” Exploration of voice is something a couple of other Canadian poets have been working on over the past few years as well, including Stephen Brockwell and K.I. (Karen) Press, who also present commentary and social exploration in poetry through voices that are often silent. In Dachsel’s Glossolalia, the exploration of multiple voices is echoed through the composition of individual pieces as well, as each voice utilizes a different compositional style, from the lyric of “Ruth Daggett Vose Sayers,” to the point form of “Almera Woodward Johnson” to the erasure of “Lucy Walker,” that includes:

When at length we were forced to believe she would not speak to us again we were in the depths of despair. Ten motherless children! & such a young mother! The youngest not yet two years old. The Prophet came to the rescue. He said, if you remain here Brother Walker, you will soon follow your wife. You must have a change of scene, a change of climate. You have just such a family as I could love. My house shall be their home. For the present, I would advise you to sell your effects, place the little ones with kind friends, & the four eldest shall come to my house & be received & treated as my own children, & if I find the little ones are not content, or not treated right, I will bring them home & keep them     thought     of being broken up as a family, & being separated from the little ones. However my father sought to comfort us by saying two years would soon pass by when with renewed health he hoped to return & make us a home where we might be together again. The tears rained down our faces all the while we were with them   the people often said they wished we would calm ourselves in their presence or not come to see them as it made them discontented.

Writing through sisterhood, motherhood and sexuality, the work can’t help but become a portrait (whether fictional or otherwise) of Joseph Smith himself. And what kind of portrait has Dachsel painted? The portrait appears largely obsessive, abusive and insular, a religious zealotry that can do little but damage the women around him. What is interesting is in how Dachsel’s poems focus on the individuals, working to give each of them voice, but delves little into the situation they shared, that of the plural marriage itself. Instead, the point of the collection is to hear from the women as individuals, through their own stories of childbirth, heartbreaks, jealousies and other experiences. As Dachsel writes to open the piece, “Rhoda Richards”:

            My heart lives in this box.

            Open it.

Ongoing notes: early June, 2009

[Lainna reading an issue of Poetry] Here’s hoping you can make it to the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, happening June 20th at the Jack Purcell Community Centre; there’s even the pre-fair reading by five writers (McArthur, Sze, Anstee, Fuhr + Fiorentino) happening the night before at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market. And watch out for the sixteenth anniversary above/ground press reading/launch/party, with readings and new publications by Roland Prevost, Lainna Lane El Jabi and Phil Hall (and perhaps more), at the Ottawa Art Gallery on Thursday, August 13 at 7pm. Or then, of course, the Talonlaunches I'm part of this week in Calgary (Tuesday, Pages on Kensington) and Vancouver (Wednesday, Anza Club). Will I see you at any of these? Check out, too, an interview I just did with Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky.

Edmonton AB: Former Vancouver and current Edmonton resident, the poet Marita Dachsel has published sparingly over the past decade and a half, whether a chapbook with above/ground press back in 1996 or a trade poetry collection but a couple of years back, so a new poetry chapbook from Trisia Eddy’s Red Nettle Press is something to pay attention to, her Eliza Roxcy Snow (2009).

I will never feel the ache
of filling breasts
heavy for release
or the need to hide my blouse
blooming with stain,

but do not be mistaken.

I know the urgent suckle
of a needy mouth.

Eliza Roxcy Snow is a series of unmarked photographs, a series of flashes, of flickers; an odd kind of collage work that isn’t really explained, and moves, fluid, from page to page. As the back of the small collection explains:

This is a work of fiction, inspired by the real Eliza Roxcy Snow, polygamous wife of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church. It is by no means meant to be read as a biography of the woman. For factual information on her, I suggest reading In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith by Todd Compton.

The connections are made and the narratives created by the reader. A break from her first collection of poems, this works far less of a narrative but threads nonetheless.

There are many versions of the story,
& you should be wise enough to know
that truth is filtered through tongues.

Calgary AB: I’m liking this new publication derek beaulieu is working through his No Press, speechless 1, “dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of visual and concrete poetry.” beaulieu has long been a proponent of the form, through his own work as a writer, critic, editor and publisher, including his own essay on such in his title with Talonbooks, his work with filling Station magazine, and perhaps bringing the form into Canadian literary journals the past few years in a way that hasn’t been seen since the small press explosion of the 1960s and 70s, with his own work appearing in journals that traditionally don’t publish such work. The first issue is a lovely production (just like all of his other No Press publications), featuring the work of Eva Gonzalez, Rachelle Pinnow, Helen Hajnoczky and Mary Ellen Solt, including the essay “Writing the Concrete Body: Cixous, Solt, and the Feminist Potential of Concrete Poetics” by Hajnocsky. I wonder if she has written about Vancouver visual/concrete poet Judith Copithorne? He says that submissions are welcome, c/o #2, 733-2nd Avenue NW, Calgary AB T2N 0E4.

Some Edmonton, thus;

[Lainna] I’ve been here since Thursday, April 9; what have I been up to? My Talonbooks launch next week, so hopefully a good crowd for that, lovingly hosted by Trisia Eddy and Lainna Lane El Jabi and their current incarnation of The Factory (West) Reading Series. A reading there before heading back to Ottawa for the writers festival, but unfortunately missing out on the entire Edmonton Poetry Festival happening here the same time. The same day I flew in there was a day-long conference at the University of Alberta, predominantly made up of English and Film Studies department grad students, apparently to give them practice at presenting at conferences, including readings of creative works by Heather Simeny McLeod, Rebecca Frederickson and Joel Katelnikoff that I would have enjoyed witnessing, but unfortunatly the timing didn’t quite work out. I heard most of a paper on the McClelland & Stewart New Canadian Library paperback series that I would have liked to have heard more of. Being a mini-conference, though, I doubt there will be a post-event publication to go along with it, which is a bit disappointing.

Much of my days have been distracted, in a particular direction. Other parts included a visit to NeWest Press last week to see Lou Morin, a visit to the University of Alberta Press to hand in my signed contract (I’ve a poetry collection out with them soon, wild horses, written while I was writer-in-residence in 2007-8), and Trisia Eddy and Michael Gravel’s combined Olive reading on Tuesday. I heard both of them read last May as part of Eddy’s Red Nettle Press launch, two days before I moved back to Ottawa, and was very impressed by both of them (I have actually heard Eddy read a couple of times now). She has a manuscript ready, but so far, I don’t think she’s sent it anywhere. Gravel, on the other hand, is part of the Raving Poets, doing a more personal and narrative kind of writing that doesn’t necessarily fall into my interest, but he’s one of the better readers I’ve heard in some time. A number of the poems he read from his 2008 Red Nettle Press chapbook came out of the fact that in December 2007, he nearly died of a blood clot in his heart and spent weeks in hospital, so his work certainly is memorable.

Fast Heart

Comes across the beat
like chest wire
face drained to paper
neck bulging a pump.
Fingers to wrist,
do the math.
160 at rest.
A dead short somewhere
on the grid.
The heart –
that old electro-mech
stopwatch sump,
swishing the juice,
jamming the pipes.
It could explode,
blow muscle to the lungs.
At 160 I find a chair
send my eyes back
and wait for the sirens. (Michael Gravel, “Further No Theories”)

[Lainna (centre) and I visiting U of A Press; marketing guru Cathie Crooks on left, Jeff Carpenter on right] It would have been nice to hear Lainna read in the open set, but she had read in the previous two, so didn’t. I still haven’t heard her read. There’s a video of her reading a poem or two on YouTube (although I can't, for the life of me, find it right now), one of which will be appearing in the next issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, once all the contributors actually get around to contributing. Saw poet Marita Dachsel as well, partner of current playwrite-in-residence Kevin Kerr (a two-year term recently extended to three) whom I’ve only met once before, and that when she extremely pregnant in fall 2007 with their second child, when she helped us launch the first Edmonton issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club. Have you seen the fantastic interview series she's been doing on her blog lately? Meeting her twice, despite having published her poetry chapbook back in 1996 through above/ground press. Just how big is this country that I see someone only twice, having known them that long?

[Myrna Kostash's little front balcony] An already Edmonton week and a bit, wandering the town, quietly through the University of Alberta, along Whyte Avenue (where I picked up a birthday card for my sister’s 33rd birthday), to that West Edmonton Mall we love so much; returned today to Myrna Kostash’s lovely condo [see what I wrote when here last]. Strange to be here again, after nearly six months; good that, after a shared house some distance, I have some singular space to breathe in a downtown condo near shopping, coffee, otherwise. It was early November when I left here last, two Edmonton weeks, to see her after five long months. Another five long months of distance, and so much has changed since then, is different since. So many workable and positive things. Friday night, Lainna and I with Myrna and a bottle of wine, the night before she drove off in her red car to Banff, bags and laptop in tow. Did you know that Myrna has work coming out over the next year or so with both NeWest Press and the University of Alberta Press?

Today, who knows; a quiet laptop day with the spring door open, breeze coming through. The night before, a bottle of wine with Vancouver-returned Catherine Owen and her over-excited dog, jumping around as though she’d never seen human beings before; did you know that Owen has a collection of literary essays out with Wolsak & Wynn in another two years?

Did you know, according to Myrna, Prince George BC writer Sarah De Leeuw won the CBC Literary Award this past year, moons after her first and only book [see my piece on such here] came out with NeWest Press [see my note on such here]. Much of what I’m otherwise up to, preparing a new slate of “12 or 20 questions” to start posting June first (already interviews with Jason Dewinetz, Stephen Henighan, Michelle Berry, Janice Williamson, Ray Hsu, and plenty of others) to correspond with the time I (roughly) begin a Toronto year, following my attractive young lady to the big city. I’m working a whole new list of authors, not wanting any overlap with the previous series. Tomorrow, interviewed by Stephanie Hall for Other Voices, an Edmonton-based literary journal, on these new books I seem to have out.

[waiting for her with books, writing, at HUB, University of Alberta] Otherwise, working (slowly) final final edits to this poetry collection for NeWest Press, twice-edited by poet, pal and clever lad (and current Toronto resident) Andy Weaver,who used to make this E-town sing. Scribbling poems, reading Bruce Serafin’s Stardust, Joe LeSueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, all after rereading Elizabeth Smart’s The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, Dany Laferriere’s Why must a black writer write about sex?

Writing an essay about being here, being in these moments of post-Edmonton Edmonton and the beginnings of something else, the beginnings of will hopefully be a creative non-fiction book on Toronto, a follow-up (of sorts) to the “McLennan, Alberta” book I worked while in this town (currently making the rounds with readers, friends, editors and publishers before revisiting such sometime this summer). Edmonton before Ottawa; Ottawa before Toronto. The current plans that hold, and certainly hold.

WRITING: WHAT MATTERS ; University of Alberta

On Thursday, I was able to go to a panel discussion at the University of Alberta called “Writing: What Matters,” chaired by Janice Williamson, with brief talks by Lynn Coady (Writer in Residence, English & Film Studies), Kevin Kerr (Playwright in Residence, Drama), Rita Espeschit (Writer in Exile, Edmonton) and Derek Walcott (Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Arts). U of A has been pretty lucky to have Walcott around the past little bit, giving talks, being available and otherwise, including even doing a poetry workshop with various writers taking classes throughout the English & Film Studies Department, and he even gave a reading to a packed hall last fall, perhaps but the beginning of this longer-termed arrangement.

Lynn Coady, this year’s writer-in-residence, started her talk referencing how she found it difficult not to take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments against artists personally, suggesting any argument against was “whining” and/or “self-absorbed bullshit,” and suggesting artists aren’t ordinary Canadians, which make their concerns somehow diminished. She talked about writing as her way to address the question of “what matters,” and to “engage the world.” Writing is, she said, what she’s best at doing and like doing most, but how is it that culture at large says its irrelevant? Rita Espeschit, a writer who immigrated to Canada from Brazil in 2001, and the author of fourteen books, talked about how she originally heard that Canada was “like the United States but colder.” She was very pleased and surprised to learn, soon after arriving, that she was wrong (“but not about the colder,” she said). Unlike Coady who read from a pre-prepared speech (call it the writer in her, I would have done the same thing), Espeschit spoke informally of how writing shapes who we are (as Canadians) and is a reflection, showing us to ourselves and to different generations and parts of the country. She wondered if much of this conversation had to do with us having an aggressive neighbour with the same language; when you have an aggressive neighbour with a different language, she said, you have a gate between you. She referenced, too, something Prime Minister Harper said about Canada not having a culture, but a series of regions. Perhaps he should have talked to John Ralston Saul, who recently talked about Canada as a Metis nation, forming ourselves through the fact that we have a range of diversity. Can we simply not see “Canadian culture” because there is no single “one” culture, but a range of cultures? Such ideas become far harder to reduce, and thus grasp onto, by someone willfully working to pay little or no attention.

Kevin Kerr [above, talking to Edmonton poet/publisher Trisia Eddy], playwright, who is actually in the second year of a two-year term (I would have loved a two-year term) and husband of poet Marita Dachsel, took another point of view, taking the “what matters” of writing into his own specific process, and talking specifically how he got into the five year project that turned into the play Skydive, currently being performed in Calgary. Worked through with Vancouver’s Realwheels, a theatre company that writes pieces around and with disabilities, this is the second production Kerr has worked on with them. He talked about the idea of the Frankenstein monster, the “spark of life” as metaphor for theatre, with a final production made up of a series of disparate body parts sewn together, searching for that spark that always evades answers, as in, what makes a project work, what makes a project live? Although he made a point to say that the playwright wasn’t the doctor, but perhaps the head, with the actors as arms and legs (he did keep going with the metaphor, but I stopped taking notes after the first bit).[above: Rita talking with Janice Williamson] Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, an award-winning poet, playwright and visual artist from St. Lucia (he currently divides his time between New York, Trinidad & Tobago and St. Lucia), started out by saying that, as a Nobel Laureate, he gets asked to talk all around the world, from Mexico to Brazil to Italy, to and with writers, and always about this subject of how and what writing matters. He sees it as a repeated question, where is the centre? He talked about how culture demeans, misunderstands and misrepresents artists through monetary reward as being a mark of success, and that centres such as New York, Paris and London by themselves do not produce great work. Money is not a measure, he said, and he was increasingly disturbed by this, that the notion of craft gets overtaken by career and financial competition. Unlike what the “centre” of what is usually spoken of, his centre is, as he called it, a semi-literature island, and talked about measuring criteria that have nothing to do with the craft. This has been said before, he said, this is not new. He cited examples of obscure geography creating genius away from any idea of “centre,” including Joyce, turning Dublin into a village and he the village explainer, Faulker and Marquez. Who would have thought about the blasphemous hymns, he said of Emily Dickinson, of a spinster recluse out in the country? He ended by saying that the comments made by the Prime Minister were profoundly scary and ridiculous, and about how it is insulting to “ordinary Canadians” that their Prime Minister presumes them not smart enough to engage with it, instead forcing the dumbing down of such works. He ended with these magnificent lines:

Those who presume to speak for the common man demean him.

And then I got lost on the way to the reception, and ended up somewhere else entirely.