Aaron Tucker, Catalogue D’oiseaux

 

I dream of you & a tree
that flourishes serpentine
a labyrinth up through packed earth
through clay & quartz & mica, through surfacesoil
the trunk tapers, splits into Ys
that further divide, forking limbs of limbs
a bird on each, flashes of magpies
darting chickadees, a perching predatory eagle
pelicans & storks & herons & kingfishers & cranes
leaves & twigs, barely visible
a tree with feathers talon beaks
you, a hummingbird, delicate & light-boned
in torpor, fractional heart rate
central among the wings of the tree

I’d been curious to see the full-length poem that makes up the continued, ongoing present of the lyric of Toronto poet Aaron Tucker’s third full-length poetry title, Catalogue D’oiseaux (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021). Catalogue D’oiseaux is a single book-length poem composed in birdsong, writing, as the back cover offers: “a year in the life of a couple separated by distance, carefully documenting time spent together and apart. When reunited, they embark on travels across the globe—from Toronto to Berlin, Porto to the Yukon.” “I in Toronto amid the chills off Lake Ontario,” he writes, early on in the poem, “comforted only by those long flights to you / when I looked out the window at the clouds & the bent horizon / the sun rising above it & the ocean below [.]” The intimacy and the narrative expositions are a shift from the structural concerns of his first two, far more constraint-based, poetry titles: Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press, 2017) and punchlines (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015). In an interview posted January 1, 2018 over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, conducted  by Ian Whistle, Tucker references composing poems that could very much be the opening strains of this collected lyric. As he offers: “I’m writing weird little bird-lyric poems based on some of the travelling I have been doing. I’m not exactly sure what they are, or what they might become, but I’ve enjoyed writing them so far.” Tucker writes on reading, travel, musical composition, writing and long distances, allowing the flourishing of this new relationship, this new connection, to hold as the central basis of the poem’s strength and momentum. There is something interesting in the blend of the intimately personal and the structural that Tucker explores in this singular poem. It is comparable, in a certain way, to the human elements that Canadian poet Christian Bök allowed in the text of his most recent volume, The Xenotext Book 1 (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here]. The intimacy allows the structure of Tucker’s Catalogue D’oiseaux it’s heart, propelling the mechanics that allow the machine to live.

you are a jackdaw on our apartment’s windowledge
watching as I write to you while listening to Messiaen’s piece
as performed by his wife, Yvonne Loriod, in collaboration
imagining him composing with her straight back in mind
her fingers spanning, migrating between each bird
the piece is tailored to her body so only she can play it
           perfectly
& when she performs it, it is the only music ever written
it seals the couple, the music a bridge between two shores

There is also an interesting tonal element that seems newly introduced to Tucker’s lyric, as though the subject matter provides for a softer, more serious meditation, and one I would have read as perhaps by Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell over the work of Aaron Tucker.

As part of an interview posted at Train : a poetry journal later that same year, Tucker speaks of the collection, then still in manuscript form: “By contrast, the book I’m working on now, tentatively titled Catalogue d’oiseaux after Olivier Messiaen’s solo piano piece of the same name, involved actually writing the poetry part and not just handing it off to my computer co-author. But in much the same ways, I did find myself putting the different parts together: […] it’s a long lyrical poem, stitched together by travel, art, sex, birds, growing older and into love outside your twenties, with all the events of two lives combining.” Later, in the same interview:

You seem to approach poetry collections as projects. How did this process emerge?

That’s funny, yes, I hadn’t thought about it like that. I think part of this stems from my tendency to start with big questions and then work to answer them with some poetic gesture. For Irresponsible Mediums, it was “How can I merge chess and poetry in some way?” For Loss Sets (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/), an ongoing collaborative project with Jordan Scott, Namir Ahmed and Tiffany Cheung, Jordan actually asked “Could we translate poems into 3D printed sculptures?” These lead to smaller questions, and it’s usually in answering those smaller questions or problems that the actual work gets produced. But I think working backwards from a large, semi-impossible looking question, works best for me.

I think for Catalogue d’oiseaux, the beginning question was “What would a love poem, at this stage of my life, look like?” Looking back, I can see myself asking this because I did want to write something that looked a little more what I used to write, something lyrical, less conceptual and more emotional; I wanted to make a pretty thing, rather than sort out some sort of intellectual concept.

rob mclennan round-up: some poems, two interviews, etcetera

I feel as though I keep forgetting to mention things such as these, but I do have some poems from "the book of smaller" up in the twelfth issue of where is the river, as well as new poems up at Selcouth Station and Empty Mirror. I was even interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal! And by Paul Brookes for his Wombwell Rainbow Interviews series! [you can see a full list of interviews with me online here] Thanks so much to the editors of all! Further links to further poems, short stories, essays etcetera of mine online also appear (as best as my ability provides) over at my clever author page. Oh, and did I mention that I'm posting poems over at my Patreon page? I'm totally posting poems over at my Patreon page.

an interview, a pamphlet + two new poems,

I was recently interviewed as part of a spotlight via the Ottawa Arts Council, had a wee pamphlet produced by Anthony Etherin's Penteract Press (selected from a work-in-progress from a decade or so ago), and had newly-composed poems (as part of the current work-in-progress, "book of magazine verse") appear via Train : a poetry journal and the Chaudiere Books, for the sake of #NationalPoetryMonth. Exciting!
 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji, port of being

Heat

Birth from our own skin

Concerns over devaluation

Body that hangs and holds

Mushroom halos of work

Dark faces glow in oil

At the back of the room hands wait

To be held in court

To speak a warm fabric of lips

Gaze that hangs and holds

Scholar alone in the office

Ports open for syntax

Decoys of chat and lovers

Hands that hang and hold

Faces of men and women

In the night of a still life

Circuitry to collect heat

From our whispers

Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s debut full-length collection, winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, is port of being (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018). Hers is a collection composed as a book of dislocations, implications and accumulations via short lyrics that explore borders, violence and human connection. The poems in port of being are deliberately constructed to keep the reader off-balance, employing sequences of fragments that layer upon layer into something unsettling, writing on violence, distant wars, social media, internet cables, death, borders and the horror at an increasing disregard of facts. port of being writes from the slippages of what was once actual or presumed solid ground, writing from a series of negative and positive shifts, from what hadn’t been acknowledged before, to what never should have occurred. As she writes to open the poem “Heat”: “Birth from our own skin // Concerns over devaluation // Body that hangs and holds [.]” Ramji writes from a dangerous place, one that comes from knowledge and acknowledgment, attempting to articulate how one might navigate in such a landscape, such as this fragment, from the middle of the poem “Secret Playground”:

It doesn’t make sense to ask

if words will ever stop failing me

but I want to ask it. What does it take

for a three-year-old who lived on M&Ms

and barely escaped the Gulf War

to call the first part of her life

“simulacra”?

I didn’t tell you

because I still don’t believe it.

In Toronto, I read a poem

about another part of my life,

one I still find hard to believe

when I’m not with myself.

Ina recent interview posted at Train : a poetry journal, she spoke to the difference between compiling the poems in her chapbook Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017) and this debut full-length collection:

Prosopopoeia brought together some poems I'd written over the years. It's not necessarily unified, though themes and connections emerged after seeing the various pieces in conversation with each other. The chapbook clarified my obsessions with surveillance, geography, time, and relations between people and objects, and it began to couple those with more personal experiences of loneliness, addiction, and clinical depression. Recognizing these connections in the chapbook was crucial for the book. When I was writing Port of Being, I constantly jostled with the weight of these personal experiences and a sense of responsibility to facts, history, and the experiences of other people. This struggle was intensified when, a few years ago, a thief who stole my laptop followed me and had knowledge of my whereabouts. It was a traumatizing experience that made the more removed preoccupations with surveillance and space far more personal and immediate. The book has a clear arc (at least to me) that moves into the lyrical. I should clarify that the book isn't about me being stalked, though. I've preferred to tell it slant (thanks to Emily Dickinson for the wise words!). It began with research, which led me to undertake a kind of surveillance (after Vito Acconci's Following Piece) in return, and this gave rise to the first part of the book. The process of putting together the book was like following a trail of myself in the world and mapping it all together. I learned so much about the world (for lack of a better word) when writing this book and that makes me feel okay.

One might think she writes for the same reason as Dany Laferrière’s narrator, “Dany,” in the novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1994), offered for writing his own first novel: I wrote this book to save my life. Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s poems, while betraying the occasional exhaustion, exasperation and frustration, don’t fall entirely into hopelessness, providing a glimmer of something beyond mere survival. “In the morning we consider ghosts.” she writes, to end the poem “Nearness”: “I feel the sun settle on my ear.”