Sarah Burgoyne & Vi Khi Nao, Mechanophilia, Book 1

 

0          of two or three square miles
9          of tears striates across a river rewritten by a
7          city shape. A foolish pitch to cancel
4          my membership with loneliness.
9          Something hit our heads and tiptoed into cirrus
                              Clouds
4          while desolate rain memorized
4          imperfect geometries, letting fall
5          devastating isotopes of emotional indifference
9          in the same place. You, in pristine ditches, find
2          an absolute
3          tangle spreading apart
0          eyelids from dreams.

From Montreal-based experimental poet Sarah Burgoyne & Iowa City-based Vietnamese-born poet and multi-genre writer Vi Khi Nao comes the collaborative Mechanophilia, Book 1 (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2023), produced through Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. I’ve been an admirer of Burgoyne’s work for some time [see my review of her latest solo collection here], but hadn’t previously been aware of the work of Vi Khi Nao (although I’ve caught more than a couple of interviews she’s conducted, including this one with Sarah Burgoyne), the author of not only six poetry collections, a short story collection and a novel, but a prior collaborative work, the novella Funeral, with Daisuke Shen (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as the first of an ongoing, potentially open-ended collaboration between the two, comparable to the two volumes of the “Continuations” series [see my review of the second volume here], composed as well via email, by Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy. It is interesting to get a sense of the crossing of vast, geographic distances between these two writers, something articulated as well in a review of Nao’s prior collaboration, almost as though she is working to either chase or bridge a number of solitudes.

Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as a continuous, book-length piece across more than a hundred pages, following a numbering system of lines that accumulate, following the numerical structure of pi. A “collaborative epic,” as the press release offers, “by American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.” The numerical system is reminiscent, slightly, of those grid-poems that Canadian Modernist poet Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), a poet better known for being married to legendary prose writer Sheila Watson (1909-1998) than for his own work, spent his career focused upon. Through Burgoyne and Nao, there is the suggestion of the call and response, threads that myriad and move beyond the two distinct voices that mingle, weave and interweave, blending into each other as a separate sequence of a combined single voice. Through these two, references weave into and around each other, changing shape and texture as the poem furthers. Part of what becomes interesting through such a project is not only how such a project might progress across the further three volumes, but how the individual works of these two might adapt as well. As their “EPILOGUE” writes:

Alas, we have lost heart. Or so it seems after three thousand and two lines of poetry (pi to 3,000 decimal places). But this is merely the first of many (infinite) volumes. To write this book, we foolishly cancelled our memberships with loneliness and wrote across countries, in virtual high seas, daily, for years, spooling out line after line of ancient questions, complaints, please, declarations, each taking a line, poets’ do-si-do. While we wrote, we got to know each other for the first time. We chatted about our lives, our loves, our families, our pain, our pasts, what we were eating, cooking, planting, not planting, buying, teaching, reading, painting, who was visiting, who was publishing, and whether the heart is really located under the floorboards, as Poe suggested. (It is.) This side chat, perhaps the most precious document of all, maps an epistolary acquaintance, charts a friendship in the making, and Mechanophilia is its shadow, its dream, its under-the-floorboards heart, friendship’s supraliminality. We think this is why it gets funnier as it moves along. Like books of the Bible, Mechanophilia at its current stage comprises four books, each corresponding to a few thousand digits of pi. This project will continue until we die. This is the first book. A genesis in more ways than one.

 

Sarah Burgoyne, Because the Sun

 

Because the Sun takes inspiration from a decade-long fascination with a scene in Albert Camus’s L’étranger – the one in which his main character Meursault, ‘press[ed]’ by the blinding sun, shoots a man on the beach. I wanted to take up the relentless heat of the sun and its potential for transference – in this case, from atmosphere to human interaction, from Meursault’s murder of the unnamed ‘Arab’ to the example of gendered violence committed against the victim’s sister (also unnamed), and finally the micro-aggressions against Meursault’s girlfriend Marie. I saw a parallel here between atmosphere and violence in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise – what is it that moves Louise to pull the trigger on Thelma’s assailant after Thelma is safe? In both cases, the sun is a material symbol of pain, an affective backlog we’re slung under, pushing us through desert after desert, where we become deadly.

I gave voice to the speaker of Because the Sun, in part, by weaving excerpts from Camus’s extensive notebooks (scoured for every instance in which he refers to the sun), with the surreal lyric of automatic writing, scientific descriptions of heat and heat stroke, and film dictations. Because the Sun’s pastiche of personal and ‘objective’ (often scientific) voices strives to embody both stylistic and formal ‘relentlessness’ by teasing out discursive tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun. (“NOTES”)

Montreal poet Sarah Burgoyne’s latest poetry title is Because the Sun (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2021), a book composed as a quartet of lyric and prose sections: “one, the sun,” “two, the sky,” “three, women” and “four, flowers.” The author of a handful of chapbooks both solo and collaborative, this is Burgoyne’s second trade poetry title, after the award-winning Saint Twin (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2016). As she describes through the notes at the end of Because the Sun, Burgoyne writes the facets of the sun from Camus, and the point at which Camus’ novel and the film Thelma and Louise (1991) meet. “here is the closed room,” she writes, as part of the poem “WHAT WAS / ENFANCE,” in the first section, a poem that cities itself as “after Rimbaud,” “behind the chrysanthemums, the / dead little room and its mat of astroturf, the whole sky is / luminous (in the room), and the great obstacle is what has / already taken place.” An earlier version of that section, also, was first revealed as her “statement” to introduce her work as part of her participation in the “Spotlight series,” posted March 21, 2017. As part of a richly fascinating interview, “Sarah Burgoyne In Conversation With Vi Khi Nao,” posted April 13, 2021 at luna luna, the two discuss the implications of the sun, and Camus, as Vi Khi Nao asks:

The content of this book’s unraveling is structured/outlined by a quote you pulled from Camus: ‘I count. I say: one, the sea; two, the sky (ah, how beautiful it is); three women; four, flowers (ah, how happy I am).’ Can you share with us the intentions behind the omission of the content in parentheses?  Are beauty and happiness not a part of Camus’ sun? Did you want them implied?

SB: These are great questions, first of all. And I want to say that “solarly-accusatory” is an excellent description of the title. It’s actually the reason Meursault gives in l’Etranger during his trial for having shot the man on the beach: “c’était à cause du soleil.” Not the most convincing excuse… but every time the sun is at that low angle and burning right into my eyes I think of that scene. As for the beauty and happiness—yes—I believe they are very much part of Camus’ sun. The reason I scoured his notebooks was because I knew he must be obsessed with the sun, and even though it isn’t always written about in conjunction with beauty and happiness, (at one point he talks about ‘the real climate of tragedy’ being not the night but ‘the heat on the quays’), one doesn’t usually obsess over something unless one is somewhat in love with it…

The third section is a length of extended prose on the right side with an equally-placed hole excised on every face page, setting that text outside the boundaries of an exploration of Thelma and Louise, reminiscent of George Bowering working a similar excision of text in one of the stories in his short story collection, The Rain Barrel (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1994). In Burgoyne’s text, it is as though there is a hole shot through it, whether sun or bullet-hole, that same hole running through and left behind at the end of the section. Burgoyne has previously done some stunning work with the prose poem form, especially the extended or serial prose poem, so it is fascinating to see her explore more conceptual frameworks through this latest collection. “a work of art is / a confession,” she writes, as part of the final section. The conceptual framework of Because the Sun works from Camus and Thelma and Louise, examining an array of sentences on and around the sun, but also explores the very nature of art-making, and the relationships language and art have with each other, artwork has with other artworks, and relationships those works might have with the audience/reader, including the narrator/creator of this particular work. One can create and even hide behind artwork, but it does not erase the creator; it does not provide a place from which to be completely invisible. “the tops / of buildings get a / little colder with all / the damning / evidence in our / hands we’re afraid / of punishment / we’re glad this / went nowhere” (“JACKPOT,” “four, flowers”).

correction: i am my own convection     overwrought
in yellow     i dress in the light
at the bottom of the pool i
ferry light along
here
i am in it (“THE SUN’S CITIZENS ARE SOLAR NOTES”)

Jessica Q. Stark, Savage Pageant

Name Numerology K-Hole: 11 Weeks

Hope is a thing with a name, and

  I am a personality calculator.

I hunted for you in Internet lists.

  This stranger sea—each route

too wayward by edge and vowel.

  A name is a settled home

for the indefinite. Unknown love-

  born, murky-watered babe, let

me call you. Nothing. Mix in salt,

  melody, and ventilate. Voilà

elegy for an exact flaw, for self-

  knowing. We are only here for a

short time. You have ten fingers and

  ten toes, I have a black-and-white.

In it, your head is cast down from

  view, your face obscured.

American poet Jessica Q. Stark’s full-length debut is Savage Pageant (Birds LLC, 2020), a book that includes incredible sharpness, quick turns and powerful images, such as this, the last few lines of one of the opening poems, “Savage Pageant: A Genealogy,” that reads:

My grandmother had eleven pregnancies and

      an infection.

My mother had four and wished for boys.

Sometimes you can’t put all the bones

back where they’re supposed to go.

I had a boy and they took you out with a               knife.

Savage Pageant writes on pregnancy and the body, connecting both to family, genealogy and very real and physical elements of differences the body experiences, from within as well as reactions to those changes. Hers is a book marking shifts, articulating changes large and small, and providing a context far larger and far more visceral than I’ve seen before. Constructed with an “Explanatory Note” and a “Prologue” (which is made up of the above poem), Savage Pageant is structured in four sections and three single or two-poem intermissions—“Act I The Soil,” “Intermission,” “Act II The Ghosts,” “Intermission,” “Act III The Animals,” “Intermission” and “Act IV The Illness”—with a single-poem “Epilogue” to close. I quite like how the dense language of Stark’s poems twist and gyrate, punch and swagger, managing to speak of pregnancy and parenting and the body in new and unexpected ways, from the fragmentary elusive to the incredibly direct, as she writes as the second of the trio of stanzas of one of the poems in the second “Intermission,” “A. Know Your Symptom: 17 weeks”: “contempt from strangers, faster heartbeat, / decreased libido, high blood pressure, breast / and nipple changes, noticeable weight gain, / low back ache, breast tenderness, leg swelling, / flatulence, heightened allergies, leakage of urine, / shortness of breath, leg cramps, headaches, / sensitivity of olfactory senses, increased libido, / constipation, diarrhea, vaginal discharge, / mild uterine cramping, stuffy nose, [.]” This is a remarkable book, and one that rewards further with multiple readings. As she responded as part of the “JESSICA Q STARK IN CONVERSATION WITH VI KHI NAO,” posted at Entropy in February, 2020:

The title came to me after studying the complicated history of pageantry and feminism. I wanted to examine the tension around historical storytelling as a form of pageantry in reducing complicated facts for public display and easier consumption. Stories about street signs, ourselves, our nation. Stories about pregnancy and birth. In contrast to presenting history as linear and uncomplicated, Savage Pageant emphasizes unruliness, fugitivity, and wildness that are never fully contained in a still image or a linear narrative. “Savage” also, of course, refers to the earliest accounts of “otherness” by European explorers, in an effort to contain, subjugate, and excuse their own fearful misunderstandings of “new worlds.” In my mind, Savage Pageant is also a good way to describe the history of the United States and its symptomatic citizens—from the micro-narrative to macro-histories of place and violence; its real “savageness” lies in the elaborate forms of pageantry that (attempt to) manipulate or destroy evidence of violence, racism, ecological mistakes, and national shame. I also want to point to “page” in the word “pageant.” The writing in this book, or any for that matter, inevitably enacts its own forms of unintentional violence and reductions of history and hopefully, a simultaneous break in the tide of rote timeline. I am both a spectator and of course, a deep form of spectacle. Aren’t all poets? I do not miss New York.