angela rawlings, si tu

The words, first, like cherries. Not bent to, not leaning into to form association. Not to assert not-quite. Cherries have not-quite to do with girls.

            Piano.

Beyond a square in a circle, beyond a circle in its outer circle: echo. Voices. Five girls not-quite a circle, not-quite pillar or prostrate—their ideologies angled towards, not-quite directed. Not-quite directive.

Sweeps right arm, long, across chest, pulls hair of other. Massages neck with hand, then shoulder with knee. Mouth to arm. Embrace.

To understand joint, one must. To understand, one must bring cherries a little late.

Lately I’ve been going through angela rawlings’ si tu (March, 2017), “a poetic response to Marjana Krajač’s choreography Variations on Sensitive,” produced by Multimedijalni Intitut in Zagreb. As a short preface informs, this small title is:

A written improvisation composed by angela rawlings to the structure of Marjana Krajač’s durational choreographic work Variations on Sensitive performed by dancers Irena Mikec, Lani Hosni, Mia Zalukar, Katarina Rilović and Irena Tomašić at the venue of House of HDLU (Meštrović Pavilion) in Zagreb (Croatia), on June 14^th 2015.”

For those awaiting a follow-up to her debut, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), rawlings’ creative output since then has been wide-ranging, multidisciplinary and seemingly-constant—something suggested through her 2016 interview over at Touch the Donkey—and a process not necessarily limited to the published book, but one that moves through performance, dance, visuals and text. rawlings’ si tu is reminiscent, slightly, of Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams’ collaborative GRAPPLE (above/ground press, 2016), a work that engaged dance with the lyric, yet rawlings’ response is one far more attuned to the visual materials of text on a page, and how sound and motion are expressed in the space of two dimensions, coming to her response not through the lyric, but through a far more experimental and multidisciplinary sense of how the building blocks of visual language can be applied.

I’m fascinated by rawlings’ approach in responding to a work I haven’t seen (which can provide its own benefit, not allowing the comparison to her source as distraction), yet able to grasp a sense of Krajač’s choreography as rawlings moves through description, sound and motion, writing fragments and sentences up against space, as words are reworked, transposed and translated, flipped, scattered and structured on a grid. “To put the mouth on. / To put the mouth on it. / To put the mouth on iz. // But as professionals, one / is not always so worried / about the safety of / professionelles.” Really, the performative element of sound and motion in this text is key, one that allows even the most casual reader to be present in this work as performance.

yes?

body                body                body

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Kasimor, Mavreas, lopes, Smith, L’Abbé, Price and rawlings

Anticipating the release next week of the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the eighth issue: Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price and a rawlings.

Interviews with contributors to the first seven issues, as well, remain online, including: Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming ninth issue features new writing by: Stephen Collis, Laura Sims, Paul Zits, Eric Schmaltz, Gregory Betts, Anne Boyer, François Turcot (trans. Erín Moure) and Sarah Cook. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first eight issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. You know, it's a lot cheaper than going to the movies.

Suzanne Buffam, A Pillow Book

*

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote lists. Abraham Lincoln took midnight walks. Tallulah Bankhead paid a series of young caddies to hold her hand in the dark, as did Marcel Proust. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb so he could read after dark. I put a piece of paper under my pillow at night, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark, wrote Henry David Thoreau, who once spent a fortnight in a roofless cabin with his head on a pillow of bricks.

                                    *

There are two kinds of insomniacs: those who fall asleep easily, only to wake up hours later to toss on their pillows until dawn; and those who toss on their pillows from the start, only to drift off just long enough to be roused at dawn by the crows. A little game I like to play, when I crawl into bed at the end of a long day of anything, these days, is to guess which kind, tonight, I will be.

Canadian poet and Chicago resident Suzanne Buffam’s third trade poetry collection, A Pillow Book (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2016), is a book of lists and a study of sleep, or, a lack thereof, akin to Anne Carson’s “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” that appeared in an issue of Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), before being included in Carson’s Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), or even angela rawlings’ collage-study Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). As Carson wrote: “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” Buffam’s, also, is very much a praise similar to Carson’s—as reader, admirer and not necessarily practitioner—and written as much as a series of observations amid a history of sleep and, specifically, pillows, which suggest structural echoes to Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock’s prose poem-history of bathtubs and bathing, The Art of Plumbing (above/ground press, 2013), a work later included in her remarkable Broom Broom (Ottawa ON: Coach House Books, 2014) [see my review of such here]. As Buffam writes: “I am awake, begins a seventeeth-century British meditation intended for the dead of night, but ‘tis not time to rise, neither have I yet slept enough. I am awake, yet not in paine, anguish or feare, as thousands are.”

Following her two earlier poetry collections—Past Imperfect (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2005) and The Irrationalist (Anansi, 2010)—both of which were structured more traditionally as collections of shorter lyrics, A Pillow Book is striking for its structure as a single, extended series of observations and explorations, most of which exist as titleless and seemingly standalone prose pieces of varying lengths. One section, for example, includes but a single sentence: “Men and women sleep on the same pillow, says a Mongolian proverb, but they have different dreams.” Some elements of her two prior collections hinted at such kinds of longer, extended prose structures, but hadn’t the ambition of A Pillow Book. The collection (and title) plays off and explores Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, an infamous work of prose and poetry fragments (made further known due to Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film) often referred to as the first Japanese novel, composed as a “book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi during the 990s and early 1000s in Heian Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002.” (Wikipedia). Buffam’s collection riffs off both content and form of Sei Shōnagon’s work through an accumulation of short sections, most of which exist as prose (or prose poems), some of which are written as short sketches and/or lists. As she writes: “Sei was her father’s name, Shōnagon her father’s rank. For a brief span of time at the turn of the tenth century, we know that she spent her nights behind a thin paper screen, recording her fugitive aperçus by candlelight with an ink stick on rice paper behind the bolted Heian gates. We know that she slept, when she managed to do so, on a small, hollow pillow mad of polished bamboo.”

Many lovers came to see Shōnagon, but few seemed to please her. Those who did, tact prevented her from praising. Anyone turning to her Pillow Book in search of courtly dirty-talk or cozy boudoir scenes by candlelight will turn away unsatisfied. The raciest scene in my abridged bedside edition consists of a woman taking a nap alone under bedclothes that smell faintly of sweat. It is, by and large, a dry read. So many Senior Courtiers of the Sixth Rank, Chamberlains of the Right and of the Left, Middle Counselors, Minor Chancellors, and Chancellors’ Messagers attend so many Festivals of the Fourth Day of the Fourth Month, of the Eighth Day of the Eighth Month, of the Blue Horses, of the Kamo, and of the Cherry Trees, wearing so many unlined robes of green, yellow, plum, scarlet, crimson, violet, rose, and cherry silk, in palm-leaf and wickerwork carriages, bearing herbal balls, hare-sticks, zithers, and thirteen-pipe flutes, it is hard to endure more than a page or two at a stretch. Therein lies much of  its appeal for me. It affords sufficient distraction on one’s pillow at night to transport one to a late Kurosawa dream sequence, but also enough repetitive and inconsequential minutiae to conjure, on a good night, the infinitely gentle god of sleep.

Sprinkled with personal moments of partner and daughter amid proverbs, historical tidbits on the pillow and sleep, as well as a book that works its way through Shōnagon’s thousand year old work, Buffam composes the fragments that make up A Pillow Book through and against an inability to sleep, sketching out short observations, lists and other fragments against what she aims toward but somehow misses—sleep itself:

Not a memoir. Not an epic. Not a scholarly essay. Not a shopping list. Not a diary. Not an etiquette manual. Not a gossip column. Not a prayer. Not a secret letter sent through the silent palace hallways before dawn. Lacking as it does a table of contents, an index, plot, or any discernible chronology or structure, with almost a thousand pages of surviving material, translated, retranslated, and republished in ever-shifting editions, what are the chances, I sometimes wonder, that any two people ever read the same Pillow Book?

And, as Buffam suggests, hers is an entirely different creature than, say, Canadian-turned-American poet Alan Davies’ Sei Shōnagon (Ottawa ON: hole books, 1995), a chapbook composed as a sequence of one hundred and eighty-three tercets which barely reference the title (and alluded source material), writing:

Longing for sweet daybreak

and saying nothing of it

we hang a brazier on our mouth

[Suzanne Buffam launches A Pillow Book in Ottawa on April 18, 2016 as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival]

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three,

[Stuart Ross digging through recent titles by Invisible Publishing] See part one here and part two here. Oh, I picked up so many amazing things at the most recent ottawa small press book fair (although I seem to have missed a few things, including new publications by In/Words and The Ottawa Arts Review…).

Kemptville ON/Iceland: I’m very pleased to have a copy of Chris Turnbull and a rawlings’ remarkable collaboration, The Great Canadian (2015), produced in a limited edition by Low Frequency. As their web page states:

The Great Canadian is a medium-bending collaborative effort between poet a rawlings and photographer Chris Turnbull. With images from their collaboration for Turnbull’s ongoing, site-specific rout/e project and text from rawlings’ forthcoming echolology, as well as a q-code link to a recording of rawlings reading an excerpt of the text, The Great Canadian represents an intersection of multiple trajectories. The work dances one-sided on and beyond the margins of 23 unbound 7”x7” sheets of translucent vellum, packaged in a letter-pressed brown-bag envelope.

The project is basically the point at which their two separate ongoing projects meet [see my write-up earlier this year on Turnbull’s ongoing project at Jacket2, as well as a link to her brand new poetry title], and the results are quite stunning. Both poets utilize text and image in a deep engagement with ecological concerns, as well as directly engaging with nature. As Turnbull writes as part of the publication:

a rawlings’ echolological poem, “The Great Canadian” was planted in snow along the Rideau Trail (Merrickville, ON Map #13) in 2011. For the first two kilometres, the trail hosts piles of 0:05-0:13 garbage—mattresses, old wood, junk, baby materials, clothing, bottles of the unknown. To the east 0:23-0:37, is a pile of construction materials and household items, to its 0:48, piled mattresses with a variety of junk on top. By 2012, a trail-user had moved [ it ] within a window frame that had become base and frame for the collection of tires, containers, bottles, pieces of wood, and “The 1:53-2:49. An archive. During spring melt, 2013, [ it ] floated in a deep, ATV-created large puddle—the plexiglass muddied, the paper undamaged. Spring 2014—[ it ] was floating again, slippery, so I leaned it in a safe place above the waterline. By the time of autumn 1:00 2014, an unknown trail-user ha re-replaced the poem; the window frame functioning again as base and frame for a collection of tires, containers, bottles, pieces of wood, and “The Great Canadian.”

[ it ] offers a statement subject to its own ruination: “I will not ruin the environment.” The poem degrades over time: in written form, exposed to external conditions, as voiced utterance seeking and losing meaning and context, and as auditory experience, internalized or heard, temporary. a rawlings’ release of “The Great Canadian” for rout/e, the involvement of an unknown caretaker of the poem and trail, and the development and production of a chapbook with Michael Flatt & Low Frequency Press, charts extended, intriguing, and unforeseen collaborations. The chapbook combines an assortment of rawlings’ page-based variants on her initial text (forthcoming in her manuscript-in-progress echolology) with sited visuals of “The Great Canadian.” [ Here ], “The Great Canadian” reforms as a transforming eyed-object predicated upon an unknown series of linguistic relationships and soundings (echolology). The chapbook is archival, the poem is vanishing from the site of the trail, echolology is emergent.

You really need to get a copy of this. In many ways, it has to be seen to be believed.

Ottawa ON: The Sourdough Collaborations: poems and discussion by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie (Phafours, 2015) contain exactly what the title describes: a conversation between two Ottawa poets on their collaboration as it is happening, using the poems as examples of what they are working on together. I saw an earlier version not that long ago appear in filling Station magazine and was intrigued, but there is something of the conversation as a whole that is both really interesting, and almost distracting: there is something about the poems that I would like to see on their own, as well, without the conversation about them wrapped around my experience of reading. As they write, “How can we explore recipes for making new?”

2. likewise      (Pirie)

this call should be transferred.

not counting. not counting. knot.

if someone is chewing loudly,

eat them to hide the noise.

almost the same as perfume;

how a basket of peaches muffles a room.

watch out for too many keys;

also, for old Portuguese proverbs.

lens caps are accepted in the forest.

silicon earth is a better terrazzo.

anyhow it’s much worse to live in fear.

I know an awe fantasy. one is right here,

training time. mares learning harness are small-eared.

flying bats are high fashion designers.

so, what are the differences between a cat’s coats?

oh, all that devour our mind’s nimble legs.

The conversation begins around a poem that Pirie composed, and furthers into how she begins by ‘translating’ the poem through various means, to compose a new piece. From that point on, Prevost takes Pirie’s response, and works his own variation on ‘translation,’ which leads Pirie to respond to Roland’s response, and so on (including a collaborative translation), until fourteen poems in total are created. They run the poem through online translations, working small edits as they go. Over the past decade or more, both Ottawa poets Pirie and Prevost have been engaged in conversations and writing-as-study on poetic language, structure and possibility, so to see them in conversation with each other on collaboration seems a logical step in their ongoing processes.

Prevost on the process of making poem 9: After many wild permutations, it seemed appropriate to imitate a less wild poem, while at the same time, keeping to the subversive premises of our play.

Over the longer view of the series, there’s a sound shift across poems. As you’ll see scope becomes scape. It later became nodding onion as we go across slant rhyme and slant meaning. It tantalizes in the attempt to ‘signify’ something grander, but it’s just play on the previous text, with more like the spirit of a telescope haunting the piece like a ghost. If you peg down a single thought and wrap everything around it, an odd kind of focus ensues. For ironic fun, the pegged idea here is the fog of distance.

There was a pause of a few months. How to find the rhythm again? Pirie ran Langues Imaginaires thru Dutch then did a naïve homophonic translation to English. A story was mixed in (of rigidity vs blue ocean, blue ocean) because story is more memorable than randomness.

Part of what intrigues about this publication is in seeing the nuts and bolts of how the two of them worked the collaboration, and seeing how, through the very nature of producing the publication the way that they have, the process of this particular collaboration is more important to either of them than the finished product. I mean, the results of their work is almost pushed aside, not allowed to be experienced on its own terms. It does make me curious to see if this is simply one of what might be a series of collaborations they end up working on together over the next few months or years. As fascinating and engaging as seeing their process is, I want to be able to read the result without having to know everything about how they got there; at least, not until later.

Windsor Review: Best Writers Under 35, ed. Jenny Sampirisi

A Sparkle-Scale Sunrise

A sparkle

so tiny

and in its brilliance

so brave

took

what there is

left

of light

and threw it

high

paying

no mind

there wasn’t

a sky

that could hold it

here (Souvankham Thammavongsa)

Guest-edited by Toronto writer Jenny Sampirisi, the spring 2013 issue of The Windsor Review (Vol. 46, No. 1), is a collection of twenty-one Canadian writers of poetry and fiction under the age of thirty-five. I’m always curious to see compilations of “new” and/or “emerging” writing and writers, simply to get a glimpse of what authors might be producing the next wave of stellar writing. Editor Sampirisi spends a good part of her introduction explaining that the caveats of “emerging” and “best” were ones pitched to her (as opposed to being pitched by her), and her discomfort at either idea as being anything more than particularly arbitrary. As she writes in her introduction:

            But I was asked and I was excited to root around in the submissions, to think about each work on its own first, then in context of the issue. I’ll tell you why I chose the pieces that I did: they made me giddy. They had a turn of phrase that required me to take a break to keep listening to it in my head. They contain images and ideas that followed me through my day, long after I’d gone onto other tasks. I can’t shake a.rawlings’ acute vignettes that are both seeing and seen; Aisha Sasha John’s vivid and evolving repetitions; Spencer Gordon’s piercing moments of self-reflection; Claire Lacey’s carnivorous bird and textual overlays. I can go on. Each piece in this issue kept me thinking. Each of them brought me joy. The writers I’ve chosen to highlight here are brave. They take risks in their work. They have distinct voices. And they are young. Let’s not forget that this issue is dedicated to the best writers UNDER 35.

[...] The word “emerging” also means “to come into view”. I like that better than the aforementioned connotations. All the writers in these pages ARE coming into view. Professionally, many of them have published a book or two, others have done performance work, shown in galleries, published nationally and internationally. You may not have heard of them before, but you will. These are the “lifers”. They’ll be here when they’re 40/50/60, though they may have to check a different box on the grant app.

Having edited an anthology or two of “new writing” myself over the years, I’m curious to see, given Sampirisi’s assertion, just how many of these writers really are still active after a decade or three more has passed; curious to see what she thinks in hindsight of her choices. Like any selection of this sort, you can only hope, as an editor, for the best for those writers you want to see more from. One can easily think of what most if not all of the poets in Al Purdy’s classic anthology Storm Warning: The New Canadian Poets (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), but very few of those who appeared in the follow-up, Storm Warning 2: The New Canadian Poets (McClelland and Stewart, 1976). Sampirisi’s list is impressive, and the issue includes work by Cris Costa (Toronto), Andrew Faulkner (Toronto), Ryan Quinn Flanagan (Elliot Lake ON), Spencer Gordon (Toronto), kate hargreaves (Windsor ON), Ray Hsu (Vancouver), Aisha Sasha John (Toronto), Claire Lacey (Calgary), Mat Laporte (Toronto), Andrew MacDonald (Toronto), Andrew McEwan (Toronto), Jacob McArthur Mooney (Toronto), Leigh Nash (Toronto), a. rawlings (Iceland), Nikki Reimer (Calgary), Rebecca Rosenblum (Toronto), Brandy Ryan (Toronto), Gillian Sze (Montreal), Souvankham Thammavongsa (Toronto), Aaron Tucker (Toronto) and Lindsay M. Williams (Galiano Island BC). While I understand part of the reasoning behind such a Toronto-focus (the geography of the editor does give her a particular advantage to knowing who the younger Toronto writers might be), it does make the issue seem a bit Toronto-heavy; might this have simply been a lack of submissions from other corners of Canada? Apart from two writers in Calgary, there aren’t any writers at all from the remainder of the prairies, and but two further emerging from anywhere west. And no one from the east coast made the list? There are certainly names I would add to a list of the thirty-five and under set, including Ottawa poets Cameron Anstee, Marilyn Irwin, JM Francheteau, Brecken Hancock and even Christine McNair, as well as, I’m sure, dozens of others who could have made such a list. I look forward to seeing where many of these writers might end up.

knock! knock!

and there is a certain sadness he knows now

when he answers the door and there’s no one there

especially not a woman with hair stabbing the wind like keystrokes (Aaron Tucker)

Editor Sampirisi has done an interesting job putting together an issue of some fantastic writing. Some of the highlights of the issue include the precise poems of Souvankham Thammavongsa, the expressive play of Claire Lacey’s work, bold and confident poems by Aisha Sasha John, the poem-fragments of Aaron Tucker, Mat Laporte’s relentless prose, and, really, just about everything a.rawlings has been producing over the past few years (her work is absolutely incredible; I’ve been awaiting a second trade collection for some time now).

VESSAR

I sit down and bow. I close my eyes as I breathe. In my mind, I see one woman in the place where I most picture one woman. She looks ready to leave at any moment. In my mind, one woman leaves. I follow her through many places we have been together. (a.rawlings)

Another highlight of the issue includes the six poems by Jacob McArthur Mooney; I’m intrigued by the sentences in his poems, such as “Excerpts from the Future Memoirs of Roger Ebert,” that includes the lines: “One day, I blew away into the ocean. Amoeba mated with my hair. / I ceased to exist. I anthologized myself.” There is also this poem by Ryan Quinn Flanagan, that appears to be playfully directed at American poet and editor Matthew Zapruder:

Damn You, Zapruder!

The truth

will be buried

like acorns

if there

is any.

Squirrels

will know

and chipmunks

will know

and a few shells

will turn up

(now

and then)

on the back stoop

of sliding doors

in desperate need

of sweeping.