Jennifer Spector, Hithe

 

Of how elements canopy
                    Plum rose and ginger, cashew, prestonia,
The corotú parasoled harbour and shade
                       & setchell in burrows of grazing
Batten, trumeau, gable                 leg and hand
Housed in a wind-shelled pharos

 

One bird scoring an aria as we collect our tea
          Bristles silver on the soft
Shake of tail                 aligns with moon-burned tide

                                    It is the first morning of time
                            And the morning today (“A SAIL HORSE”)

Thanks to rural Ottawa poet Chris Turnbull, I was recently introduced to the work of Jennifer Spector, an American poet from New York currently living and working in Panama, specifically through her poetry title Hithe (Connemara, Ireland: Xylem Books, 2021). There is such stretch to these lyrics, such delicate placement and rhythm across incredible distances through phrases set carefully. Her poems are composed out of lines and phrases that accumulate, not carved but placed or assembled, set carefully one on top of another. “know / the cold / how it rips your skirt / dances the grave / shuttles its many nests,” she writes, to close the three-part, four-page lyric “SAND HWYL,” “this breath / did you suspect / flush scooped / of own dark weep?” The author biography on Spector’s website writes that her work “embraces a poetics of place and dialogue with the natural world, as it alters, translates, or abstracts in retrieval.” Certainly, this self-description of her work not only connects deeply to the self-description of the publisher’s interests and aesthetics, but to Chris Turnbull’s ongoing projects as well (and I half wonder if Turnbull might emerge with a title through Xylem Books at some point). “blade with me in low / grasses,” she writes, to open the three-page poem “MIGRATIONS,” “stay quiet     the pirate / birds and saltarines deep building rough nests / spindle the trees // let us lay to ground      or / island for weeks / to roost on dry cliffs [.]” Or, as the following page begins:

   follow me    sleep near quiet water
trail our carrion at the sound       swimming
                iguanas       headed to islands will walk
        across land
    clutches of thirty
share nests along mangroves and rivers
     even the crocodiles   emerge at night, stalking
swamp brakes

There’s an enormous amount of physical and conceptual space between Spector’s phrases and lines, so clearly and deliberately set. There is a thickness of description managed without a single wasted or extraneous word, with echoes of Lorine Niedecker in tone combined with Phil Hall’s bricolage and condensed language, brought into a deeper and more refined sharpness; or imagine, if the late Nelson Ball composed sequences with longer threads, and a bit more lyric. Deeply physical in short and sharp detail, this is an absolute beauty of a collection, one deeply attuned to attending the glossary of landscape. I am delighted to go through this.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hamish Ballantyne

Hamish Ballantyne is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. He has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab (Knife/Fork/Book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Auric Press, 2022) and published his first full-length Tomorrow is a Holiday (New Star) in 2024.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first chapbook came out in early 2020 and flew under the radar. My most recent work is more deliberate, for better or for worse.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction and non-fiction before poetry—I wrote a lot of stories growing up. I also wrote non-fiction after a fashion—I used to write small books about animals, the weather, natural history that were 100% made-up. I only came to poetry in my teens, through my friends.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It takes a long time to get going, a lot of attempts circling around the same idea, sound, word. Once I crack something, develop an unexpected phrase, then I can get to cruising where a lot of writing happens very quickly. Then the editing again is a slow process, trimming things and developing threads between different poems.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I think more and more I find myself working on a book from the very beginning. I have a lot of ideas for books, execution is harder.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No I'm not, but it's getting easier. I do spend a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds out loud, it's just that I don't think I'm the best reader. I'm working on that too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yeah I think I do but I don't know if I can phrase them adequately outside of my writing. For one thing, I'm invested in the unscalability of poetry—the impossibility of extracting meanings from the full density of the text as it's written or read aloud. Poetry has an inbuilt resistance to the frictionless translatability demanded by late capital, and as such has huge potential to safeguard threatened histories, lifeways, idioms, sounds.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There's clearly a lot of anxiety in Western liberal democracies right now about the role of the writer in culture, and I think it has a lot to do with the hunch that no one reads anymore, with a liberal insistence that the crises of late capitalism are actually a result of people failing to communicate properly and we need to bridge dialogue in our polarized societies etc. I've seen a few too many thinkpieces about empathy—I'm suspicious of those.  

I don't see any sort of privileged role for writers in the larger culture, but I think literary writing is important. Documenting histories, imagining futures and alternative presents, transgressing the boundaries of language etc. I am less concerned about the role of the writer and more about the role of writing in the culture—because as worried as people are about the crumbling institutions of literature, about changing modes of reception, about shrinking readership, writing—the inscription of language—remains dynamic and participatory.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like it! I haven't been to a writing workshop or class since high school, so working with Rob Manery on my most recent book was a nice/new experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One time we were driving down a logging road and a big rig came flying around the corner and my friend went halfway off a cliff trying to avoid getting hit. His van was kind of teetering there for a minute but the trucker hopped out, got some chains, and dragged it back on the road. The trucker (Walter) thought the whole thing was pretty funny and just said "keep 'er between the ditches" before he blasted off again. Good advice. But maybe the chestnut there is that if you almost kill someone you should at least drag them out of the ditch with chains.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
The two have a very close relationship for me. Translation is generative, it allows me to play and experiment more freely, because there's material there to work with, there are some parameters. The nothing of the white page can be pretty restrictive, I get stuck with what's easy for me. So in times where I'm not writing much or I don't have much going on in my head I'll turn to translation for a while to get the wheels turning.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I try to read before work every day, to make sure that I do something on a workday that isn't just work. Then I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go so I can write on the bus or when I'm walking around. Essentially I try to absorb as much as I can, from as many sources as possible—and eventually something in the confluence of film-music-poetry-natural history-history-philosophy-novels-newspapers will congeal into a thought, and once I have about four or five thoughts that have been sitting in my notebook for a while the writing will start to take shape in my head as I walk around.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Writing that's familiar, people like Peter Culley, Philip Whalen, Hoa Nguyen, Roberto Bolaño. But also I turn to a less exacting form of reading, skimming big books I have lying around. And music, and movies: Pedro Almodovar, Lucrecia Martel, Mike Leigh. Recently I had a long day of no writing and watched a ten-minute documentary about a family in Louisiana that poaches rabbits as they get flushed out of the corn by the big agribusiness threshers. That opened the floodgates.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Creosote! Docks! Low tide!

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I think David W. McFadden is drawing a distinction between literature and life which we must strive to destroy at every instant!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writing of Michael Cavuto, Fan Wu, Tessa Bolsover, Tara Bigdeli, Cecily Nicholson, Dale Smith, Aime Cesaire, Cesar Vallejo, Fred Wah. Michael Taussig, Clarice Lispector, Gogol, Sergio Pitol.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go to the Brooks Peninsula.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would love to work on an oyster farm.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always just liked the idea of stacking a bunch of papers I wrote on.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Secret Ladder by Wilson Harris. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of poems about the speed of sound and gambling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Garin Cycholl, ) prairie d

I’m intrigued by this new collection, the first I’ve seen, by Chicago poet Garin Cycholl, a collection the title of which is structured as

           )
prairie
            d

and produced in 2024 through Buffalo publisher BlazeVOX. According to Cycholl’s author biography, “prairie)d is the last volume among his Illinois poems, which include Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. Together as ‘local epic,’ these book-length poems play with aspects of memory, myth, and place.” I’m fascinated by the suggestion of this quartet-suite of collections that collect into a single project. The multiple-book length poetry structure is something that doesn’t often occur often throughout contemporary poetry, although one could point to bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Robert Kroetsch’s “Field Notes,” Dennis Cooley’s “Love in a Dry Land” [see my review of one of such here], Erín Moure’s trilogy around the citizen [see my review of the third in this trio here], Steven Ross Smith’s fluttertongue, Bruce Whiteman’s The Invisible World Is in Decline, or Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing “from unincorporated territory” project [see my review of the fifth collection in this sequence here]. Some ideas are too big to contain, one might say, within the bounds of a single volume, and present themselves as not simply “a body of ongoing work” but a project across multiple books.

Through my own reading, I can see physical and structural elements in Cycholl’s prairie)d of that ‘prairie vernacular’ of Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley (interesting, also, that Cooley provided a blurb for the back cover) [see my review of Cooley’s latest here], but one composed across a straighter line; or even echoes of Andrew Suknaski, Sid Marty or Barry McKinnon’s classic I Wanted To Say Something (1975), unaware as I am of those American counterparts of the same period that could have provided (for as much as I’m aware) a more direct influence upon this project (or simply Cycholl’s work more broadly). There is an opening of the field to these poems, one anchored in those early prairie explorations of lyric examination across the long poem, providing a narrative fragmentation but relative straightforward earnestness. The poems exist as gestures across the expanse of white, exploring the landscape of the American Midwest. “American runs as the / creek does—a ditch / into a wide, muddy / spot just west of town,” he writes, as part of the poem “Oblivion).” Throughout, Cycholl writes on Robert Frost and Michigan’s edge, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Mississippi basin, American biologist Tyrone B. Hayes and hip waders, offering a walk through storytelling that runs into a gallop, writing descriptive lines that run endless across the horizon. “my memory / in these frogs— / the sour, milky /chemicals pas- / sing thru them / and the waters / passing thru me,” he writes, further on in the same poem, “(if every prairie is a return [.]” While one might think it is hard to see the forest for the trees, this fourth in a quartet exists as an intriguing stand-alone, clearly a love song to a landscape and geography, writing across its gains and losses, failures and potential losses to come through environmental and climate crises. “I sing to you from the exile of waters,” the poem “Zeke’s song” begins, “this city, Old Earth’s vengeance for Eden; / what this place was originally, and still is, / northern [.]” Or, as the opening stretch, titled “PRAIRIE,” that begins:

(my body)

is a

journey a couple of

strings
plucked

            from here

I is the poet of the plain;
the poet of standing waters,
of lungs gone to seed, of
ancient seepage

but as the song gets
closer to me, it
loses place

                        prairie
collapses under the eye’s
weight into a fistful of
smokestacks, a waterless
tower, five drums tagged
SIMPLE HAZARD—

 

Simina Banu, I Will Get Up Off Of

 

this monobloc but I fear I am becoming experimental with my attempts. Last night I tried to hoist myself up by gripping onto bananas taped all over the walls. They couldn’t bear the weight of something: me? Sometimes the tape would peel the paint right off the wall, revealing a horrifying yellow undercoat, and aother times the banana would just split, leaving me banana-handed but utterly seated.

The second full-length collection by Montreal poet Simina Banu, following POP (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], is I Will Get Up Off Of (Coach House Books, 2024), a book-length suite akin to a deck of cards, working through layers of depression, regression and response. As the back cover writes: “How does anyone leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate.” From the cluster of lyric explorations of her full-length debut, Banu shifts into a structure of prose lyrics that cohere into a book-length structure, the first page of which opens with a single fragment—“I will get up off of”—before the following page furthers that thought, leaving the space where the prior page, that prior phrase, had left off:

                              this monobloc but I’ve been sentenced and now I am running through a field of memes. I tread softly, and they bite at my feet, relatably, godless. The memes are my companions, and I want to tell them how I’ve felt these days, because the memes will understand. They’ve been here too. They’ve felt like this, just like this. I know because they talk about their psychotherapists and their debts and their SSRIs and their exes and their microwaves and their possums. I trip. The memes encircle me, mouths agape like baby birds, and I feed them flesh from my eyes, and I feel loved.

Composed in a sequence of prose blocks, there is something less of the prose poem to this stretch of pieces than a poetry book’s-worth of prose extensions across the lyric sentence, each broken up into blocks, each returning to that same Groundhog Day moment. “this monobloc but Goya’s dog drowned in mud.” she writes, a few pages in. “It’s true the dog gazed upward, but she was looking at mud, and guess what, the mud wasn’t looking at her. If we want to be accurate, she was looking at oil, she was oil, and everyone was plastered. Me too, over and over and over: the oil fills my stomach, and the mud fills me.” There is something compelling in how Banu rhythmically returns each lyric opening to “this monobloc,” offering book title as the presumed opening phrase of each poem, perpetually returning to the beginning, to begin again, offering a tethered and unsettlingly stressed variation on Robert Kroetsch’s structure of composing the long poem; by continually returning to the beginning, one can keep going indefinitely, after all. And yet, Banu’s seemingly-unbreakable narrative tether is entirely the crux of the problem her narrator wishes to address, reducing the complexities of depression and anxiety down to the simplest, and deceptively so, of questions, asking: How does one get up from a chair?