"A SINGLE STREAK, PURE WHITE OF SKY" : Verse magazine blog

My poem, "A SINGLE STREAK, PURE WHITE OF SKY," from the "household items" manuscript has been posted on the Verse magazine blog. Thanks!

Kate Schapira, The Soft Place

Give the kid my notebook to quiet her.

Give it to her every year.

Give her every year

her head-top smelling

like an experiment in communal living.

In 2016 we will begin paying more

in benefits than we collect in taxes

leaking through to the secure side of

a compact between generations

prepared especially for Kate Schapira. (“The Beginnings of Generosity”)

In her fourth trade poetry collection, The Soft Place (Denver CO: Horse Less Press, 2012), Providence, Rhode Island poet Kate Schapira composes four poem/sections out of notes and fragments that accumulate into a work that feels larger than the scope of the current trade work. 

There is something about her poetry that feels larger than the mere shape of itself, akin to works such as bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes, or more contemporary works, such as the poetry of Emily Carr, and yet, without having seen any of her previous works, it becomes difficult to do anything but throw out conjecture. Just what is it she is building? 

Composed in four poem-sections—“The Beginnings of Generosity,” “Suture Sutras,” “Open Storage” and “Border Portal”—there is a meditational quality to the writing in The Soft Place, a thoughtful movement that works equally slow and quick. As she writes in the first section:

            Bottles of breast milk even with their high

            fat content getting old waiting

            colostomy bags and seeps in the sides

            of transit

            Cupping the inarticulate flesh with inadequate hands

Schapira’s is a wide canvas, and this collection feels merely a part of something ongoing, gives the appearance of writing as a daily practice, akin to bpNichol’s “poem as long as a life.” Schapira stitches, in the finest sense, a quilt composed of fragments, a structure most obvious in the third section. The travel-section, “Open Storage,” unlike the other sections, is made up of individually-titled poems (as opposed to a poem/section of accumulated fragments), each of which repeat and wrap around each other in a compelling cadence of repetition. Poems in this section include “Train Notes (Expanded),” “Ocean, Air and Sickness: Day 1,” “Safety Fact 1,” “Ocean, Air and Sickness: Day 2,” “Safety Fact 2,” and multiple “Heirloom Notes (Expanded),” among others.

Train Notes (Expanded)

“look, listen and live” (Fall asleep

with hands guarding hills and old woods

inside your sweater, softer

wood eating into harder sand)

(For lovers’ protection labels attach

themselves to precautions) “Have occupants

move away from windows and cover eyes”

“Everything your weakened, damaged or failing

heart desires” (Mouth chasing

air in your dream, body bulwark wrapping

—a soft world means a thin barrier)

“We turn heart failure into heart success”

(We move as fast as the words move)

Schapira manages to connect her work back to itself without falling into mockery, equally managing to extend the scope of the individual poems, and the collection as a whole, most of which does feel as though sketched out during travel, with shades of the epistolary. When comparing this collection to another of the press’ titles, Richard Froude’s Fabric (Horse Less Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], it gives the impression that the editors of Horse Less Press might prefer quality poetry manuscripts constructed out of long, thoughtful, meditative fragments. How do such works get constructed? I am interested in pursuing her other works, to attempt to figure out.

Heirloom Notes (Concluded)

“I want us to be like that 95-year-old oven,” you say. Big cement

lions on both sides of an overpass bridge. Flat park and muddy

river below; fog and hillside, tangle and ivy, dark twilight, cold

damp air. I wrote this down carefully. I brought it to you.

Another Christmas in (old) Glengarry

Our first married Christmas! (Which means we got together-things such as a microwave, instead of my usual socks) Christine and I drove down to the farm on Christmas Eve for our usual Christmas on MacDonald’s Grove Road, in our small corner of eastern Ontario. This is what my sister’s many children looked like [l-r: Rory (6), Duncan (4) and Emma (9)] with their hands over their faces. Later on, Emma (who had her birthday but a week or so ago) and I walked from their house [this is her, below, with her house in the background] to the homestead to help my father with a larger gift.

Emma even took a picture with me, with the old homestead (and Maxville in the distance) behind (wearing my ottawa international writers festival toque, of course):

We enjoyed our big meal in the afternoon before I headed back into Ottawa to pick my lovely daughter up from work. Once Kate was back out with us, we dove into presents (as children do). Although by that time, my terrible camera rebelled against the darkness of the house, and refused to allow most of my photographic attempts. Emma and Rory were good enough to show how good they looked in the masks we picked up for them on our honeymoon, at one of the 10,000 gift stores in the Louvre: 

On Christmas morning, we lounged for a bit on the homestead in front of Christmassy-television with my father, before heading out to the car (below) to return Kate home and pick up Lemonade, our errant cat and head into Toronto to visit Christine’s mother and brother and his fiancé. Oh, for the days when these visits weren't so brief!

merry christmas, season, holiday, xmessy, etc

Fluttertongue 5, Steven Ross Smith

My review of Steven Ross Smith's Fluttertongue 5 (Turnstone Press, 2011) is now online at Turntable + Blue Light. See his own essay on the same in the fifth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics.

José Saramago, small memories: A Memoir

One day, my father and I were on the rear balcony playing (I recall that families with few possession spent most of their time at the back of the house, mainly in the kitchen), I was sitting on the ground and he on a small wooden bench of the kind that was commonplace then and considered indispensable, especially to the women of the household, who sat there to do their sewing. Standing behind me, watching the game, was António Barata. My father was not a man to let his son beat him and so, implacably, and taking advantage of my limited skill, he scored goal after goal. Barata, as an officer in the Criminal Investigation Department, must have had plenty of training in different ways of putting psychological pressure on the detainees in his care, but clearly thought it a good idea to use that occasion to get in a little extra practice. He kept nudging me with his foot from behind and saying: “You’re losing, you’re losing.” The boy I was at the time put up for as long as he could with the father who kept winning and the neighbor who kept taunting him, but eventually, in desperation, he struck Barata on the foot (well, “struck” is too strong a word to describe a blow dealt by a mere child) and at the same time vented his frustration by using the few words that could be spoken in such circumstances without offending anyone: “Stop it!” Barely were the words out of his mouth, however, than his all-conquering father slapped him twice across the face, so hard that the blow sent him rolling across the concrete floor of the balcony. Neither father nor neighbor, both of whom were policemen and honest guardians of public order, ever understood that they had shown a lack of respect for someone who could have a lot of growing up to do before he could finally tell this sad tale. His and theirs.

Lately I’ve been reading small memories: A Memoir (trans. Margaret Jull Costa, 2009) by the late Nobel laureate José Saramago. For whatever reason, I’ve long been more attracted to the non-fiction of certain writers than to the novels they’re known for, having spent the past few months slowly working through collections of essays by Siri Hustvedt, ZadieSmith [see my review of such here], Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, and that most recent Paul Auster memoir [see my review of such here]. I’m not entirely certain why, apart from wanting to know, perhaps, a story closer to what might actually have been “true.” What does it matter?

Despite my interest in fiction, I’ve always gravitated to the non-fiction pieces in Granta first, well before any of the fiction. Another recent discovery was the non-fiction anthology mortification: writer’s stories of their public shame, ed. Robin Robertson (2003), with numerous stories by Margaret Atwoood, Michael Ondaatje, Simon Armitage, Margaret Drabble, A.L. Kennedy and Niall Griffiths, any of which would make any working writer feel less foolish and lost in their work and experiences. Perhaps it is a matter of wanting fact over style, to understand something more direct about the story being told, and he or she who might be telling it.

The late Saramago is one of those authors that Stephen Brockwell keeps recommending to me, and I haven’t read nearly as much as I should by Saramago, having only read the novel Blindness, a gift from my ex-wife somewhere in the 1990s (I have yet to see the movie version). Once opened, the book was impossible to put down. I was fortunate enough to hear Saramago read in Portugese (unfortunately, the translating-machines weren’t working) when he came through town a few years ago, thanks to the Ottawa international writers festival, and his presence was quiet, but striking.

small memories: A Memoir is exactly that, Saramago writing openly about his younger life, sketching out recollections as they come to him, in a loosely-chronological order, shifting somewhat as the story requires. There are even tales he tells that he later corrects, after receiving new information, a correction or a new realization. Just how much can anyone trust their own memory after decades? In here, we are told of his grandparents, the village of Azinhaga and Lisbon, his first romantic stirrings and simple encounters, his first encounters with literature, and witness the death of Saramago’s elder brother when the author is but a toddler. As a writer, one of the aspects of the memoir I found utterly fascinating was in the way he constructs his sentences (a slight misnomer, given that the book is translated into English), the stretched-out sentences riddled with small asides and complex twists, unending winding roads one might suspect would never end, and yet, still cohere. The tales of small memories: A Memoir are less held together with fact than with memory, even one the author himself doesn’t entirely trust, but hold together in their own way to tell the story of how he arrived to that place where he would begin to write, and evolve into the man he eventually became. Once the stories begin, you might be able to put the rest together yourself.

Laura Walker, Follow-Haswed

haswed

marked

or got

or

fer a-wei

or got

or

marked

marked with

or

Berkeley, California poet Laura Walker’s new collection, Follow-Haswed (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2012) is a conceptual work, something the author wants you to know from the offset:

Note on the text:

These are collaged poems: each poem is composed of fragments of a single entry from Volume VI of the Oxford English Dictionary, “Follow-Haswed.” The text includes etymologies, usage notes, definitions, and quotations.

Titles are the entry words. Line breaks indicate a jump within the OED text.

Through the conceptual element of the project, this is nearly a lyric fragment version of something Steve McCaffery might have imagined, composing stops and starts, halting space and breath. The poems in Follow-Haswed are condensed into a kind of shorthand. When properly done, constraint can highlight and contain the most unique spaces, and there are a number of sharp, empty spaces she has littered throughout, deliberate absences for a reader to possibly fill.

gibbous

she comes

in a wan decline

and the related

rounded

protuberant

wrasse, a fish

hump

bunch back’d

all your kindred some

is there of all

he dies

in consequence

is there

would vanish away

When Robert Creeley articulated his own brevity, he maintained a certain through-line in his poems. In Follow-Haswed, Laura Walker composes a series of individual points, nearly as dots on an incomplete map that, when seen together, point their own way towards something else. The poems here articulate a loss, an emptiness and an unexplained ruin deliberately and wonderfully not spelled out in its entirety. Somehow, by themselves, the breaks become the through-line, and the poems expand into what the reader allows.