essays in the face of uncertainties

There have been reports on fatigue, of the two months-plus of lockdown, and the exhaustion that inevitably follows. How does one exist in a pandemic? Today I’m reading Buffalo, New York poet Noah Falck, sitting at my desk with my first cup of morning coffee to read from his latest, Exclusions (2020):

The entire world is room temperature.

Sunlight bleeds over the city,

and the mallwalkers gather

to form a sort of nervous system

or fatigue performance, we say.

I can hear Christine and Aoife in the bedroom, singing. The sun is warm and the girls spend their days in our backyard wading pool or through the sprinkler but we’re still waking up later than we should.

It is reported that Annie Glenn, widow of US Astronaut John Glenn, has died at one hundred years of age, due to Covid-19 related illness. Teju Cole, in The New York Times Magazine: “History’s first draft is almost always wrong — but we still have to try and write it.” There is only so much one can see from the inside. He states updated numbers and further updated numbers and asks, where is the grief? Everywhere, it would seem, writers and journalists are coming out of the woodwork, all writing on attempting to comprehend what, for now, might still be too impossibly large to understand. Through all of this there is still poverty, there are still food shortages, there are still factors such as floods, fires and tornadoes that refuse to stand still. There is racism, and obscene amounts of income disparity. “I keep thinking about floods,” he writes, “and how only after the waters recede do the bodies of the drowned become visible.” By the time you are reading this, what might we have seen?

Letters arrive, from Amanda Earl and Pearl Pirie, responding to mine. Pearl’s letter also includes a poem on fatigue. As she writes: “fatigue / from sustained concentration // a focus I thought I could never regain / but did [.]”

I bet if the trees were text

I’d find them and their leaf galls illegible

Pearl and her husband Brian live in rural Quebec, where they’ve built a small house on a parcel of land, so isolation takes on new meaning from where they’ve settled. Through all of this, are still their same trees, the same squirrels, the same spring growth.

Christine informs that our particular Ottawa ward is now considered a ‘hot-spot,’ second only after Rideau. Numbers don’t lie, I suppose, but increased testing might shift them as well. We do not leave the house. We wash our hands. We wash our hands.

essays in the face of uncertainties

today would have been my father's seventy-ninth birthday,

And here's a photo I discovered during one of our house-cleaning/sorting sessions, of my wee father with his maternal grandfather, Fred Campbell (1873-1963), in front of the Campbell house on Marlborough Street, Maxville (just north of the post office). I found the photograph, among numerous others I hadn't previously seen, buried in a trunk in the master bedroom closet. Apparently when his maternal aunt, Harriet (1907-1991) died, her trunk and belongings were simply moved from the nursing home (the Maxville Manor) and into the farmhouse, seemingly unopened, unsorted. There are numerous examples of this around the house, from the trunk of 1000s of family photos going back six generations of Page family I couldn't access until my mother died (from her own mother, who died a decade prior to my mother), or my father's great-aunt, Belle, her trunk sitting out in the garage from the time she died in 1978 until a couple of years ago, when I finally realized it was out there. God sakes. It provides for some curious discoveries, but also some baffling questions as to why these were simply brought into the house and abandoned?

And here's the obituary I wrote for my father in May, in case you hadn't seen.

The Man from Glengarry

                     I am the tourist. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.

                               Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

1.

He asks himself: to be from somewhere, does that mean you are also of that same place? And what is the difference? Perhaps these are the incorrect questions.

There are those of the county that consider the county a Celtic creation, but tend not to give any thought to the Mohawk, displaced from the land before the establishment of European boundaries. Dismissed by the British with no more than a word that erases their agency: “acquired.” Do you even know where they went, where they ended up? Without explanation, or further context. Instead, we speak of brawny Scottish pioneers who tamed the tress and rapids and the roughness of bush, intemperate and desolate and snow-thick. The swamps they’d cross to drain, and drain to cross.

The land is sacred, their descendants trill, without a speck of irony. I mean, what matters?

2.

During every teenhood summer, the drinking deaths involving speeding cars that met with trains or met with trees or met with other cars. The year one car flipped, four bodies linking arms from across the provincial border, returning home from a village bar out of sight but not out of reach. A year to the day later, a train struck another, as metal and adolescence lay dead on the tracks. By 11pm, most of the farm kids long in bed, buffered from such summer danger: bored teens driving roughshod, cross-stitch over blacktop, watching mailboxes, driveways, fields of sleepy Holsteins, trees and trees and forests for the trees and desperately searching for how to leave this place but unable to cross that final boundary. Car radios or cassette-decks blasting pj harvey blasting Depeche Mode or blasting what else into that combustion of county silence and oblivion, driving out or into what they could not see to escape, what they could not hope to contain.

They say its raining on Lake Michigan. In which direction is that?

3.

1881: an upside down year. The year William Henry McCarty, Jr., also known as William H. Bonney, “Billy the Kid,” was shot and killed by Pat Garrett outside Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The year the fictional Dr. John H. Watson was introduced to Sherlock Holmes, opening “A Study in Scarlet.” The same year the Canadian Pacific Railroad was incorporated, and Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull surrendered to US federal troops. Over the space of this same year, US President James Garfield was inaugurated, shot and soon died, replaced by Chester A. Arthur. The census found 4,324,810 people living in Canada, and the borders of Manitoba stretched further north, west and east, causing Ontario, of course, to complain.

This was also the year the rail line scratched to meet the earth of county, delineating a single east-west line, around which a hamlet begin to eddy, swirl. A station that begat a hamlet, then a village, draining out surrounding hamlets, some down to but a single homestead. A pool that grew enough to village but no more, they say, for the lack of an accompanying body of water. Still. From the gravity well of trestle, the promise of passenger and freight, a billow-belch of Victorian smoke enough to parallel the treeline, sky.

A linage, a path, along a delta of farmland, the layered blues of Prescott and Russell along the northern boundary. And here, just south, from this line down through two centuries of familial activity, stretch of trees and seasonal pine and pick of stone to line the fence, the underbrush.

4.

From the isolation, and a blend of Scottish, Irish and French, an Ottawa Valley lilt, or twang: the kind that adds an “h,” shifting “room” to the phonetic “rhoom,” amusing any number of listeners from beyond the borders of Ottawa Valley. Our history-rich parcel of Eastern Ontario: the transition between the Saint Lawrence Lowlands and the Canadian Shield, still known as unceded territory, traditionally that of the Algonquin First Nation.

The sound of chainsaws, rolling logs and sawdust trails. Domtar cleans away the underbrush, a managed forest signed along the mess of muddy ditch, of spring.

They say it is raining on the Ottawa River. The storm rides the river, galloping west. We see no evidence from here.

5.

My father’s annual cow that bleeds out in the shed, front end loader, chained-up legs of the carcass over cement floor, as gravity leans a line into a dark red pool. A cat carcass asleep in the haymow, pitchfork assailing it out through the window and down into muddy barnyard.

At the top of the laneway, aside the mailbox, he waits for his morning school bus, amid the redwinged blackbird’s trills. Birdsong permeates the clear spring air, the combined sweet scent of mud, dead grass and melting snow.

They say its raining on the St. Lawrence River, where boats would roam for pleasure. The occasional nighttime run for cigarettes. Along the coastline, bullet-holes adorn the outer walls. They greyscale, shadow. Much like this rain.

6.

A tether, neither anchor nor umbilical. What else to call it. Look, he says, to his trio of daughters. This geography as much a part of my body as you. He waves his hand. They roll their eyes.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Yusuf Saadi

Yusuf Saadi’s first collection is Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions 2020). He previously won the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award and the The Malahat Review‘s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry. At other times, his writing has appeared in journals/anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Vallum, Brick, Canadian Notes & Queries, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, Arc, Grain, CV2, and The Puritan. He holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria and currently lives in Montreal.

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?

My first chapbook relieved a lot of dread: I was like, well, if I die right now, at least my life wasn’t a complete waste. I consider myself incredibly fortunate with my first collection coming out – I’m fulfilling a dream, which is a privileged experience many never have. I wish the book wasn’t coming out during the corona pandemic, but what can one do.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I always intended to write prose, and I read more prose, but I somehow ended up gravitating toward poetry. My mind tends to find the minutia of language more interesting than writing characters or plot. (I also find writing characters and plot challenging; maybe that’s why I don’t find myself as drawn to it?)

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?

I’m pretty slow – I like to have a line or two to begin with and play with it in my head while I’m walking to school/work, running errands, etc. Then once I get it down on paper I keep picking away at it. This might take a couple of weeks, but usually several months.

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 only have about one collection’s worth of poems – they were all conceived of as individual pieces. I tend to like this better as it allows you to begin each new poem with a blank horizon.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Well, the last time I did a reading I was introduced as a “recluse” which was quite amusing (and maybe a tiny bit insulting). I don’t do a lot of readings as I prefer to keep my work to myself, but every once in a while I’ll randomly get an inkling I should do one or I’ll get invited to one that feels right and I’ll use it as a reason to edit existing poems.

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?

I think similar concerns as a lot of poets – what is the relationship between language, imagination, and world? Where do poems come from? I think ethical questions are important. How does the way we use language shape our relationship to the natural world and other beings? How can we language to create more harmonious ways of living?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t have too much belief in using art to simply disseminate ideas – YouTube or Reddit is more effective for that. I see poetry as often very personal – to go to a place with language that only you can go, to craft yourself into a person that can write something no other being could ever write.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I do like to share poems with friends. I had my first experience with an official editor while working on my debut collection with Nightwood. I found it helpful, but having a final deadline for the ultimate version of each poem caused me unease: I like knowing I have the opportunity to continue picking away at a poem later with fresher eyes. I’m quite sure I really annoyed/frustrated my editors (though they never told me that directly).

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Write for your best reader – assume they’re smart sensitive and don’t simply want information they could get on their own; they want a world.

10 - 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 don’t have much of a routine, but when I do write it it’s often when other people are sleeping. In the past, that’s meant that I write late at night. I’d like to try to write early mornings if possible, as that’s probably better for my health.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Other books. When stalled, it’s nice to read writing that’s bursting with energy and ideas. Rilke always feels alive (in English – I can’t read German, unfortunately). David Foster Wallace. Anne Carson. Wallace Stevens. Also writing that can be very intimate: Anne Michaels, Doyali Islam. I like to walk as well – it’s a kind of meditation for me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I don’t know what home is right now.

13 - 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’d say all of the above at different times. I like ekphrastic poems.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m not much of a philosopher, but I like to dabble. I also like to read works on poetics written by poets, especially those philosophically inclined — I like essays by Tim Lilburn and Don McKay recently. And I try to read history when I can, especially on South Asia and Bengal; it’s something I wish I knew more about.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Learn Latin and even Greek if I have the discipline. Read Proust in French. Read Bengali. Get to RCM 8 in piano. Visit Germany and Spain, especially Berlin. Develop a relationship with a place I can call home. Be in life-long love.

16 - 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 think musicians are the coolest people on Earth.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve always wanted to write since I was a kid. I never thought about it too much.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently reread The God of Small Things. Except for occasional descriptions I wasn’t a fan of (the characterization of Velutha’s “chocolate skin”), it absorbed me with its ways of seeing how power is wielded by people across political, cultural, and national spectrums, as well as the childlike curiosity and inventiveness that pervades the language. The chapters “The God of Small Things” and “Kochu Thomban” in particular are lovely – I like the story of the actors who’ve sold their souls to become cultural artifacts for tourists and then perform all night until dawn with no audience to seek clemency for selling their souls for bread.

Parasite was great.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m slowly working on some new poems. Possibly digging up my old novella on South Asian partition. And I actually have a couple of ideas for short stories I’d like to try out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;