Anne Parian, monospace, translated by Emma Ramadan

Changes in the air beyond our expectations cutting bit by bit through this discovery

I don’t know anything about it

Each addition perfects the perceptible whole

Promontories placed to give rise to forms ways and overall views

allowing repetition by mass and by sequence

overall view

exchanged in an instant⁷

7. So watch as I repeat myself and never stop considering the minor details. I keep track of the rumors and each thing thought. I imagine the opposite all the time. The smallest doubt dispenses with sense and my reply.

Recently, I’ve been going through Parisian author, photographer and artist Anne Parian’s Monospace, translated by Emma Ramadan (Providence RI/Paris France: La Presse, 2015). As the back cover writes: “Monospace is a project driven by a single question: ‘How can we garden space into existence?’” Composed as a book-length lyric suite, Monospace carves, cleans, contains and draws, exploring the minutae of space, writing out the garden as the grand metaphor covering the physical act of cultivating a garden, writing, and how essential the act of remembering is to identity and being. The poem accumulates through short, nearly self-contained fragments, composed in the smallest details. Robert Kroetsch may have asked, once, “How do you grow a poet?” but Parian’s queries are more detailed, and metaphysical, tying the meditation of gardening and the construction of that space to something far deeper. As she writes: “without the support / of that which we / carelessly remember [.]”

I watch it like that lifted up mechanically like that whatever it is

a condensed image

look and see why

I might not have recognized it before

Note it for the end of July and forget it before planting Acanthus

Sea holly

Abelias

perfection corrected from now on

refined you say in new classic connections

that I try to emphasize