“The summer’s almost gone / The winter’s tuning up”
Toronto ON: Poet, playwright, stage director and theatre company founder Adam Seelig was good enough to send along a copy of his Numbers: Poems (Toronto ON: allaphbed press, 2021). The structures of his poems are enormously playful, even while working through poems that investigate the numbers-to-date of Covid fatalities and the intricacies of Biblical text. At forty-four pages, this is a collection built around anxiety and inquiry, not only documenting a particular period of time but seeking to wrap one’s head around how to find comfort, even from within. He writes of the failure of multiple governments, both provincial and federal, in responding to the opening weeks of the pandemic, and of reports of the crisis from other locations. He writes of the stress of absorbing the news, and how one is supposed to contain such multitudes through such a particular crisis. I’m fascinated not only by the nature of his inquiry, but the ways in which he employs spacing, allowing both pause and breath to occupy as much space in the poem as thought, as the poem “Summarizing Numbers (2)” opens: “It becomes clear that / a / nation needs / not only laws / and social / roles but / also the ability / to cope with physical / and spiritual / challenges / to survival [.]”
Lack of testing in
airports
Lack of testing at
borders
Lack of testing at work
Lack of testing in
schools
(This is getting
predictable)
Lack of contact tracing
Lack of preparation
Lack of protective
equipment for frontliners
Lack of lessons learned
from SARS 2003
Lack of foresight from
the government of Ontario
Lack of insight from same
government
Lack of border closures
by the government of Canada
Lack of vaccine
manufacturing in Canada
Lack of timely vaccine
procurement by the government of Canada
Lack of vaccine (“To List
is to Demonstrate a Sense of Order and Control”)
Email him at onelittlegoattc@gmail.com to see about how you might be able to secure a copy
Ottawa/Toronto ON: Another poet that utilizes space in an interesting way is Ottawa poet nina jane drystek, author of the new a: of: in (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2021). The author of a handful of chapbooks [including this one I reviewed over here, earlier this year], part of the enjoyment of reading her work is in seeing the ways in which she is influenced by both sound and visual poetries, and the ways in which she explores elements of both throughout her ongoing work. drystek’s latest utilizes space as not only a visual component, including a variety of structures including mirror text and layering, but one of breath, exemplifying a series of staccato pulses, short breaths and other soundscapes, such as the opening of “a similar design,” that reads:
the telephone clock
a bar a drink
newspapers fire
engines
the streets of New York
a pathway
ladder
sky fire cigarettes
back of chair
the door
a bar
tables c o a l d u s t
drysek’s poems begin with lyric meaning as a foundation, but utilize sound and shape as their propulsion, and the effect is simultaneously lively and jarring, providing a project equally vibrant as potential adaptation into performance as it is as a printed chapbook. At the back of the collection, she speaks of how this collection originally begun as an erasure project, writing:
in 2010 i began excavating anaïs nin’s a spy in the house of love as an erasure project. in my early twenties i was fascinated by how nin expressed women’s sexuality and over the course of several readings i noticed that sabina’s desire was reflected in the objects that surrounded her. language moved her desire forward and gave it urgency through prepositions. i began to highlight these parts of the text—object nouns, objects and their adverbs. each type of preposition—i ended up with smeared pages and colour coded phrases of desire. i typed it all out and the original erasure was strict in its conceptual approach, listing each instance chronologically. that is how ii left the project—unsure how much i should intervene with the original text.
a few years later ii unearthed it from my undergraduate papers and simplified it, giving it a new structure and some play across the page. i made more authorial interventions by cutting sections. i shared it with some readers who enjoyed it. i printed it and let it live in the drawer of an old desk.
a decade after it was originally scored, i pulled the text from its drawer and retyped it again. i got an opportunity to re-experience the emotions in nin’s original text and re-remember my first engagements with it and the romantic desires of my early twenties. a beautiful, confusing and disturbing process. in re-transcribing ii brough my more recent experiences of desire and writing to the process. i applied a new view and took the text further by isolating resonances and amplifying the feverishness.
a : of : in has dissolved over time and the text in your hands now is more of disintegration than the pure erasure it once was, and in many ways, more complete.
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