Otherwise, we’re fine in our wee house. The young ladies continue their online e-learning sessions, and Christine and I take turns alternating our children school-lifeguarding sessions against attempts at work in our individual corners. We await the possibility of our young ladies their vaccines. We await the possibility of, once that, slowly considering a return to the world.
Other than that, apparently we had a photo session off in the woods recently, for the sake of various things, including our seasonal holiday card [photo credit: Jenna at Four Leaf Photography]. Do we not look grand?
Edmonton AB: I am very pleased to be introduced to the work of Matthew James Weigel, through his bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted chapbook, It Was Treaty/It Was Me (Montreal QC: Vallum Chapbooks, 2020). And were you aware that he has a full-length debut forthcoming in the spring with Coach House Books? Subtitled “processes of: agreement, acquisition, and archive, with figures and their captions by the author,” It Was Treaty/It Was Me is a collage of excerpts and excisions. Predominantly a reclamation project, Weigel works through the archive, both his family’s personal to government and university archives, to attempt to articulate history from his own perspective, as both Dene and Métis. The basis of his thoughtful and careful assemblage of altered image and text: who gets to tell the story of one’s own family? As the back cover offers: “Drawing on government records, archival images and his own family history, Matthew James Weigel blends prose and poetry to look how John A. Macdonald and his government used to treaties to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. Weigel juxtaposes the machinations of the Canadian government with other versions of the story; official history bumps up against memories recorded in the body, exposing corruption and violence.” This is really a fascinating collection, and I can only hope that this thread he’s begun to pull might eventually become book-length. I am looking forward to his spring debut. As he writes:
I’d like you to see some of my family. This is Marie Fabien and James Balsillie with four of their youngest children.
When I showed this image to my dad, he got very quiet, tears in his eyes and with his hand held to his face.
This photograph is not in the possession of my family, but in the archives of the University of Alberta.
I’ve never seen the photo. Neither has my father or anyone else in my family. I found it online. The image has an item number and subject taxonomy links to “Family and personal life” and “Aboriginal Peoples.”
I assume it sits in a box on a shelf.
San Francisco CA: Elizabeth Robinson was good enough to send me a copy of her chapbook UNDER NECESSITY OF WIND (Milwaukee MI: tinder | tender, 2017), a grouping of eleven poems that appear to adhere to her ongoing exploration of poems writing “on,” including “On Healing,” “On The Impossible,” “On Molting” and “On Passage.” In a recent interview conducted by Valerie Coulton, and posted at Palabrosa, Robinson speaks to that particular structure:
For a long time, when my life was pretty disrupted and I felt that I wasn’t really engaged in a consistent writing practice (like ten years!)—I would just write these poems “on” anything that engaged my attention in a passing way. They were kind of an exercise in attention and against writer’s block. Eventually, I went back and looked at them, and they are hiding out in every corner of my computer in various files. There are at least 200. So I guess I was writing a lot more than I realized. I’ve been mining them lately—revising, ordering them into selections and chapbooks. It’s a little bit like looking backwards in time and making a portrait of who I was and what my concerns were. During that challenging decade, I was always trying to get away from my situation (or get out of it) and into something more productive and satisfying. The poems in this selection may not address that in a biographical, narrative way, but the theme is clearly there!
Robinson’s poems offer an attentive, meditative syntax of tangible objects, attentive to small gestures, language and intimacy, one that seems in tandem with the Lorine Niedecker quote included on the back cover: “simply // butterflies / are quicker / than rock [.]” Seeming very much an excerpt of a larger project or structure, Robinson’s UNDER NECESSITY OF WIND writes out the accumulative minutiae of the large canvas, including poems composed in dedication to Phillip Greenlief, Bill Bennett, Colleen Lookingbill, Beth Murray, Michael Gizzi and Selah Saterstrom (including, in some cases, poems-as-memorials). As she writes as part of the opening poem, “On Healing,” for Greenlief: “Memory is a form of syntax, a sentence pronounced on us.” Or the poem “On Faith,” that begins:
I was able to commiserate with you.
This time, I made myself a speaker. I wore my crown and
spoke as one who has a body which
can make a voice.
In the future we will reflect ourselves together as a further future
but my sympathy will have exhausted itself, and you
will see the crown lowered to your head.
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