Alison Calder, Synaptic

 

CONNECTOMICS

The idea is
to render the brain
transparent enough to read through,
trickles of water washing away thought.

Deletions, insertions, translocations, inversions,
proofreaders’ symbols carve a straight line
to the minotaur. 

In the light of the laboratory,
thought’s skein unravels,
bumpy road smoothed. 

Lucent, pellucid, the brain wavers
like the glass in a display case,
minimum interference between eye and page. 

Like reading through a jellyfish.
The text, however, remains opaque.

Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Alison Calder’s third full-length poetry collection, after Wolf Tree (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2009) and Tiger Park (Coteau Books, 2014), is Synaptic (Regina SK: University of Regina Press, 2022), a curious assemblage of narrative theses whittled and shaped through the lyric. Comprised of two sections of shorter poems (only one piece throughout is longer than a single page, and not by much, while a further poem sits in three short sections)—“Connectomics” and “Other Fires”—it is the longer, opening section that shapes the core of the collection. Synaptic is a collection of poems through which she (according to the back cover blurb) “ruminates on the inner workings of the brain, language, and the state of human curiosity in the age of information,” although the descriptor seems more specific to the first section than the book as a whole. Through the framework of the lyric narrative, Calder works a sequence of studies, and there are elements of Calder’s approach that echo the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of Legris’ latest here], through their shared observation and unfolding of a particular question, idea or thought. “A road, a network, consciousness / is a computer,” Calder writes, to open the poem “SCIENCE,” “a map. / It’s a vehicle on a road, it’s not the road. / It’s a stream. / A neuron’s like a tree. Consciousness / is a load the vehicle’s hauling.” Through the poems of the first section, Calder explores brain function, from the language of genomes and synapses to anti-depressants. “A synapse is two friends talking on the phone.” she writes, to close the same poem, “The skull’s a box of books you move / from house to house to house.” Through the thirty-two poems of the first section, she seeks to articulate a map of her findings on brain activity, writing further points along a lengthy progression of ongoing study, processing data on the very idea of processing data. “Beneath the squares,” she writes, to close the poem “PYCORTEX,” “the seams are full / of hidden fabric. If you ripped apart / the sutures, laid the fragments side by side, / you could assemble the resemblance / of a blanket, see where it might hold a body. / Pulled back to rags, it won’t keep anybody warm.”

Comparatively, the second section (twenty-six poems) is constructed as an assemblage of more self-contained studies on a variety of subjects, including the weather, marriage, the 1970s, turning fifty, eating lobster, various holes in the ground (this does come up more than once), selkies, arguments on form and two poems for Saskatchewan-born American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004), an artist covered recently, and in very different ways, through American poet and editor Lawrence Giffin’s Untitled, 2004 (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Regina poet, fiction writer and critic Michael Trussler’s Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It makes me wonder: is there a resurgence happening of Martin’s work that I should be aware of (and have otherwise missed)? Calder’s paired poems on Martin open the second section, and both pieces share the title “ARGUMENT WITH AGNES MARTIN.” The first poem is subtitled “(Siberia/Saskatoon),” and the second, “(Taos),” both of which offer a perspective upon Martin’s work through the lens of prairie geography. “What you’re facing is where you’re from.” the second poem ends. Or, as the first poem offers, in its final three lines: “Similarity, difference, the same shapes punched out over and over. / Scrape away white: pink, green, cream, thin blue / of powdered milk. The minimal aesthetic. Plain.” At the end of the collection, Calder offers a note on Martin and her work, writing that “Her best-known works are large, luminous, and sometimes almost colourless canvasses marked by lines and grids.” One could easily see how such patterns could line up with elements of prairie geography and landscape, especially elements of Martin’s home-province of Saskatchewan.

There is something interesting in the way Calder looks at Martin’s work through the lens of a prairie landscape that is reminiscent of an earlier poem of hers, “SEXING THE PRAIRIE; or, Why I Am/Not a Prairie Poet,” a piece that originally appeared in Open Letter, and later, in Calder’s first collection; a poem that responded directly, and at length, to Robert Kroetsch, situating her own thinking and writing in relation (and opposition) to elements of his. There is something of Calder’s response that seems a way of her placing and articulating her own thoughts, her own mapping, by seeking out and responding to an already-established reference point. In that earlier poem, she writes how she isn’t a prairie poet by responding directly to Kroetsch, subsequently situating herself in the prairie landscape through responding to the work of Agnes Martin. Through her lyric, she seeks a signpost, and writes her way around it. Or, as she writes to open the poem “AT 50,” offering (along with what could be seen as a sly reference to an earlier collection by Sharon Thesen): “At 50, my body says fuck it, / I’m not following rules anymore. / One foot on the dock, one foot in a canoe, / a tipping point, two halves of a pill capsule broken open. / This is it: the beginning of the long dash.”