Gary Barwin, IMAGINING IMAGINING: Essays on Language, Identity & Infinity

 

What about my cohabitation with books? Unlike the well-ordered collection of my grandparents, that served to reinforce, preserve and establish – though part of me longs for such a Talmudic colloquy with the traditional structures of inquiry – I wish for my own library to surprise and confound. To afford me the chance, as Dylan Thomas says, to read “indiscriminately and all the time with my eyes hanging out.” My personal library isn’t in one place. It’s pervasive. It’s scattered. It oozes. It’s environmental. It’s in most rooms in the house. On shelves. In stacks. Beside the bed. In the bathroom. In books borrowed or ones that have wandered off to friends and family. I think of it as rhizomatic. Connected in invisible yet nourishing ways. From book to book. From book to me. And from book to my now adult kids. They have some of the books, as indeed, I ended up with some of my parents’ books, as I still think about the books they had in my childhood. To paraphrase a discussion about Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of culture, the library “spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps …” (“The Archive of Theseus”)

I’m very much enjoying Hamilton poet, novelist, visual and sound poet, performer, collaborator, musician and teacher Gary Barwin’s latest, the collection of essays IMAGINING IMAGINING: Essays on Language, Identity & Infinity (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), twenty-three non-fiction pieces originally prompted, as he writes in the acknowledgements, by Wolsak & Wynn editor/publisher Noelle Allen, “who had the idea for a book of essays in the first place and whose keen editorial advice was invaluable.” As he writes further on, “Most of the essays here were written specifically for the collection, but many were adapted from work written for other occasions […].” Composed with humour and expansive thinking that punctuate the length of breadth of his other work, these essays provide a curious and foundational centre for and how he got to where he is now in his creative life; immersed equally, it would seem, in an array of genres and movements—from surrealist poems and novels to lyric narratives, visual and sound poetry, musical composition and performance, and a range of collaborations across each and every one of these forms—in an open, engaged and questioning manner. The essays here articulate the shapes of his thinking, and how one idea might, impossibly, connect to another. “Before we continue,” he writes, as part of “Wide Asleep: Night thoughts on Insomnia,” “a word about digression and association. Association seems apropos to sleep (the original Rorschach test) – borderless irrational night, ten-dimensional dream, time as an infinitely sided crystal made of pure possibility and quantum entanglement. Almost anything can relate to sleep. The endless monkey bars of darkness. The chocolate bar wrapper of night. Ten emus lined up, shaggy, ready to brush against your closed eyes.” There is such delight in the discoveries and connections that Barwin makes in these pieces, and seeing ideas and references connect in real time might perhaps be the finest element of these essays. Consider, for example, the opening of the first essay, “Broken Light: The Alefbeit and What’s Missing,” that begins:

When I was a little left-handed kid growing up in Ireland, we used fountain pens and I always smudged the letters as I wrote. I was really happy when I began going to Hebrew school and found out that Hebrew is read from right to left – the opposite of English. I could write clearly now while all the right-handed kids smudged their writing and got ink all over their hands. It was electric: this idea that language could be turned around. That it could make you look at things differently. Your inky hand. The page. Your way of being in the world.

This single paragraph, akin to a strand of DNA, somehow holds the entirety of Gary Barwin’s approach to his entire creative output. Or at least, might provide any new reader of his work a kind of introduction. To consider his poetry titles from the past few years alone can be overwhelming, showcasing a small degree of those myriad directions he moves across almost simultaneously: Barwin and Lillian Nećakov’s collaborative DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS, EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here], the most charming creatures: poems (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], a second full-length collaboration with Tom Prime, Bird Arsonist (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], a collaboration with Gregory Betts, The Fabulous Op (Ireland: Beir Bua Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] and For It Is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected POEMS, edited with an Introduction by Alessandro Porco (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2019) [see my review of such here]. I won’t even begin to discuss multiple solo and collaborative chapbooks, his musical performances (solo and collaborative), visual works, sound works, short prose or novels. How does he keep track of it all? Infinite, indeed. This is a remarkable work, and one remarkably layered, complex and polyphonic, composed with such an ease through the language, even within surreal bends, quirky leaps and outright left-field asides. Somehow, these essays introduce how the connections between seemingly-disparate works might connect, all part of the same expansive way of considering the world; how Barwin approaches and engages not only different perspectives, but multiple: he connects his lefthandedness with learning Hebrew, and connects learning Hebrew with his concurrent experiences growing up in Ireland. Through Barwin, somehow, everything connects, and there is such logic and clarity to his connections. I think of this paragraph, for example, included as part of the essay “That’ll Leave a Mark,” which looks at collaborating in creating a public art sculpture, but one that includes a perspective from years of working within the landscape of small and micro literary presses in Canada:

A couple of years ago I, along with two artist friends of mine, Tor Lukasik-Foss and Simon Frank, were chosen to create a public artwork for the City of Hamilton. The work was to address refugees, migrants, immigrants, persecution, the search for freedom and safety in new home. We designed and had ten bronze suitcases with a variety of symbols on them. One suitcase would lie open on its side with a live tree growing out of it. I’d never been involved in creating public art, let alone sculpture. The lengthy and expensive process of creating bronze sculptures was fascinating. High temperatures. Fire. Blowtorches. Chemicals. Molten metal. Here was a work that I was involved in that was really heavy. Literally. And permanent. It could last for hundreds of years ensconced beside the path in the park. Not at all like a leaflet.