Sarah Burgoyne & Vi Khi Nao, Mechanophilia, Book 1

 

0          of two or three square miles
9          of tears striates across a river rewritten by a
7          city shape. A foolish pitch to cancel
4          my membership with loneliness.
9          Something hit our heads and tiptoed into cirrus
                              Clouds
4          while desolate rain memorized
4          imperfect geometries, letting fall
5          devastating isotopes of emotional indifference
9          in the same place. You, in pristine ditches, find
2          an absolute
3          tangle spreading apart
0          eyelids from dreams.

From Montreal-based experimental poet Sarah Burgoyne & Iowa City-based Vietnamese-born poet and multi-genre writer Vi Khi Nao comes the collaborative Mechanophilia, Book 1 (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2023), produced through Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. I’ve been an admirer of Burgoyne’s work for some time [see my review of her latest solo collection here], but hadn’t previously been aware of the work of Vi Khi Nao (although I’ve caught more than a couple of interviews she’s conducted, including this one with Sarah Burgoyne), the author of not only six poetry collections, a short story collection and a novel, but a prior collaborative work, the novella Funeral, with Daisuke Shen (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as the first of an ongoing, potentially open-ended collaboration between the two, comparable to the two volumes of the “Continuations” series [see my review of the second volume here], composed as well via email, by Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy. It is interesting to get a sense of the crossing of vast, geographic distances between these two writers, something articulated as well in a review of Nao’s prior collaboration, almost as though she is working to either chase or bridge a number of solitudes.

Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as a continuous, book-length piece across more than a hundred pages, following a numbering system of lines that accumulate, following the numerical structure of pi. A “collaborative epic,” as the press release offers, “by American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.” The numerical system is reminiscent, slightly, of those grid-poems that Canadian Modernist poet Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), a poet better known for being married to legendary prose writer Sheila Watson (1909-1998) than for his own work, spent his career focused upon. Through Burgoyne and Nao, there is the suggestion of the call and response, threads that myriad and move beyond the two distinct voices that mingle, weave and interweave, blending into each other as a separate sequence of a combined single voice. Through these two, references weave into and around each other, changing shape and texture as the poem furthers. Part of what becomes interesting through such a project is not only how such a project might progress across the further three volumes, but how the individual works of these two might adapt as well. As their “EPILOGUE” writes:

Alas, we have lost heart. Or so it seems after three thousand and two lines of poetry (pi to 3,000 decimal places). But this is merely the first of many (infinite) volumes. To write this book, we foolishly cancelled our memberships with loneliness and wrote across countries, in virtual high seas, daily, for years, spooling out line after line of ancient questions, complaints, please, declarations, each taking a line, poets’ do-si-do. While we wrote, we got to know each other for the first time. We chatted about our lives, our loves, our families, our pain, our pasts, what we were eating, cooking, planting, not planting, buying, teaching, reading, painting, who was visiting, who was publishing, and whether the heart is really located under the floorboards, as Poe suggested. (It is.) This side chat, perhaps the most precious document of all, maps an epistolary acquaintance, charts a friendship in the making, and Mechanophilia is its shadow, its dream, its under-the-floorboards heart, friendship’s supraliminality. We think this is why it gets funnier as it moves along. Like books of the Bible, Mechanophilia at its current stage comprises four books, each corresponding to a few thousand digits of pi. This project will continue until we die. This is the first book. A genesis in more ways than one.