R Kolewe, A Net of Momentary Sapphire

 

38.

Not as if starting an inventory like Perec
(notepad, pencil, stack of dishes, gloves, the cat)
(again I’m lying) but overlap or fold or

I haven’t understood a thing.
Heard what I wanted flowers I don’t know.
Word cuttings in knotted lines & gaps.

The latest from Toronto poet R Kolewe is A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023), a collection that “offers three closely related poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated.” There aren’t that many Canadian poets these days overtly working in the tradition of the long poem – Vancouver poets Stephen Collis [see my review of his latest here] and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, certainly – and Kolewe has been feeling out the boundaries of formal innovation across the long poem form for some time now, from his Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Bookhug Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as through a handful of chapbooks. There are even fewer Canadian poets working so deeply and through such lengthy works via the recombinant—although works by Grant Wilkins, Gregory Betts, Margaret Christakos [see my review of her latest here] and Sonnet L’Abbé [see my review of her recombinant project reworking Shakespeare’s sonnets here] certainly come to mind.

Across three numbered parts, three separate sequences—“PART ONE: The foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself,” “PART TWO: Like the noises alive people wear” (part of which landed previously as an above/ground press chapbook) and “PART THREE: Beginning again & again is a natural thing even when there is a series”—Kolewe extends a sequence of collage-thoughts, writing a moment, another moment and a further moment in a lengthy, continuous string of gestures. “I can’t write what I really cant. / Remember leave things out I am like bees,” he writes, in the fifth part of the one hundred and twenty numbered sections of the second sequence, “That’s the real thing is what I said I said. // Ah, but then we would be come more than / modern, & death / always so contemporary.” Two pages further, part seven writes:

Rework this as there’s no joy here
& not enough voices no long poem containing
history –

too many ways to divide all these pages & letters & elegies
archaic forms of life unchanged by notebooks or photographs
or beauty unnameable recognized –

If literary writing can be considered a kind of study, which I deeply think it is, Kolewe is one of our more thoughtful contemporary practitioners, allowing a wildly diverse series of threads to weave through his deceptively-straightforward lyric collage. As part forty-eight, held in the second cluster of the second section, reads: “Rework this as there’s no joy here / & not enough voices no long poem containing / any vision or revision of history – [.]” Through A Net of Momentary Sapphire, Kolewe examines lyric thinking, recombinant works and the long poem through the very form of the long poem, seeking to examine critically from the inside. “If there were a poem that made this / clear I would copy it here.” he writes, to open part ninety-two, “I can’t / say if that’s true but I want it to be.”