I dream of you & a
tree
that flourishes
serpentine
a labyrinth up through
packed earth
through clay & quartz
& mica, through surfacesoil
the trunk tapers, splits
into Ys
that further divide,
forking limbs of limbs
a bird on each, flashes
of magpies
darting chickadees, a
perching predatory eagle
pelicans & storks
& herons & kingfishers & cranes
leaves & twigs,
barely visible
a tree with feathers
talon beaks
you, a hummingbird, delicate
& light-boned
in torpor, fractional
heart rate
central among the wings
of the tree
I’d
been curious to see the full-length poem that makes up the continued, ongoing
present of the lyric of
Toronto poet Aaron Tucker’s third full-length poetry
title,
Catalogue D’oiseaux (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021).
Catalogue D’oiseaux
is a single book-length poem composed in birdsong, writing, as the back cover
offers: “a year in the life of a couple separated by distance, carefully
documenting time spent together and apart. When reunited, they embark on
travels across the globe—from Toronto to Berlin, Porto to the Yukon.” “I in
Toronto amid the chills off Lake Ontario,” he writes, early on in the poem, “comforted
only by those long flights to you / when I looked out the window at the clouds
& the bent horizon / the sun rising above it & the ocean below [.]” The
intimacy and the narrative expositions are a shift from the structural concerns
of his first two, far more constraint-based, poetry titles:
Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press, 2017) and
punchlines
(Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015).
In an interview posted January 1, 2018
over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, conducted
by Ian Whistle, Tucker references composing
poems that could very much be the opening strains of this collected lyric. As he
offers: “I’m writing weird little bird-lyric poems based on some of the
travelling I have been doing. I’m not exactly sure what they are, or what they
might become, but I’ve enjoyed writing them so far.” Tucker writes on reading,
travel, musical composition, writing and long distances, allowing the flourishing
of this new relationship, this new connection, to hold as the central basis of
the poem’s strength and momentum. There is something interesting in the blend
of the intimately personal and the structural that Tucker explores in this
singular poem. It is comparable, in a certain way, to the human elements that
Canadian poet Christian Bök allowed in the text of his most recent volume,
The Xenotext Book 1 (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2015) [
see my review of such here]. The
intimacy allows the structure of Tucker’s
Catalogue D’oiseaux it’s heart,
propelling the mechanics that allow the machine to live.
you are a jackdaw on our apartment’s
windowledge
watching as I write to
you while listening to Messiaen’s piece
as performed by his wife,
Yvonne Loriod, in collaboration
imagining him composing
with her straight back in mind
her fingers spanning, migrating
between each bird
the piece is tailored to
her body so only she can play it
perfectly
& when she performs
it, it is the only music ever written
it seals the couple, the
music a bridge between two shores
There
is also an interesting tonal element that seems newly introduced to Tucker’s
lyric, as though the subject matter provides for a softer, more serious meditation,
and one I would have read as perhaps by Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell over the
work of Aaron Tucker.
As
part of an interview posted at Train : a poetry journal later that same
year, Tucker speaks of the collection, then still in manuscript form: “By
contrast, the book I’m working on now, tentatively titled Catalogue
d’oiseaux after Olivier Messiaen’s solo piano piece of the same name,
involved actually writing the poetry part and not just handing it off to my
computer co-author. But in much the same ways, I did find myself putting the
different parts together: […] it’s a long lyrical poem, stitched together by
travel, art, sex, birds, growing older and into love outside your twenties,
with all the events of two lives combining.” Later, in the same interview:
You seem to approach
poetry collections as projects. How did this process emerge?
That’s funny, yes, I
hadn’t thought about it like that. I think part of this stems from my tendency
to start with big questions and then work to answer them with some poetic
gesture. For Irresponsible Mediums, it was “How can I merge chess and
poetry in some way?” For Loss Sets (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/),
an ongoing collaborative project with Jordan Scott, Namir Ahmed and Tiffany
Cheung, Jordan actually asked “Could we translate poems into 3D printed
sculptures?” These lead to smaller questions, and it’s usually in answering
those smaller questions or problems that the actual work gets produced. But I
think working backwards from a large, semi-impossible looking question, works
best for me.
I think for Catalogue
d’oiseaux, the beginning question was “What would a love poem, at this
stage of my life, look like?” Looking back, I can see myself asking this
because I did want to write something that looked a little more what I used to
write, something lyrical, less conceptual and more emotional; I wanted to make
a pretty thing, rather than sort out some sort of intellectual concept.
