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.”

Brian Teare, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

Not to know, but to go on.

white underpainting

floats up through               milky as wringing

darker colors it carries       just-washed glue

                                          brushes over the sink

            as water floats paper

            before saturation    waiting is the color

            reveals its inks       of what draws nearer

                                          without touching

The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015) is Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, after The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009), Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, 2010) and Companion Grasses (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As Teare describes in the preface to the collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven is a poetry book constructed from the onset of his own illness, which prompted his discovery of the infamously reclusive American (born and raised in Canada) abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004). He writes: “When in 2009 I began writing the poems in this book, I knew nothing about Agnes Martin. Early during the onset of a chronic illness, I opened her Writings and found ‘The Untroubled Mind’ to be a comfort. But as the illness deepened I began to ‘seek her out’ when I could through research in museums, libraries, and archives. These poems set my life in relation to my long encounter with her painting, drawing, writing, and the metaphysics she argued was implicit in them.” Known for her use of lines, grids and fields of subtle colour, Teare’s poems employ an intriguing structural influence from Martin’s artwork, stretching her colour field into a series of texts stretched across the field of the page (and the book is 8 inches by 9.5 inches, in case you are wondering the size and scope of his physical field). Certainly, Teare’s use of empty space and the length and breadth of the page isn’t new, as evidenced from his Companion Grasses, but the influence of the grid structure from Agnes Martin allow for a curious exploration of how words are shaped, and even read, playing off each other in nearly-overlapping lines. In a recent interview with Christy Davids on the new collection, posted at The Conversant, he writes:

In both Sight Map (University of California 2009) and Companion Grasses (Omnidawn 2013), I was working off of my own kind of personal reading of Olson’s “Projective Verse”—I think that’s not surprising for anyone who knows my work—and in Companion Grasses that was particularly true in terms of thinking about prosody, and also thinking about poems on the page as being a scoring of an encounter with a place or a species. Because so many of those poems—all of them, really—were written on foot, were written in the field, I was really trying to use prosody and typography as a musical registration of an encounter, and combining Olson’s belief in the page as a kind of musical score with the ways in which breath and ear change in relation to whatever you’re in relation to. I was interested in the phenomenology of prosody—that it could, theoretically, capture or register relation differently between each encounter with place, with species, with a particular day or meteorology or whatever.

As well, unlike Martin’s reluctance, if not refusal, to release biographical detail, Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven directly engages his illness, as he writes to open the poem “We are not the instruments of fate nor are we the pawns of fate we are the materials of fate.”: “I leave each doctor’s appointment ashamed to be ill // the philosopher argues the verbal expression of pain // undiagnosed my body so illegible no one can read it // replaces pain without offering a description of it [.]” As part of his author biography at the Ahsahta Press website, Teare offers:

I hate that a biography like this largely leaves out the formative details: a difficult family life, the disaster of coming out in the rural South, my first love dead of AIDS, falling in love again in California, years of chronic illness, my discovery of meditation. True to my early schooling in Confessional writing, these narratives are in my books. But more importantly, my books understand autobiography to be as much intellectual as physical, as aesthetic as it is emotional. I’ve striven to fashion a poetics that can inscribe experience on all the registers on which it occurs: high to low, abstract to literal, philosophy to pornography. Similarly, I’ve striven to render the poem’s form flexible and sensitive enough to register the myriad shifts native to experience. Inspired in equal parts by Charles Olson’s essay on projective verse and my training as a letterpress and digital typesetter, I’ve recently come to believe that design is both proprioceptive and plastic, capable of carrying embodied knowledge and visual information that exceeds the semantic. The poems of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are the direct expression of this belief.

The poems in The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are structured in three untitled sections, with poems floating through direct and indirect reference and response to, and influence from, Martin’s artwork and writing, as well as his own ongoing illness. As the poem “Defeated you will stand at the door of your house and welcome the unknown.” begins: “chronic nausea / chronic non // narrative even / the public health /                                  eventually the surface gets interesting [.]” The introduction of a further abstraction into his work is quite compelling, compared to the more direct lines and lineages of Companion Grasses, and allow for a far more visual and meditative flow, expanding his repertoire to extend into a deeper use of the fragment, collision and critical intelligence. His utterly fascinating author statement on the Ahsahta Press website (I find myself quite taken with the clarity and ease of his prose) ends with:

I worked on the poems for six years. Keenly aware that Martin herself avoided autobiographical narrative in her writing and representation in her visual work, I couldn’t help but think that chronic illness seemed the perfect fusion of autobiography and formal abstraction. Pain was largely wordless, but it was also my life—a somatic texture in which illness became a chronic duration and duration (time) became texture (form). And things anyways happened. Over those six years, I got access to public health care and exhausted my treatment options without getting a diagnosis, I started seeing a Chinese medical practitioner for herbs and acupuncture (which helped), and I also started a meditation practice (which helped). But I remained ill. And I kept returning to Martin and her work, even going to museums, libraries, and archives to get “closer” to her, the way young curators and artists had once sought her out in the desert of New Mexico.

Eventually I realized I’d been looking for someone or something to help me change my life. I’d been seeking healers and teachers, some of whom did in fact help, some of whom didn’t. Eventually I ended up in the hospital (again) and realized help might not be coming, at least not in the form I’d wanted. Lying on the gurney, I asked: What’s the right attitude toward suffering? An answer came: It neither lies to you nor makes you suffer more. And more than my own suffering I heard the man in the room next to me weeping as a doctor drained his wound. When I stopped wanting a teacher, when I stopped waiting for an end to suffering, my life did change. I did in fact suffer less. When I gave up the illusion of salvation, I found a modicum of rest and some room for the experience of joy. When I stopped needing Martin to help me, I could finally look at her work in companionable awe.