Lea Graham, This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch

On Crows

Last Thursday, the light at the ridge above that bend in the Hudson spread like Dreamsicles in July. Crows valentined dumpsters. Earth called cadence below. Lamps floated stem-less, sturgeon moons in a month of wolf whistles & Route 9’s chemical taste. Was it Williams who said “the hardest thing to do is see”? (Or was that just my gynecologist?) As a kid, my mother caged a crow believing one day it would sing “Hello, Dolly.” She faithfully fed it pork chops under a sycamore tree. Instead, it ate her spelling bee ring. She often said: Crows love the shiny things. Beware.

There aren’t that many poets from Arkansas composing poems influenced by Canadian prairie poet Robert Kroetsch, with the notable exception of Lea Graham (who, herself,was recently shortlisted for the 2016 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry), through her new chapbook This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Ottawa ON: Apt 9 Press, 2016). The author of the poetry collection Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011) [see my review of such here] and the collaborative chapbook Metric (above/ground press, 2011) and Calendar Girls (above/ground press, 2006), Graham writes in her acknowledgements that “These poems were written in dialogue with many of Robert Kroetsch’s texts,” including Excerpts from the Real World (Oolichan Books, 1986), The Completed Field Notes (The University of Alberta Press, 2000), The Crow Journals (NeWest Press, 1980), The Hornbooks of Rita K (The University of Alberta Press, 2001), The Lovely Treachery of Words (Oxford University Press, 1989), The Sad Phoenician (Coach House Press, 1979), Too Bad (The University of Alberta Press, 2006) and What the Crow Said (General Publishing Company, 1978), as well as Andrew Suknaski’s The Ghosts Call You Poor (Macmillan of Canada, 1978) and Ken Jennings’ Maphead: The Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (Scribner Books, 2011). In an interview forthcoming at Touch the Donkey, she discusses some of her connections to prairie poetry (and poets) in Canada:

I think that being from Arkansas, I have both a good sense of humour about place, but also a sense of the underdog in me. I think that maybe that’s a sense of the west, what you are up against, a sense of the isolated or rural. I grew up partially on my grandparents working farm in Greenland, Arkansas where I had an acute feeling of how isolated I was from the rest of the world (meaning: the world of books). But also, I had these young uncles and an aunt who worked in my grandfather’s dairy barn and chicken houses—and who were always playing jokes on me and my brothers and on each other. They used to leave messages to each other written in soap on the bathroom mirrors. There was a toolbox of arrowheads, fish hooks, grinding stones and Civil War cannon balls under the sink in the bathroom. I have written of that image over and over again. The sense of the humorous and fleeting, but of the tactile and enduring, too. When I read cooley and Kroetsch, it felt like I was reading at least a part of my own family, but in the most intellectual and tricky ways. And to be geographically connective about it, my maternal grandmother was from the Dakotas and later Montana. Her mother was from Norway and had been a homesteader.  She—Dagmar Zacharias—is the only one of my great-grandparents who was from the old country—everyone else was “American.” In any case, my maternal grandmother met my grandfather when he was an itinerant worker from Northwest Arkansas during the Depression and had worked his way up to Billings, Montana where he worked part of the week in a bakery and another part in a dairy. The bakery was in a basement, but had a window onto the street where you could only see people’s legs. He picked out her legs of all the young nurses on their way to school. This family story (or maybe the way I tell it), doesn’t seem far from the Canadian narratives I’ve read.

Robert Kroetsch infamously called literature a conversation, and the epistolary poems in Graham’s This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch do read as missives directed to the late Alberta poet, composed directly from where she is to wherever it is that he is, or was, and her ten poem collection opens with a quote from Kroetsch’s Excerpts from the Real World: “Perhaps if I call you forever you’ll hear me toward the end.” Kroetsch famously wrote poems that spoke of repeatedly returning to the beginning; through composing “the end,” is Graham attempting to circumvent Kroetsch’s continuous delay, or is she simply responding in kind, composing the yang to his ying? Is she, through her title, admitting that she can actually hear him, and could the entire time? In the poem “After Irene,” written after a hurricane, she writes: “You’ve written that our job is to uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible again.” Later on in the same piece, ending:

You’ve said it yourself: we can never leave home, never escape the skiffle bands & buttermilk, the avocado seed suspended on windowsills. You with your buffalo wallow & tipi ring. So long Binghamtop dreams! Me with my Civil War cannonballs, knucklebones under the sink. Our storm’s core cages us like a story. Like a thousand sea birds, bewildered, becalmed, trapped in eye’s past.

Her poems are prose-thick with information and references, collaged narratives composed in furious, passionate bursts, each in their own way searching for ways in which to make sense of the chaos, all of which is directed beyond the immediate chaos and back into “Bob” (all of which makes me hope she comes to Ottawa next spring for the rumoured Robert Kroetsch conference, so she can speak to him further). “You sing on the other side of the Wailing Wall,” she writes, to end her poem “Excerpts from This End of the World”: “words I wish I could take back / from the Coro desert or the post-industrial town / I am doomed to & that promise / of milk, honey.” Her poems evoke much of Kroetsch’s work for their shared questioning, their passions, from friends, food, travel and lovers, and the occasional drunken revelry and crude passing remark. Throughout these poems there is a searching, a seeking, as she looks to the work of Robert Kroetsch for advice, and direction, almost as though the lyrics of Lea Graham are repeatedly asking Robert Kroetsch: Why does the heart want what it wants? As she opens the poem “On the Mystery of the Vanishing Phoenician from 110 Mill Street”: “Bob, / I am writing this from the old millstream where your Sad Phoenician vanishes. I bring it with me to sit on the ledge when I need the rush, an eyeful of swoosh. Just when I’m fixed on a bright flip-flop or stroller wheel, I realize it’s skedaddled.” Later on in the same piece, writing:

Last month it disappeared to a dance in Smuts. All the way to Wood Mountain, can you believe it? That bit from cooley, who said it had been seen with Suknaski’s ghosts. They snuck into an old Métis church with their beer breath & dialect, telling stories of Duck Lake, sex in mangers. It drug in a few days later, stone-roasted, announcing its retirement to Assiniboia. Boy oh boy, Bob, did you raise it to act like this? Even crazy mclennan swears it Skypes him late every fourth Tuesday, repeating pornographers & poets enjoy large views nine times before clicking end. He & his lady shake & drink & claim they’ll start banning its mention from the Mercury Lounge. It late-nights, inventing toponomies for Medicine Hat. Can’t shut up about the onomastics of ex-lovers (the woman from Nanaimo, et al). How do I exist with a book that goes on like this?

nathan dueck, he’ll

            I WAS RAISED INDOORS BY PARENTS ATTEMPTING TO SPARE ME from developing allergies or asthma. Mother indulged my bookish inclinations, borrowing a shelf’s worth of hymnals in noble German alongside sheaves of humble English novels. Father assigned me a related duty: I was to translate sheets of Hüag’dietsch and Enjelsch lines into Plaut’dietsch, our mother tongue, a plain-spoken parlance with the cadence, intonation, and tempo of the Canadian prairies. Such a learned chore was common in Mennonite – ooda Mennoniet – households like mine, for we were formally illiterate, in spite of our fluency with a particular Germanic vernacular, yet in the first half of the twentieth century a daughter normally assumed that responsibility. (“A NOTE ON THE TEXT”)

And so begins Calgary poet nathan dueck’s second trade poetry collection, he’ll (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2014), a wonderfully playful book of anxieties surrounding translation, culture, punctuation (such as this poem, included recently as part of the dusie “Tuesday poem” series) and language. Constructed in the collage structure of the Canadian long poem, he’ll explores the anxieties, histories and contradictions of his Mennonite self. As he writes: “By the time you read my admission it will / be posthumous. So long I have suffered sin- [.]” In many ways, dueck’s he’ll seems influenced in form by Dennis Cooley’s Bloody Jack (Turnstone Press, 1984), among others, for his playful use of language (including the pun), wild collage of lyric and characters, and array of disparate sections. In many ways, dueck is applying many of Cooley’s poetic and storytelling structures and exploratory techniques to his Mennonite past, much in the way (via far different forms) Myrna Kostash and Andrew Suknaski did in the 1970s and 80s for first generation Ukrainian Canadians. At some points in the book, dueck utilizes the visual/concrete, sometimes the staggered lyric fragment, and other times, the book reads as straight documentary. “I cannot create / a tradition.” he writes, in the poem “EULOGIUM”: “I can only invent a new testament.” There is a lot happening in he’ll, and dueck’s is a rich, wide and varied canvas. As part of the poem “PROEM” reads:

He will quietly homily, you know. Eli will.

                                                                   Peck

keys of a manual typewriter

                                            over an ad from page

656 of the 1979 Sears catalogue. Or a recipe on

page 13 of the Mennonite Treasury. Full stop –

Mechanical harmonics scale:

                                                Tabs set →

                                                                    Unclr.

No space bar.

                        Locked shift.

Appearing a full decade after the publication of his king’s(mère) (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2004), which explored aspects of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s life, beliefs and death, dueck appears to favour the book-length exploration subjects through the essay-collage of experimental and avant-garde lyric, and manages to create something entirely thrilling and unique, pushing in directions rarely taken in poetry. How many other poetry collections might include a clearing or two of the throat?

He will post quires. Testaments or testimonies.

Ice age glaciers carved Pembina Escarpment from prairies to shield, from tree to medicine line.

Lost my place staring at headstone posture of a church minus its steeple. Rows made from felled birchbark with plastic kneelers of summerfallow fertilized by formaldehyde. When Rat River runs off, pews embalm churchgoers in Sunday clothes.

Tangled keystrokes. Loosened carriages. Dirtied segments.

Dennis Cooley, abecedarium

dear muse what’s the use

pretending we know where this is

going to end or why i am your out

landish & dashing figure in your o pera

& you yourself limbs akimbo O

lympic in movement limber

emotions thick & sloppy as soup

muddy alembic to your thoughts

your modus operandi shady as a water tower

why is it i should have to be playing opus

sum tell how i came to be your one

                                                            & only

            all yours all limbs (“dear muse”)

Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Dennis Cooley’s new poetry collection, abecedarium (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2014) is an expansive play of puns and train-of-thought sound play constructed through an exploration of a variety of subjects, including the history of the alphabet, references to the works of writers such as Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering and Andrew Suknaski, prairie histories, crows and what the ear hears, and poems that simply appear to propel narratively through and against the sounds of the words themselves. Throughout abecedarium his references are rich and varied, such as the poem “a long funny book,” that opens with a reference to Vancouver writer George Bowering’s novel A Short Sad Book (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1977), which itself played off Gertrude Stein’s A Long Gay Book (1933), as Cooley writes:

I’m thinking of calling

                  this a long poem.

I’m thinking of calling this

                            a long funny book.

            Well it is.

It is when you compare it

                  to George’s. It’s not

            a comic book

& it’s not a cosmic book

it is a funny book.

George’s was not.

                                                You could tell

                                      it was.

            a short sad book.

I’m telling you George

                                                & it isn’t

            funny. Funny he sd

                                                            you shld

                              say that.

                                                                        That’s true

                                                                       that’s what

                                                                              I said.

Cooley’s poetry collections over the years have each shaped themselves around a central idea or theme, from the play and punning around the physical landscape of the prairies, hearth and home of his correction line (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown, 2008) to his play around the histories of Manitoba outlaw John Krafchenko (a book heavily influenced originally by Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) in Bloody Jack (Turnstone Press, 1984; Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), to the exploration of his mother he did with Irene (Turnstone Press, 2000), and even to the Dracula-themed vampire poems of Seeing Red (Turnstone Press, 2003). The lineage of abecedarium appears to follow a particular trajectory directly back to his correction line, as Cooley wrote out geographic tracings, as well as historical and pre-historical tracings, furthering such in the stones (Turnstone Press, 2013), a book that opens a play on the word, the image and the idea of the stone, writing “the rocks scraped by wind and snow / and by later arrivals / rivals for space,” and composing a space entirely constructed out of the semi-permanence of stone. Writing his way down to basic elements, Cooley writes through the development of language and writing, various ancient histories, books and writers he has read and admired over the years and prairie landscapes, blending them together in an abecedarium that works to explore the very idea of communication: written, spoken and archival.

    a part

of a new line

made a new

make a new

now     how does it act

up on you

    does it leave you

    breathless does it

bring you gasping

to the breathing hole

            till death doth us part

    & you you are pretty

    broken up about it be

    cause breaking up is hard

                to do    is it

    not dear reader (“home thoughts”)

Over the past three decades or more, Cooley’s poetry books have increasingly appeared to be each composed and collected as a kind of expansive collage-work in the form of a trade collection of poems, writing the subject from as many angles and perspectives as possible, allowing the final result to be a collaboration between an exhaustive poetic research and polyphonic mishmash that refuses to hold any perspective as singular, staid or solid. And yet, it would appear that this book, more than many of the books he has produced, the word play and the explorations of sound might be the forefront of his purposes. This is Cooley at smart and serious joyful play, pure and simple, bringing the weight of years of reading, listening, research and knowledge to every motion.

Jenna Butler, seldom seen road

Legend, 1942

saskatchewan in autumn

war & harvest

fields given over to

air basses

times like these

where you come from less important than

how strong your shoulders

& how willing

& your name

falling unnoticed in

the wake of the threshing crew

heritage here

in the hands

     scythe in churchyard grass    the arc

     of axe & mattock

this land’s bones

too stubborn for words

Edmonton poet Jenna Butler’s third trade poetry collection seldom seen road (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2013) is a book of disappearance, as she composes poems on ghost towns, forgotten figures and those who have been otherwise lost. The author of Aphelion (NeWest Press, 2010) and Wells (University of Alberta Press, 2012) as well as nearly a dozen shorter collections [including one with above/ground press, posted online as a free pdf], Butler’s short poems read like pencil sketches, deceptively quick but skillfully formed poems that present the essentials of what each poem requires. Her lines are quick, and require space to stretch out, and know exactly how to make the best of subtle motion. As Andy Weaver once paraphrased Eliot, these are poems that make nothing happen.

Constructed in three sections – “Inbound,” “Lepidopterists” and “The Home Place” – Butler explores less a sense of geography but a sense of grounding against the feeling of being unmoored, tracking and tracing lines that have long faded and been forgotten. It’s as though she grounds herself specifically through these lost and fading touchstones, returning to each of them a strength and purpose simply for reaching out to them.

5.

because marriage is less

about rings than

spirals     the fretworked granary floor

when the cats have been in

moonhued garden snails

plucked & dropped into

saltwater     dim reprimand of

shells against the bucket’s tin

     you take home with you

     when you go (“Seven Ways of Leaving”)

In the second section, “Lepidopterists,” Butler composes a poem or two each for various historical figures that have slipped just outside of view, including Samuel Hearne’s wife who starved to death, Mary Norton (1708-1728), one of the “Famous Five,” Nellie McClung (1873-1951), Margaret Fleming (1901-1999), Dr. Elizabeth Beckett Matheson (1866-1958) and “The Wives of Crowfoot” (1830-1890), a group of “up to ten wives” of Crowfoot, many of whom have been long forgotten. The poem “Arrowhead Blue” is for “Manitupotis’ Women” (1873), as Butler writes, “Cypress Hills / Southern Alberta floundering under the whiskey trade / Several members of the band led by Manitupotis / (Little Soldier) and his band massacred by American wolfers [.]”

Arrowhead Blue

(Boisduval, 1852)

the lupines’ bloom

stills at dusk

all day   they have thrust

silvery-purple against

the hills’ spine

their scent

tearing the air like clamour

angling her wings

she dips amongst

violent petals

     patina the depth

     of a new bruise

a perennial ache

The poems in this collection can be described as both meticulously carved and quickly sketched, and the best pieces are the ones that remain shorter, boiled down to their essence, from pieces such as “Inbound” to the sequence “Seven Ways of Leaving.” As the press release tells us, this is “a collection of sharply observed and understated poems about the land and its people,” writing the landscape from not only the ground up but from the perspective of those who have helped in the long-thankless task of building up from what was once nothing. The poem “Alchemist” is written with the sub-title “Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park, 1999,” a site long explored by poets, including Andrew Suknaski and Monty Reid. The piece holds up well against the comparison, and holds within it the entire scope of the collection, writing out loss, absence and discovery. The single-page poem opens with:

the irony is

I come into being when called

     bucking like Sisyphus this

     unloved summoning

your voice

the wind     polytonal over

one stone or another