new essays on Joanne Page/Bronwen Wallace/Sadiqa de Meijer and Anne Carson,

Curiously, I've been working these essays on poetic form lately, the second of which has now posted, "Short Talks: the Anne Carson Lectures," over at my substack (it had been a paid-only post, but I released it after a month or so; free to sign up for the free posts, at least). There's a prior essay there as well, most likely the first in what might become a series, "Field-notes: a mothertalk," a piece subtitled "on Joanne Page, Bronwen Wallace, Sadiqa de Meijer + my mother," with a further I seem to be working on Don McKay's 1975 collection Long Sault, in case such intrigues, articulating my thoughts on the accumulative long poem. I'm sure I'll post that over to the substack as well, once I complete the thing. Might there be a book in here, somewhere? Where might I head next?

MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

 

In a museum in Oslo, we found a whole room of cloud studies. The small painted clouds transferred the light of another time and country directly into our faces. Though O’Hara thought that the clouds get enough attention as it is, it seemed as though we had never properly perceived their indexical charms. (“Essay on Weather”)

I’m very pleased to see a new title by St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet, editor and publisherMC Hyland—following THE END (Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks (including one through above/ground press)—their full-length The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Chicago IL: Meekling Press, 2025). “My language possessed by adverbs of suddenness,” she writes as part of “Essay on Weather,” “of incremental change.” Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next. As Hyland writes as part of “Essay on Vocation”:

Lewis Hyde writes When we are in the spirit of the gift we love to feel the body open outward. Perhaps this is the narcotic condition produced by certain of the windowless rooms. The body blooms into one set of relationships, while at the same time the person is fixed by larger systems into a position of contingency and debt. To step away, as I stepped unwillingly away from my old love, is both heartbreak and survival.

four recent (short) essays: Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross + Christine McNair,

As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.

essays in the face of uncertainties

One of the final poems in CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (2009) reads:

Frank is a

young boy

asleep in

ancient

Tibet

what you

thought was

your life is

really his

dream

he may

wake at any

moment

There was something in Neil Gaiman’s expansive The Sandman that spoke in similar directions: the city, and the dream of the city. What might happen to us if our city wakes? Anne Carson once wrote an entire essay on sleep, presented to The League of Canadian Poets as a lecture during their 2004 Annual General Meeting, held that year at a hotel in downtown Montreal. “This lecture will last fifty-eight minutes,” she told us, according to my notes from the time. There were dozens of poets from across Canada around large, circular tables in a Montreal hotel’s banquet hall, held close as Anne Carson spoke to us on sleep. Would to have remained awake through the entire lecture have been compliment or insult? To have drifted away? Later collected in her Decreation (2005) as “EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE (A Praise of Sleep),” Carson wrote:

The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can recall, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping.

Carson suggests that rooms, that houses, might be able to sleep. Her title also suggests that you can always leave the way you came in. Remember that.

Gaiman’s lead character in The Sandman is Morpheus, Dream-Lord of the Endless, so it would be an understatement to say that sleep is an important element of the series. Dreams might be a different reality than the waking world, but that doesn’t make them less real. One of the most striking moments appears early on in the series, as those in the waking world, asleep due to the ‘sleeping sickness,’ are freed from their bonds. Some had been asleep for days, or even weeks, and others, for decades. They were asleep, and as suddenly, they were not. Awake at the flick of a switch, as they say. “And then she woke up.”

It begins to feel as though we’ve been in the house long enough that individual days no longer exist. The edges of each morning shimmers, as each evening falls in on itself. The children have always been. We have always been. We have always been here.

Days alternate snow squalls and sun, each one overtaking the other.

Newly-announced guidelines by the City of Ottawa recommend that, while myself and the girls might be able to go out for walks, Christine is considered high risk, and can’t even do that. I suggest she walk a marathon’s worth in our backyard, or inside our bedroom. She cares not for either suggestion. We remain in the house, even as April begins to shift melted snow into soft ground, the boundaries of grass and of lawn and of yard.

After lunch, Christine heads to the bedroom for a conference call, and our young ladies are packed with boots and coats and set loose in the backyard. Once outside, coats are abandoned, and Rose returns repeatedly to fill a container with water, to wash the caked dirt off their plastic water-table. She climbs their metal play-structure, surveying the yard. Aoife, too small to climb, hangs from the bars. I retreat to my desk and return to Julie Carr’s Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines (2010), a book I found quite remarkable when I first opened it, and still do: “To write in order to leave, for good, the day [.]” If we can leave today, somehow, might a new day begin?

I remember slipping Carson an envelope of poetry chapbooks on the day of the lecture: did I dream that as well?

essays in the face of uncertainties

Ongoing notes: early October, 2019: du Plessis + Waldrop

Don’t forget the ottawa small press fair turns twenty-five years old next month! You should totally come out for that. What else is happening? I'm at IFOA later this month, participating both as part of a small press fair and on a panel on small press, which is pretty cool. I had a book or two out this year (here and here), don’t forget. I mean: you knew all of this already, right? And did you see that 2020 subscriptions to above/ground press’ TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR OF PRODUCTION are now available?

Wolfville NS/Montreal QC: I’m extremely impressed with Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis’ chapbook unfurl: Four Essays (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2019), an assemblage of some of the sharpest and engaging critical work I’ve read in some time. Her language and detail are swift, electric and utterly delightful, and some of the sharpest, smartest prose I’ve seen. As the small collection opens:

Unfurl, for me, is the shape of a leaf managing itself into growth. It’s the gesture of a front uncurling itself, standing upright, broad-shouldered and confident. It’s a leaf from a book, a page inscribing poetry that is organic and energetic and lends itself to my mind.

            Un-furl is a negation with a generative definition. The word’s semantic growth is so strong that its prefix denoting absence is satiated, incorporated, and reinvigorated into verdure.

Unfurl is a collection of four review essays, each on a different recent poetry title by a Canadian writer—Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and an overview of a couple of titles by Anne Carson, a short essay that begins:

Anne Carson never completes a book. Currently, I am surrounded by her books. Plainwater is on my lap. Red Doc> lies open beside me and Decreation peeks out from underneath it. It crosses my mind that I need an extra perpendicular desk to lay out Eros the Bittersweet, my printout of “The Gender of Sound,” the multiple inserts of Float. And yet, Anne Carson never completes a book.

Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting

the same page.

As she writes, again, in her opening pages: “I am attuned to heed work on language, ars poetics, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetics. I seek out female embodiment of intelligence through sensuality, racial integration into geographies of mind and space. Yet each essay also stands alone. I am not flattening these poets through similarity. Rather, it’s a curious, beauteous phenomenon to see the reading of four poets’ work channeled so clearly through a mind, a set of concerns, an ecstatic moment of being animated to write. There is endless strength in considering how poems go together, enter into dialogue with one another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one another as they draw on an archive of an individual’s reading practice become writing. My reading mind à my writing mind, unfurl.” I can only hope that these essays are a teaser for an eventual full-length collection.

Minneapolis MN: New from American poet Rosmarie Waldrop comes the stunning chapbook Rehearsing the Symptoms (Minneapolis MN: Rain Taxi, 2019), a short assemblage of poems – “Wanting,” “Thinking,” “Doubting,” “Knowing,” “Doing,” “Coupling,” “Escaping Analogy,” “Meaning,” “Translating,” “Loving Words” and “Aging” – that sit at the heart of what Waldrop’s work has been doing for more than five decades: utilizing the poem as a space for sharp thinking on being, writing and literature. Given the amount of work she has published over the past fifty or so years (something evidenced through Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s recent Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin that Wave Books produced earlier this year [see my review of such here]), I find it stunning just how breathtaking and relevant her work continues to be, writing evocatively around specifics and abstracts, language and being, and the impossibly concrete, as in this excerpt of the poem “Loving Words”:

I’ve filled my house with many different things. As if to create an ecology to encourage diversity of experience. The way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species are said also to have a greater number of languages.

Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of page and perspective cavalière. Turned my back on the window in favor of definitive articles on perception. Of introversion and subcutaneous shivers.