Arleen Paré, Time Out of Time

 

in the Canadian Rockies bears speak
neither English nor French nor Kutenai
nor Arabic  nor will they stay
inside their considerable mountain-side squares

to sight a grizzly
at the far end of a trail
is both bespoke
lucky   and not

the screed granite walls
the brief sunlight there
casting
overlong shadows

language then
is of little assistance
you are forced
to fall back on unfortified faith

thank you   mouthing thank you
and please
addressing the universe
mouthing no thank you too

the common grizzly
can cover vast distances
faster than the word
fear (“Etel Adnan 29”)

I was curious to see Victoria, British Columbia poet Arleen Paré’s latest collection, Time Out of Time (Qualicum Beach BC: Dagger Editions / Caitlin Press, 2022), a collection that takes as its immediate prompt of a particular work by the late Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021). As Paré writes as part of a “Note from the Author” to open the collection: “In April, my poet friend Maureen Hynes suggested I read Time by Etel Adnan. It was love at first page. The poems in Time are spare and exquisitely structured. And then I discovered the remarkable Etel Adnan herself! […] In 2020, Time won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Fully smitten, I have employed the poetics in Time to shape this tribute collection.” (The note also offers that Adnan died just as the book was going to press.)

There’s something not only ambitious but ultimately daring in declaring one’s intentions at the offset: any reader could easily move to the source material and ultimately compare the two. Some things can’t be helped, I suppose. On her part, Paré is the author of more than a half-dozen published collections (although this is the first of her titles I’ve seen not published by Brick Books), including Paper Trail (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2007), Lake of Two Mountains (London ON: Brick Books, 2014) [see my review of such here], He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press, 2015) and First (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021). And while Paré isn’t Adnan (nor is she, through this collection, aiming or claiming to be), the shift in her own work through this collection is interesting: composed from the place where her interest and Adnan’s meet, and expanding upon those possibilities of influence. “This is what a blessing is,” Paré writes, to open the poem “A Blessing,” set between poems “33” and “34,” “forty years   waking up every morning side by side / leaving the house through the front door   enduring so little   a blessing [.]”

Interestingly enough, Etel Adnan’s TIME (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], was my first introduction to Adnan’s work as well, furthering my own reading of her work with Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] before beginning to move slowly into her backlist, and echoes of influence have certainly rippled through my own writing, repeatedly, since. Which is to say, naturally, that I understand Paré’s impulse, and admire her ambition for taking on a book-length response to another book (there must be other examples, but I’m unable to think of any at the moment). Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, TIME is constructed out of six extended lyric sequences that work through threads of meditative fragments across temporal stretches well beyond the immediate composition of the poems themselves, but across the length and breath of the author’s own nine decades of experience, yet with an immediacy that focuses upon the small moment in striking ways. Paré’s forty-nine part numbered sequence, “Etel Adnan,” makes up the collection Time Out of Time, set with the occasional other poem folded between, also works across those small and large moments, offering her thoughts on Adnan’s work and of the author, moving across a layering of how she reads Adnan’s temporality against her own: “I want to follow you / into your small / verbal squares / elegant   spare / enough cut / enough cut [.]” (“Etel Adnan 2”). In certain ways, Time Out of Time takes a while to lift itself beyond initial influence—nearly the first third, in fact—although there are moments from the offset that certainly sparkle. There is something quite magical in the fifth section, where she writes: “she  a small moveable organism / bespeaking hope / even when hope is in hiding [.],” but less so in the following section, that writes: “I now know what you look like / on Google / you smile / you are seated / you speak English Arabic French and / you write in all three / you paint / small squares of colour / you are now ninety-six / I know you best / in your small squares of mentation [.]”

Pop Culture 1

Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian?... In part because she has been
“ghosted”—or made to seem invisible by culture itself.
—Terry Castle

In the last century   the twentieth   the late nineteen-nineties   everyone wanted
to be a lesbian   this may be an exaggeration   maybe not everyone   maybe not
Pope Saint Paul II or John Ashbery or Sarah Palin   but many   enough   lesbians
being the media darlings of that period of time   TV   magazines   photomontages
the lesbian at last   at long long last   becoming visible   transmuting the zeitgeist
a time out of time   refreshingly free of sham
if you can’t bring back the past
                                                in time you can
                                                                        bring forth the future.

From what I’ve seen of Paré’s previous work, her impulse is less the disjointed fragment than the narrative through-line, so in comparison, Adnan’s work offers a compactness and the suggestion of an otherwise-overt connective tissue between (although I don’t know if my comprehension of Paré’s writing is slanted through only being aware of her titles published through Brick). Moving through an exploration of the structure of Adnan’s lyric, Paré’s lines engaged with a particular level of sparseness, and the possibility of writing a narrative line across individual points that begin to accumulate, instead of a more overt narrative through-line. Time Out of Time writes out an examination of time, and of her own time, including climate, mass extinction and the forty years she’s spent with her wife, weaving elements in and around each other, both attentive and attuned, and simultaneously open-hearted and reserved. As she writes to open “Etel Adnan 22”: “you say on page 82 that the heart / sets up its own heart equations / I say you are nowhere in sight // concerning time / no one understands / its substance [.]” This really is a fascinating project, and interesting to see Paré work so deliberately and overtly beyond the boundaries of her poetics-to-date. It brings an introduction of a particular kind of abstract to her work as well, rippling across each page. “how would a rose be known,” she offers, as part of “Etel Adnan 33,” “without those four letters to frame it [.]” The real measure for this particular kind of project, in many ways, will be to see how Paré’s work moves forward from this point. I’m looking forward to it.

Arleen Paré, Lake of Two Mountains

SUMMER

God and molecules, nuclei and neutrinos:

you’re told certain uncertain things.

Told this is your mother,

whose coffined face you don’t know,

whose dress is a dress she’d never have owned.

If you could, you’d live below theory, subatomic

notions floating unseen. Helixed webs,

beyond life’s unparseable range.

You’d believe in spiders, though they too

occupy their own theoried world.

On ceilings, unfalling, they attach, reattach,

rappelling. Their silks

unconcerned with what gravity can do.

Your mother sat you, as a baby, in the shallows,

the lake licking your spine.

Her face then was all you needed to know.

There’s a photograph. Part of the web.

Everything beginning that moment,

untheoried, exposed.

Victoria, British Columbia writer Arleen Paré’s third book and second trade poetry collection, Lake of Two Mountains (London ON: Brick Books, 2014) is composed as a portrait of a lake. Unlike other poetry collections on lakes, such as Michael Redhill’s magnificent Lake Nora Arms (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1993) [see my piece on such here], which was composed almost as a dream-portrait of a myth of a fictional lake, Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains explores the lake as a narrative portrait, very much engaged from a highly personal perspective, writing of family outings, gatherings and a variety of relatives, such as the poems “DAD IN THE LAKE” and “OLDER AUNT,” as well as portraits from childhood, amid the explorations into some of the historical threads that run through the region. Originally named lac des Médicis by Samuel de Champlain in 1612, Lake of Two Mountains, or Lac des Deux Montagnes, sits in Western Quebec, on the south-western tip of the Island of Montreal, and is where the St Lawrence River meets the Ottawa. The geography holds such histories as Samuel de Champlain, Brébeuf and the Oka Crisis, some of which Paré works to discuss in poems such as “OKA CRISIS,” that opens:

You saw the war start on your sister’s TV:

masks and camouflage gear. Before that,

you saw nothing at all.

                        Until you knew what it meant,

what could you know? High-school history,

blue textbook, Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant.

From a distance, five miles or more,

what can be seen?

The lake, a spreading brown water

coming to rest

before it reaches St. Lawrence’s olivine rush.

Fattened hinge,

endless trade route, Old World and New.

Two mountains, seen only from the lake’s centre.

Wherever centre resides. Absent

from nautical maps, and unnamed.

Island cottages morph into mansions,

mushroom the land.

Islanders don’t return to the city when summer ends. Anymore.

When summer ends they book a cruise to Cancun.

This is a very physical collection, existing as a kind of family photo album from a summer cottage, perhaps, over anything overtly political or critical of some of the more difficult and complex histories that run rampant through the area. Honestly, one shouldn’t criticize a book for not being what it simply isn’t, but there are parts of me that wish for a book that was less one that engages from the perspective of the cottage-dweller, existing as a kind of outsider to a region that includes Oka, for example. While even bringing such up might feel entirely unfair, I can’t help but feel such, with the exception of the poem “OKA CRISIS,” writing: “No one knows how hate works. No one knows / why the Mohawk / don’t own the land.” That short example might be among the sharpest, and most pointed lines in the poem, as Paré paints a portrait of a pent-up explosion at the long end of some difficult Canadian history, much of which exists more as a description that the reader is left to interpret and consider, without the interference of narrator. The second page of the three-page piece includes:

The reservation is a settlement

plus several lots in the town. Owned

by the Feds, purchased

from centuries of history.

Sulpician priests, City Hall.

                              Unceded by Mohawks

who keep living there, who claim it,

time immemorial, claim the pines that secure the small hill,

claim their dead buried under the pines.

                                                And the fish,

and the fishing huts that stud winter ice,

raccoons and foxes, firewood chopped

from the trees, the narrow main road,

the farms and the horses, the Mohawk Gas station,

eggs, cigarettes, neon lights, warrior flags,

hand-painted signs.

Still, the collection is an intriguing series of portraits composed as a mix of the personal and the historical, moving easily between the lyric to the prose poem. Some of the most striking poems in the collection have to be the prose pieces, in which the personal “I” is reduced, and a far tighter and more focused portrait emerges, such as the seven “MONASTIC LIFE” poems that thread through the collection, the two “LAKE” poems or the five “FRÈRE GABRIEL’S LIFE” pieces. Somehow, these pieces, spread through the collection, are the poems that hold the entire book together, allowing for more personal poems interspersed throughout.

LAKE 1

The lake harbours no greed. Rain comes, the lake simply receives. Rain comes in spring, and the ice, in plates and in discs, moves east, leaving crust and a thick, ragged skirt. Grit that falls through, trail of a fox falling in. Everything is poor. Rain comes, and wind. Wind like a cousin, not always kind. Wind-scrub and wind-wash, rough play and tease. Wind drags the lake’s floor, casts up what’s past dying. Swollen boards from fish huts, rented in winter, towed onto the ice, bird wings, broken at shore, rotten fish. The lake has nothing to ask, its ear cupped. Its hearing fills with nothing but rain. Water rises. Herons shrug in rock hollows, frogs wallow deeper in mud. Floods well. Lake opens up, gleaning, a chalice brimmed to the lip.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Arleen Paré

Arleen Paré is a Victoria poet and novelist with an MFA from the University of Victoria. Originally from Montreal, she lived in Vancouver for many years, where she worked as a social worker and administrator for Vancouver Coastal Health in community mental health housing.  She has published poetry and prose in several Canadian literary journals and anthologies.  Her first book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2008. Her second novel, Leaving Now, released in 2012 by Caitlin Press, has received positive attention.  Her third book, a collection of poetry called Lake of Two Mountains, was released in April.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When copies of my first book, Paper Trail, arrived at my house in their small cardboard box, it was as though a miracle had been visited upon me.  It took my breath away.  It changed me into a writer, one with substance.  I had been a social worker and now I was a writer, a metamorphoses had occurred.  I was a changeling.   So you could say it made me believe in miracles, but that isn’t true.  Every book is like another miracle.

My first book was mixed genre, no matter what it’s called.  It was about working in bureaucracy and  I wrote it in desperation, a way of transitioning out of bureaucracy.   And – another miracle - it won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and had been short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry.   This recent book is a collection of poetry, plain and simple – no lyrical fragments, no narrative arc, no fairytale.

The difference is that I now after three books I believe in myself – a little more.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It was the reverse for me: in fact I did not come to poetry first.  At first I was interested in writing fiction; in fact, I was writing a novel.   But later, after a few months, after I joined a writing group, poetry crept up on me – more from an time management requirement than anything else.  I was working full-time and every month I had to bring some writing to the writing group; poetry was just less time-consuming.   Before I knew it, I was writing more poetry than fiction.  Finally I had to drop the fiction that I was writing fiction.  My first two books are mixed genre books, and this shifty history is likely why.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of time starting a project and the speed of inspiration and execution all vary.  Paper Trail, my first book, a mixed genre collection, or novel, depending on your point of view, was just over three years from start to publication contract; Leaving Now, a novel of mixed genre, was a ten year process, and Lake of Two Mountains, a poetry collection just released by Brick Books, took two years.

I always edit and edit and edit, so my final versions are different than the originals.  I take notes.  I fuss and fuss some more.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I have almost always started with an idea for a book.  I find it more appealing and more productive to know which subject I am focussing on, which direction I am moving in.  I have one poetry collection that will become a book, but that book is the exception.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy public readings.  If I’m working on a project an open mike reading will help focus the edits of what I might be reading; the act of reading to a public audience helps me to listen to a poem differently.  If I’m launching a book, the reading helps me to hear, and then read, the poems more acutely.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
If by theoretical concerns you mean themes, yes, I suppose I do.  I seem to get caught up in concepts, emotions such as loss, loneliness, longing, like almost everyone else.  And the big one: unconditional origin(s), which I’m told is impossible to ask, let alone answer.  But still I want an answer, or several.  Want, want, want, as Chase Twichell writes in the last line of one of her poems.  And I am guilty.   If this is not a current and perpetual question, I do not know what is.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I would only answer this in clichés, I suspect, which might be the same as saying I really don’t know.  Personally, I write for the love of it, for the pleasure it brings me; I hope it brings others pleasure, or at least some interest, maybe comfort, too.  As for the writer’s role in the larger culture: I was once a social worker, which makes it hard for me to say much about the writer’s role.  I realize a writer can press political agendas and make a difference in that way.  This has been seen in history especially in periods of serious repression.  I suppose, she can elicit emotional responses, which might be of use in the larger culture, softening it, humanizing it.  Jane Hirshfield says that “in contemporary American culture, all the arts, and particularly poetry, have as a central task the work of paying attention to whatever the mainstream culture ignores or dismisses. Now a great deal of our current mainstream culture is asking us to deaden ourselves—to close heart, eyes, mouth, to thicken skin, to stay inside a perimeter of consuming and protecting. Art’s example reminds us that it is possible to develop an awakened and courageous and indecorous soul, in the face of a world that mostly asks us to be obedient sheep”. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find it essential, generally satisfying, very useful and rarely difficult – though, to be honest, there have been moments.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Patrick Lane once said: honour your own voice; don’t compare your voice to the voices of others; believe in that voice.  I keep that close to my own comparative heart.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
In almost all of my projects, move between genres.  It’s more or less natural for me.  The hard thing is holding to one.  If you read Paper Trail or Leaving Now, you will understand – they are pretty much entirely a mix.  The appeal is the freedom, the continual surprise.  I have a hard time writing a narrative in a straight and continuous line.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I begin with oatmeal and aerobics most days.  I have almost no writing regime.  Even the word regime makes me shiver.  I worked for too many years with alarm clocks and schedules to want to impose that on my writing life.  That said, when I do have a deadline, I can work to it without even trying.  I want to keep my writing in the zone of play which it is; writing is almost the most fun I can have.  It’s a magnet; I seek it out always.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I might read.  I might walk.  I might go to a poetry reading.  Listening to poetry often primes the pump for me – just the sound of words in their best order is inspiring.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fresh mown grass.  I grew up in Dorval, a suburb of Montreal and there were plenty of small lawns in our subdivision, and when the snow finally melted, all the small lawns needed mowing.  Also, then, in the winter, which was long, the smell of snow.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Visual art for sure.  And science, biology, also astrophysics -- and always nature.  I’m a lyric poet, I suppose, despite growing up in the suburbs, and a sucker for nature.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Tim Lilburn, Melanie Siebert, Don Domanski, all the poets, eleven in all, in my two writing groups, and many of the writers in the Victoria writing community - it’s a big and friendly community and their support is pretty constant and always reassuring.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit Istanbul.  Live beside a warm lake and swim every morning.  Have an art show of my own.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, I was, as I have mentioned, a social worker.  I still identify as a social worker.  Many of my friends are social workers.  So in fact, when I wasn’t a writer, I was a social worker.  Though now I think I might have wanted to be an architect.  I would love to be a pilot.  Or a famous painter.  A painter, for sure, but especially a famous one who makes her living as a painter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Words make me write, and the feelings that want to live and breathe as words.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Curiosity by Joan Thomas, a Canadian novelist.  It is great.  And before that, The All of It by Jeanette Haien, an Irish writer.  I recently saw Philomena, which I loved, and Muscle Shoals, which was exciting.  And a film about the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, which I found useful for catching up, a little, with the wild current tide of Physics.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a poetry project which will be largely ekphrastic.  More than that, I can’t say right now, but I am working.  There are two other projects simmering on the back burner as well.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;