Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking

 

1

Don’t think thinking without heart no such separation
within the acting body takes a step without all of it the self
propelled into doing the thing (for example, the horse) and
on the earth as well picking up the whole circuit feet first feel
the waves tidal and even outside to moon and sun it’s OK
to notate only one of those things without knowing fixed
anyway some heart sits in the arms of

Having appeared as a thread through his work, including through multiple full-length poetry titles, is Vancouver poet Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), a new volume collecting the one hundred and seventy numbered poems in this sequence-to-date for the first time. The first ten poems in the sequence, as Wah’s notes acknowledge, were “written for and published in an issue of Open Letter (5.7 [Spring 1984]) on notation,” a project originally prompted by bpNichol and Frank Davey (there are at least three Open Letter issues “on notation”). The original handful of poems might have been prompted by an idea on notation, but the poems quickly evolved into a sequence of responses, whether composed as individual pieces or short groupings of pieces, to music, visual art, theory and poetry. The first sixty-nine pieces later appeared as Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), with a subsequent thirty-five appearing as part of Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, 1992). Subsequent pieces collected in the volume originally emerged through numerous literary journals, festschrifts, anthologies and further of his trade titles, existing as a thread across the length and breadth of his work since, encompassing nearly forty years of composition. There is something fascinating about a poetry title composed across four decades, especially one that emerges out of a particular thread excised from the rest of his work. How does this one thread exist in relation to other pieces he’s worked on, across that same period? Perhaps at some point down the road, a similar volume might compile Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days,” another sequence of poems focusing equally on “response” as well as an attention to form, language and breath. To pull out and compile a single thread, what is the portrait that might emerge? As Wah writes to introduce those original pieces in Open Letter:

THE FOLLOWING ‘DRUNK’ WRITINGS ARE NOTES FOR TALK. IN THE explication of these estranged pieces lies possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty is literal and intentional. I’m wary of any attempt to make it easy. ‘language [the true practice of thought]’ Kristeva says or Jack writing yesterday with reminders all through his letter, mind stumbling over itself not recognizing stuff ‘till later,

That last part of your letter makes me remember Wittgenstein’s saying ‘don’t think, look.’ And if the ‘dogmatic order’ is only in the para-text of perception, then … the syntax of thinking in its (linguistic) periodicity is always going to elide that bump or ‘nipple’ Juan de la Cosa’s eyes included (but you’d have this already from Henry Lee and Benjamin L.).

And then the gates open to the ‘double,’ the binary. Emic. Dialogic.

In many ways, Wah’s “Music at the Heart of Thinking” is built in a manner opposite to a project such as Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s impossibly-large and ongoing “Love in a Dry Land”: where Cooley’s is a single project nearly thirty years in the making, with threads excerpted for book publication, Wah’s appears as a single, occasional and ongoing thread. His is a sequence of occasionals sprung from a shared impulse of improvisation and response; a project that adds poems as they are needed, potentially for as long as he requires them. The idea of “drunk writings” he mentions in his original introduction, is something he referred to in that first trade volume as “drunken tai chi,” the idea of a master craftsman deliberately compromised, forcing themselves to work more intuitively, and allowing the unconscious to take over. In the note at the back of the current collection, he continues that particular thread, writing that “The ‘MHTs’ became, for me, a niche for a compositional attention I wanted to explore in particular ways. I had been attracted to the prose poem through my attempts at the utanikki, the poetic journal. Within the prose poem I was interested in upsetting the tyranny of the sentence as a unit of composition. The resistance to closure and syntactic predictability implicit in contesting the sentence is a dynamic also shared with the long poem.” As his opening note to the current volume, “One makes (the) difference,” begins:

To say: “I don’t understand what this means,” is, at least, to recognize that “this” means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast.

The “Music at the Heart of Thinking” poems, a project that emerged out of Wah’s attention to improvisation and response [something we discussed as part of an interview I conducted with Wah for Jacket2], appears to be the thread of his work where he more overtly explores the possibilities of improvisation alongside ekphrastic movement, allowing the poems a looseness, and trusting them to land as they should. Set together for the first time, the ebb and flow of the series is interesting, as the poems expand and contract, reach out and retreat; from compact prose poems to sentence-stanzas, exploring both the breath-line and the poetic sentence. “The plateau of the poem,” he writes, to open “127,” “pulling a story from a fire / smouldering under foot / on a periphery of words / as things while sentenced [.]” The series also evolves from more general explorations to specific responses, whether to specific people, artworks or thinking, such as “Music at the Heart of Thinking Eighty-Something,” after Christine Stewart, that includes: “Where to go to get the word rubble now or as you say fair / producing sky weather may eventually.” Wah’s has always been a poetic simultaneously engaged with breath and quick thought, language and deep meditation on being, identity and theory, and Music at the Heart of Thinking provides an ongoing example of just how powerful a master can be, even as he allows himself the quick line, the quick sketch; allowing himself to relax, and let go.

90

On the weekend I got into anger talk about landscape and the hunger of narrative to eat answer or time but space works for me because place got to be more spiritual at least last felt now this water/genetic I suspect passions like anger suprafixed to simply dwells I mean contained as we speak of it believe me I’d like to find a new word-track for feeling but language and moment work out simply as simultaneous occurrences so I don’t think you should blame words for time-lapse tropism e.g. ethics is probably something that surrounds you like your house it’s where you live

 

Christine Stewart, Treaty 6 Deixis

In that way look in that way

In that way there where

those bones were

like that where we were there was this noise this noise was

the centre of our attention

After years of itinerant publishing through small and smaller venues, Edmonton-based poet and critic Christine Stewart’s long-awaited debut is the book-length essay-poem Treaty 6 Deixis (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018). While this might be her full-length solo debut, Stewart is also the author of a full-length collaboration with Toronto poet and editor David Dowker—Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013)—and an incomplete list of her chapbooks would include The Barscheit Horse [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang] (Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993), A Travel Narrative (Berkeley Horse, 1994), Daddy Clean Head (Vancouver, BC: Lumpe Presse, 2000), From Taxonomy (Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003), Pessoa’s July: or the months of astonishment (Vancouver, BC: Nomados Press, 2006), The Trees of Periphery (Edmonton AB: above/ground press, 2007) and The Odes (Nomados Press, 2015).

On this river – North Saskatchewan

Will and welcome as the day which when that sun shines

Makes water grow or covers others more often

Composed in fragments and short bursts, Treaty 6 Deixes is a poem that engages with the people and the place of what is now known as Alberta, and the river valley that snakes and rolls through what is now the City of Edmonton, exploring an engagement with not only the people and the place, but an agreement between peoples, one that has been regularly and repeatedly broken, battered and mangled by the Crown. As the back cover to the collection informs: “Deixis, from the ancient Greek noun for ‘reference,’ means a word or phrase – ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘now,’ ‘then’ – pointing to the time, place, or situation in which a speaker is speaking, or a writer is writing. Written beside the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River) on Treaty 6 land, which encompasses most of Central Alberta and Saskatchewan, this long poem reinstates and resounds the extent of the author’s obligations as a settler, considering the ways that language might be formally and contextually engaged to re-situate us in the world.” To open her “TREATY SIX FROM UNDER MILL CREEK BRIDGE” from the anthology Toward. Some. Air., edited by Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], Stewart writes:

In “Treaties Made in Good Faith,” Sharon Venne, Cree scholar and lawyer, rejects the Government version of Treaty Six: the Indigenous Nations of that territory never surrendered their land, their governments, their legal systems, their children, or their lives. Venne’s understanding of Treaty Six comes from her Elders, who have spoken to Venne, and who have cited the Elders who negotiated with the Commissioners at the signing of the Treaty, in 1876: “We are not selling our land. We cannot sell our land … We have a relationship with the land. The Creation placed us here on Great Turtle Island and this is our land. However, we will let you live on our land.

That is, as the Elders explain it, the only way non-Indigenous people and their communities can inhabit Indigenous land is through the Treaty agreements. Which is not to say that non-Indigenous people (Canadians) don’t belong here,rather that we are here because of agreements that bind us (inexorably) to the Indigenous Nations and to the land, and that all Canadians are required (by law) to honour those agreements as they were originally intended, to know their Treaty rights and responsibilities: “to live in peace, to share resources: some of the land, some of the wood, some of the ground so that they can live on and respect the land.” As I understand it, in territories where there are no Treaties, it is our role to understand what negotiations are in place and to ensure that sound agreements and good relations are made and upheld so that we can fulfill our historic commitments to the Indigenous Nations.

Stewart, who arrived in Edmonton in 2007 from Vancouver to join the faculty of the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta, composes a poem very much on the foundation that it is everyone’s responsibility to know and understand the treaties that make up so much of our country, and to know precisely what the settler responsibilities of those treaties actually are. In many ways, it feels as though this is the project that Stewart has been working on since she landed in Edmonton, attempting to fully and respectfully understand and engage the landscape upon which she has become a small part.

While immersed in this

Their patience has been exhausted

You are here

The enemy is ahead

Treaty 6 Deixis explores how to ethically exist in and engage with such a people and place. Where Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes turns archival settler language against itself in Dead White Men (Toronto ON: Coach House, 2017) [see my review of such here], or even the language of treaties in X (Gibson’s BC: Nightwood Editions, 2013), Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis writes more immediately of her surroundings, the space bound to and by Treaty 6. Constructed as an accumulation of short fragments with an endnote, her short, incredibly precise sketches are surrounded by an enormity of both silence and white space, pointing very deliberately with a strong finger; writing and pointing, here, here, even as her “Endnote” writes of the difficulty of this very writing:

Where is this when I say this where I am here when I am here How can I a

person of white settler descent engage in a living poetic practice that points

to this place How can I acknowledge my specific historical context and see

how that points to my obligations to these connections How to express my

connections within the context of my disconnections My love and my violence

How to honour my obligations as expressed in the spirit and intent of the

Treaty negotiatons How to understand what those obligations are How to

To further this, her afterword, “TREATY 6,” opens:

From you learn lean in toward point to side ways try to next to and only just conceive of the extent of these obligations and the connections those obligations have to this water drink to this air move through to these trees live under to that rock along your bank and to this river love

Upholding the Treaty 6 agreements is our responsibility It is work to restore the kinship systems and the balance that is necessary for all life How to account for all that is taken from this place locally globally the continued injury and displacements of people here and elsewhere How to become a good relation a good accomplice a useful conspirator to breathe with the complex communities of this place Here we are asked to learn the meaning of Treaty 6 itself as it was agreed to by the nêhiyaw Îyârhe Nakoda Dene and Saulteaux and not as it was later interpreted by the Crown am asked to understand that Treaty 6 was and is a necessary nations-to-nation negotiation That at this place here there was no surrender of land to the Crown that the treaty negotiations in 1876 were made with the understanding that land sharing and close kinship connections were possible and necessary That the nations-to-nation treaty proposed by the nations of the area with the Crown was (and still is) based on thousands of years of treaties that have existed between nations and that those human-to-human treaties are founded on the original treaties that exist between the human and the non-human or more-than-human world

Toward. Some. Air. eds. Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath

The positions articulated in this anthology are vastly different, crossing generational, geographical, and theoretical borders, and in this sense we are aiming to encourage dialogue by proximity but also to suggest a looking-outwards; not so much towards other individual poets but towards other poetics and ways of being in the world. In this spirit some of the pieces included advocate different ways of listening. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Christine Stewart emphasize the importance of listening for a politics of decolonization in the settler-colonial state of Canada; Maria Damon, speaking of her position as a critic, modestly characterizes herself as the “cheer-leader,” the “friend of poets,” the “poetry-enabler”; Sean Bonney and Stephen Collis discuss the difficulties of listening to the cacophony of voices present in a collective, and the dangers of privileging the poet-subject who imagines s/he might speak for, rather than with, the otherwise excluded subject who is wrongly perceived as “voiceless.” For many of the poets in this book, listening is a political practice that moves away from the individuating compulsions of singular authorship and towards modes of collectivity, perhaps to imagine what a collective subjectivity might mean. For all its difference, the work collected here is also testament to a widespread interest in the relation between poetry and social change, or between poetry and revolution, even as the latter may involve an assertion that poetry cannot do the same work as gathering of bodies at a protest or a riot. (Amy De’Ath, “Foreword”)

I’m quite amazed by Toward. Some. Air. (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015), a remarkable poetics anthology edited by Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath. Subtitled “Remarks on Poetics of Mad Affect | Militancy | Feminism | Demotic Rhythms | Emptying | Intervention | Reluctance | Indigeneity | Immediacy | Lyric Conceptualism | Commons | Pastoral Margins | Desire | Ambivalence | Disability | The Digital | and Other Practices,” the book collections a wide range of creative and critical works by Canadian, American and British poets and critics: Peter Jaeger, Anne Boyer, Andrea Brady, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Rita Wong, Jeff Derksen, Kaia Sand, Justin Katko, Liz Howard, Larissa Lai, Reg Johanson, Michael Davidson, Nicole Markotić, Lisa Robertson, Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Roy Miki, Caroline Bergvall, cris cheek, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Steven Ross Smith, Christine Stewart, Keston Sutherland, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith, Dionne Brand and Nicole Brossard, Nicole Brossard and Fred Wah, Jow Lindsay, Keith Tuma, Amy De’Ath, Catherine Wagner, Rachel Zolf, Peter Manson, Louis Cabri, J.R. Carpenter, Lori Emerson, David Jhave Johnston, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Strickland, Darren Wershler, Sina Queyras, Daphne Marlatt, Sean Bonney and Stephen Collis, Maria Damon, Juliana Spahr and Amy De’Ath, and CAConrad. What is truly remarkable about the collection is in how it attempts to introduce, engage and even clarify, an incredible amount of contemporary conversations on poetry practice across North America and the UK. While the book doesn’t pretend to be all-inclusive or complete in any way, it does manage to bring together a much larger range of contemporary poetic practices than I’ve seen in any other single volume in quite a long time (if at all).

Honestly I don’t really like to write about prose so much because, in a way that seems true for me about prose and not so much about poetry, the practice of prose is both theory and practice. It’s one body. I mean discourse gives poets an opportunity to write prose and I think that is a pleasure in itself but prose writers, and even ones like myself who like to call themselves fiction writers or non-fiction writers and “poet,” too, depending on the mood, I think, would rather just do it and have it contain all its marvels, including thought about itself. There’s nothing about fiction or non-fiction that can’t contain thinking about itself and extrapolating about that. It’s like dropping your pen and noticing the room and then sitting up and keeping going. It’s like getting up to make tea or shitting or something like that. Thinking about the practice and the practice itself are part of the same territory in fiction so of course when you asked me to do this I thought oh fuck but I am working on a book. (Eileen Myles, from “Reluctance”)

An important feature of the anthology is in understanding how much of the conversations explored here (some of which have been building for years), as well as a number of contributors, aren’t often collected for a book such as this, especially one that exists across more than a couple national borders. As well, many of these conversations become required reading in part for their prior absence in the larger sphere, having long existed on the fringes of literary discourse, or simply too new to have been properly explored, whether conversations concerning new media, post-colonial attitudes and Idle No More, disability poetics, archival projects and post-lyric sensibilities, and any number of further conversations involving gender, race, resistance, reconciliation, violence and attention. At three hundred and forty-eight pages, this is a hefty volume, and one that anyone could and should spend a great deal of time working to absorb. What makes Toward. Some. Air. such an important anthology is in the wide range of discourses it contains, all of which have long been existing just under the surface of literary conversation; with increasing volume and intensity, these are the conversations that will be existing in the ways in which we write, read and comprehend ourselves. If you want to know what is happening, in writing and the larger discourse, this is a place to begin. As Larissa Lai writes to open her “An Ontology and Practice for Incomplete Futures”:

If the practice is to be meaningful, it must engage language, body, history, memory, the present, the unconscious, imagination, ethics, and relation in a drive towards the future.

There are also a number of more direct conversations in the collection, including an essay on the work of the late poet Peter Culley by Lisa Robertson (“Listening in Culley’s work is an economy that, while seemingly as at ease with its demotic setting as it is with a profound literariness, subtly undercuts itself with a sonically installed irony.”), the poet and critic Dale Smith interviewing his long-time partner, co-editor and co-publisher, the poet Hoa Nguyen, Keith Tuma on the work of British poet Tom Raworth, and Christine Stewart’s ongoing exploration of Edmonton’s Mill Street Bridge, specifically “Treaty Six”:

the underbridge

The underbridge at Mill Creek is an exposed edge, scarred by the extraction of resources, development, and the displacement of people. Its dynamics and devastations, its sleepers, reveal the Treaty violations and the government’s continued bio-control of Indigenous peoples and their land – all that remains at the heart of Edmonton, and of Canada. There are hundreds of underbridges in this country – colonized spaces, debris fields, wounded, appropriated earth, displaced Indigenous communites.

            How to heal this wound, how to honour the treaties, the obligations of sharing Indigenous land? How to be here? As a non-Indigenous person embedded and implicated in white settler ideology, who is that I that I am? What forces have formed me, my sense of land entitlement, and this gaze? That I, here, settled and settling, unsettled and unsettling, born in a country that is a collective and purposeful creation of forgetting, oblivescent, obliterating; not a place of limitless potential, but a nation that demands a baseline of deprivation and suffering. There is always someone sleeping under the bridge there is always an Attawapiskat. There is no post-colonial, but there is capitalism, and these are these conditions that constitute Canada: land and resource theft, the enforced dislocation of communitites, genocidal administrative systems, and government-sanctioned amnesia.

            Under the bridge at Mill Creek, composer Jacquie Leggatt and I listen, gathering rhythms and vibrations that are material and specific to the stream, to the ravine, to the river valley and to the river. Next to the huge cement piers, to the thin trees and the creek, under the bridge, noise envelops us. Wearing Jacquie’s earphones, holding the Sony recorder, we encounter layers of sound, emetings of lives; dog, jogger, stone, water, car, bird, two men (yelling from the bridge deck above). Noise swarms the listening body – from behind, from above, from below. The eyes close; the I shifts and is shaken. In its immediate proximity (surrounded) with the materiality of sound, the body encounters the permeability of its own matter. The ears can’t and won’t block the siren, the car alarm, booming truck, ragged breath, coughing body; each noise enters, moves through. The underbridge: kâhasinîskâk, place of stones, and stories, buffalo trail, a dense growth of trees and brush, remnants of a shanty town, holes from the coal mines, cow bones from the abattoir, inhabited coyote den, defunct railway: the resonant matter of this place.

Another highlight in a series of highlights is the conversation between British poet Sean Bonney and Vancouver poet Stephen Collis, “We Are An Other: Poetry, Commons, Subjectivity,” that includes:

Sean Bonney: I’ve always been interested in subjectivity, at first because certainly in the London avant-poetry scene, when I first showed up, lyric expression was a real no-no – the whole scene seemed to have very rigid rules. And anyway, dogmas against the lyric subject in poetry – from Olson on – always assume that we’re talking about a middle-class, usually male, usually white subject, as if the only people who could be interested in the “avant-garde” would be white posh men. It is easy to deny subjectivity when yours is the dominant. There’s no need to assert it because it permeates the entire atmosphere of social reality.