Colin Browne, Here

 

is it not unfolding as we imagined, are these not
the brass mackerels we welcomed home, is that
seven-headed god not the yellow box
we yelled for, is this not the street of the lost handshake
between Picasso and Breton, did the father not take
the mother to see the exhibition at war’s end
is a wheelbarrow not the green room
bristling with forest spirits, is renunciation
not the new consumption, was there not
one lip-smacking lie that set the twentieth century
in motion, was the passerby not fatally
ambushed by desire, is the young man not
booking a flight to Turkey, are the barracks
not being aired out again?

i lived in barracks, my father lived in barracks
my uncles lived in barracks, my grandfathers
lived in barracks, my great-grandfathers
lived in barracks, our Irish ancestor lived in barracks
to subdue les Indiens
and les Canadiens
in British North America
and was fed

grand fodder (“Diorama”)

Vancouver poet, critic and visual artist Colin Browne’s latest poetry title is the book-length serial poem Here (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), a stunning and serious collection that, according to the cover copy, “addresses the narratives of history, memory, and place as sites of occupation, Here.” Browne writes out colonization and his place within that, his family’s place within that, writing out a here that is open and urgent, immediate and constantly in search of a new slate of questions on our colonial past, so as to better approach the present. “what wisdom is that which / devises as an acct of human charity / the infliction of scarcity?” he writes, as part of “The Azure Notebook,” “next time / i’ll take the elevator to plankton [.]” For some time now, Browne has been composing an interconnected sequence of book-length serial poems on history and geography, setting a groundwork of personal history in the context of colonialism, all of which have appeared with Talonbooks: Ground Water (2002), The Shovel (2007), The Properties (2012) and The Hatch: poems and conversations (2015) [see my review of such here]. There is almost a single through-line between these collections, each book building upon his prior, existing as a quintet-length serial poem, the continuations of which we have yet to see. His debut collection, the book-length poem Abraham (London ON: Brick Books, 1987), might have opened up some of the threads of what he later expanded upon, but almost as a prequel to the current quartet. Think of Robert Kroetsch’s The Stone Hammer Poems (1975), for example, as a kind of prequel to Completed Field Notes (2000).

His is an eye that works through the geography as a place of origins and colonizers, of original occupants and personal history, and a slew of depictions, events and trauma that run up and down the coastline, from his own family stories of mothers and grandfathers, to mining, archival documents, the removal of totem poles from British Columbia, Emily Carr and Malcolm Lowry on the coast and Gwendolyn MacEwen in Ottawa and the story of Orpheus (Orpheus comes through multiple times, which is interesting), to his translations of early twentieth century poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Marcel Thiry that make reference to Vancouver, much of it composed without ever having visited. “At the century’s end,” he writes, in the penultimate prose poem of his “Improvisations 1-12” sequence, “Chief Johnny Muldoe found thirty-five stone clubs at the bottom of a post hole he was digging at Hagwilget Canyon in the ancient salmon village of Tse-Kya. In those days, Queen Vic ruled rock forms on the White Lake Road. In 1938, at summer’s end, in Hagwilget, Kurt Seligmann paid one hundred dollars for a pole from Tse-Kya and shipped it to Paris in two pieces.” And as Apollinaire, through Browne, writes: “There’s a poem to be written about the bird with only one wing / We’ll send it off by telephone / The trauma of it / It makes me weep a little [.]” In a 2007 interview with Peter Grant for Pacific Rim Review of Books, Browne speaks of his engagements with, as he calls it, “historical family geography”:

Colin Browne: If you look at Ground Water and The Shovel, the historical family geography is the inside coast of Vancouver Island, as I came to know it, or as I’ve imagined it. The poem “The Shovel” takes place on the east coast of Vancouver Island, and there’s a long sequence in The Shovel called “Naughts and Crosses.” Each of those little pieces “takes place” on that part of the island, as do sequences in several of the other poems.

The Okanagan is also important. I discovered an affinity—perhaps an ancestral affinity—for the Okanagan through my great-grandfather’s ranch near Kaleden. That’s what my film White Lake is about, in part, the discovery of that very open White Lake grassland landscape that I still write to. That landscape hooks into the Middle East for me.

PG: How important is place?

Colin Browne: Absolutely crucial. Because all that I write takes place in landscapes.

Poetry has become a way to articulate what I actually perceive—to find a way to enter the simultaneity of the world. You’ll see in the poems, especially in The Shovel, that I’m trying to have many events happening simultaneously. I carry different landscapes around in me, as maybe you do, and those landscapes are nudging me all the time. I don’t mind bringing some place near the Dead Sea into something about White Lake. To me they’re both in place in the same place—simply because they’re in me in that way. Is place actually out there? Or is place what you take in and then make?

I’ve also been exploring a way that I can sew, into the narratives, many times and many places simultaneously. What that means is being able to identify the temporal and geographical intersections I’m the sum of; intersections, by the way, that continue to accumulate, voluntarily and involuntarily, and which are inseparable from language. “Identifying” is a word that James Reaney used in the late 60s. He called poets “identifiers.”

Here is structured in seven poem-sections—“Diorama,” “The Azure Notebook,” “Vancouver in Translation,” “Traveller,” “Improvisations 1-12,” “Petal” and “Envoi”—composing a distinct variation on the book length serial poem, one that moves through structures similar to those of George Bowering, Stephen Collis and Jack Spicer, as well as elements of ‘improvisation,’ akin to works by William Carlos Williams, Fred Wah, Dennis Cooley or bpNichol. His blend of serial and improvisation also has links to the documentary poem, a term originally proposed by Dorothy Livesay, writing out a dense and physical collage of structures, approaches and ideas to write a geography laden with history, rich with image and texture, and a new perspective on a variety of colonial histories. It is only through acknowledgment and unpacking those historical events that one can even begin to move forward.

i tug at words like a feral dog
my subject is only incidentally poetry
utopia, i never loved you
except for those triumphant chords, that anthem!
i’ll report that my grandfather’s respite
was brutally brief
my mother learned to keep her distance
bewildered

early on there was a moneymaker
it brought it cash like a coal mine
a thief with a spade and a burlap sack
working after midnight
could make a pile in a few weeks
committing the unforgivable crime
veins of sorrow stain these beaches 

Marjerie and Malcolm in their shack
on the Inlet
young poets tracked them down
sharpen the knife, they learned
before going at the bologna 

a missionary’s wife
keeps a tiny garden
and is expected
                        to set an example

do you see the armature? (“In His Fine Hand,” “Traveller”)

Colin Browne, The Hatch: poems and conversations

the lava field

or without

in the lava fiexld

sicxk of himself

on the nigxht boat

this smallpox takes

the piss out of proxfits

wisdom teeth, then cervix

then the armisxtice

when I lisxten it’s

we’re safer, not safe

leaves bore legs

wind adores

across the on the

in the dowxn the

bring your shovel

and a strong knixfe

takes a bite

out of

wires, wirxed corners

who’s counting

it’s Rudolph that

goes down in history

de Montaigne on cannibals

a sweextness

tunnel leggers

not craxftsmen

but specixalists

all the same

For his newest collection, The Hatch: poems and conversations (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), Vancouver poet and filmmaker Colin Browne continues his incredibly-dense exploration into the serial/book-length poem, composing a collection that, as the book jacket informs, “discovers its true nature as collage.” It is as though Browne doesn’t approach his poetry collections as straightforward serial poems or collections, but structuring a singular work of poetry from the perspective of a documentary filmmaker (entirely different than the “documentary poem” named and championed by Dorothy Livesay), allowing a different kind of narrative flow to emerge, and refreshing a book-length form that desperately requires a new way of seeing. In his recent review over at The Bull Calf, Phil Hall writes:

In The Hatch, Browne is attempting the impossible, and hooray for that: starting from where he is, and who he is (reaching back to Scotland)—he is trying to pan the connections between Surrealism (André Breton, Francis Picabia, etc.) and the West Coast and its Native arts and traditions. You will perhaps remember a photo of André Breton’s desk and study, where art, totems, and masks from BC are on display. One result is that Browne’s book is populated by not only historical figures but by Wolf and Raven and Fungus Man, etc.

How could we not love and be intrigued by a book of poems that celebrates the old-fashioned political savvy of many of our waning heroes? These include (hold your hat) Norman Bethune, Emily Carr, Hank Snow, Aimé Césaire, Charles Olson, Blaise Cendrars, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Antonin Artaud, D H Lawrence, and Sorley MacLean… all in evidence here.

Hall might be the perfect reader for Browne’s work, as both have been, for some time, constructing a series of ever-expanding poetry books-as-units-of-composition utilizing history, personal information, mythology, narrative fragments and collage, and a respect for and repeated homages towards forebears, whether personal or literary, as well as a deep awareness of their natural environment. As Browne writes: “now when i dial the stars / our grande ourse – / Desnos’s bear – / is at the switchboard / good hands you’re in[.]” The Hatch builds upon and furthers the work of his three prior collections, all of which appeared through Talonbooks—Ground Water (2002), The Shovel (2007) and The Properties (2012)—in their exploration of expansive and densely-packed collage-works that stride across a wide canvas, from lyric narrative to meditative fragment to impassioned argument to conversational script, exploring the philosophies of origins across politics, geographic space and an array of traditions. Still, there is as much heart as documentary here. This book contains multitudes, to be sure, as well as an array of feathers. As he writes towards the end of “granny soot”: “i was an open mouth / without feathers or fins / a nestling at the sign / of the celestial bear / i got a hook in the head / of the weir i wove / in the trickle of a shallow / ditch[.]” And of course, as he explores in the poem “rideau,” there are even some moments that explore the capital city, where he spent part of his youth:

i’ve boned the old syntax

the ox sprouts two horns

and mistakes submission

for forgiveness. my colleagues

have been subjects for so long

they’ve come to believe that

collusion with authority

while railing against authority

will imbue them with the authority

to deny having acquired authority.

i’m listening to the Peggy Lee Band’s

“Floating Island” and hear

a better model for being human.

i promise i won’t lie to you

without knowing that

i am lying to you (“rideau”)

The stretch and continuation of his lines and phrases are seemingly endless, helping make The Hatch quite a hefty collection, and one not just of size (nearly one hundred and fifty pages), but in scope and scale, making so much else seem entirely too thin.

The Capilano Review 3.20

LC: Is that a poetry credo emerging in a couple pages of In Flux where you step out of your critic’s role and explicitly write “as a poet” (In Flux 203)? It starts for me with “somatic markers” that when articulated in language, “we associate,” you say, “with the becoming of subjectivity” (203).

RM: Your question is not an easy one for me to unravel. You’re citing from an essay on Rita Wong where I focus on the body as a living organism. The body generates a complex of affects in our daily lives, and these often go unnoticed because it is treated as an object to be appropriated, glaringly so in violent confrontations, rather than as a complex life network of somatic processes.

            I’m approaching some very tricky areas of poetic thought here, but as a poet my understanding is that the normalized discursive frames through which the world makes sense to us, as well as for us—in other words, again, what-goes-with-out-saying—are enabled in the exclusion of somatic contingencies, including the finitude of organic processes. In our corporate capitalist culture of commodities the body becomes the target of so many discursive operations from seemingly benign advertising to the extreme violence of warfare, and in between these huge corporate interest in biotechnological knowledge.

            Language plays a crucial yet mostly transparent role in sustaining the normalization of dominant representations, but when language is rendered opaque or made otherwise non-transparent as a channel of communication, for instance in poetic texts, we begin to apprehend the processes of becoming that have the potential not only to expose the limits of normalization but to transform them, we hope progressively, so that they are more inclusive than they were before.

            Here I’m talking about the creative process in general, but in some instances the “becoming of subjectivity” emerges in a more shared sense when dominant representations are seemingly spontaneously exceeded or undermined by what is then a newly identified group. The term “redress,” for instance, constituted a Japanese Canadian group in creating a movement to seek justice for the past injustices related to mass uprooting, dispossession, and internment. Perhaps this is a way of thinking about the current Idle No More movement that has emerged through the coalitional action of young aboriginal activists who are motivated by the words Idle No More. By responding to the call for action in the phrase they have exposed the dominant representations of aboriginality as extensions of a colonial system with a history as long as the Canadian state’s existence. But then again, the shift from writing a poem to a social movement may be too far-fetched a move.

The Capilano Review 3.20 (spring 2013) opens with a small section on the Vancouver poet, critic, bibliographer, teacher and activist Roy Miki, including a new poem, “Please,” an interview conducted by poet and critic Louis Cabri, as well as a review essay by Cabri on Miki’s Mannequin Rising (New Star, 2011). Miki’s contributions to literature and culture have been explored and celebrated on more than a few occasions over the past few years, including through the recent anthology Tracing theLines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour ofRoy Miki (eds. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai and Christopher Lee; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2012). Where the anthology focused on where Miki was and has been throughout his work as writer, critic, teacher and activist, this small feature in The Capilano Review focuses more on Miki’s current work, and what lies ahead. Cabri writes in his essay:

Levelling and redundancy-in-abundance, being dimensions of a capitalist economy, are qualities of consumer culture that emerge in MR. Levelling arises when a thing or process acquires exchange or market value. Redundancy-in-abundance, the way I’m using this phrase, refers to conditions of labour (“surplus” labour, a structural feature of capitalism) and products of labour (overproduction; planned obsolescence). In the second line, leveling and redundancy-in-abundance emerge through a structural homology between economics and language, and elsewhere in MR in the figure of the mannequin.

The issue also includes a small section edited/translated/compiled by Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure, “A New Regard (Quebec and Acadia),” with pieces by Chantel Neveu (translated by Angela Carr), Steve Savage (translated by Erín Moure), Suzanne Leblanc (translated by Bronwyn Haslam), Daniel Canty (translated by Oana Avasilichioaei), Jean A. Baudot (translated by Angela Carr) and France Daigle (translated by Robert Majzels), as well as Angela Carr and Kate Eichhorn’s revealing piece, “A Gloss on The Writing Machine.” Moure’s explorations in translation over the years have been well documented, and her more recent writings on translation on Jacket2 are a must-read for anyone interested in the conversation between texts, and between languages. As Moure’s introduction writes:

Pre-eminent experimental writer Nicole Brossard has recently remarked in interviews (e.g. The Gazette, February 26, 2013) that, following a heyday in the 70s and 80s, experimental writing had left French-language poetry in Quebec in favour of “what was called The New Readability.” For a while, I and other translators felt this dearth in Quebec poetry of the type of experiments with forms, sounds, effects, meanings that writers such as Brossard had introduced into the culture. There were still experiments, of course, but they were much quieter in their torquings.

            In the last ten years, though, publishers such as the pioneering Le Quartanier, La Peuplade, and others have provided national (Quebec) and transnational forums for young writers who not only produce amazing risk-taking writing in French but collaborate across boundaries with Europeans, US Americans, and Canadians in English to produce further works, flows, excitements. Meanwhile, in L’Acadie in New Brunswick, across the Quebec border to the east, established writer France Daigle will soon see her monumental novel Pour Sûr appear in the English translation of Robert Majzels. I include her because what Quebec-Alberta writer Majzels chooses to translate is part of the endeavor of opening new possibilities in French, and thus in English. And one contributor, yes, is a ghost from where the past and future overlap: in the machine itself.

            The writers and translators (and one commentator) in this section are all worth watching, the writers in their own right and as translators, and the translators for their own writing as well. I feel privileged to work among them, and to lend my hand as translator in their midst. I hope you enjoy these foments and new directions in words from Acadia and Quebec—not the avant-garde but a New Regard.

Much of the work included in the section is quite spectacular, and breathes a new kind of life into the form of the Canadian prose poem, such as Suzanne Leblanc’s sequence, “P.’s House for Thinking,” that includes:

Choral V

It was an abstract house, a construction of the mind. I ordered my memory there by an ancient process of remembrance. My tongue sought its speech. My will was oratorical. I would be no less abstract than the discourse of the philosopher, whose oeuvre had convinced me, whose life I admired. I would be no less constructed than this memorization of my singular voice, where I had chosen to stay.

West servant’s room

First floor

Outside the features in the issue also includes new work by Toronto poet Lise Downe, “from Propositions.” New work by Downe is a rare occurence, and something worth noting, reading and almost celebrating. Another highlight is the collaboration by Ted Byrne and Christine Stewart, “from St Paul.” The second in her collaborations with Byrne, she has also published a recent title in collaboration with Toronto poet David Dowker, Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013). The cover to the new issue features a stunning Alutiiq mask, One of the Old Men (2003), by Alaskan artist Perry Eaton, and the issue includes a folio of photographs of others of his masks, as well as an interview conducted by Colin Browne:

Colin Browne: “Yellow Singer” has a very beautiful, quizzical look on his face, which, I confess, makes me see him as a poet.

Perry Eaton: I think I can understand that. “Yellow Singer” is a type of mask made to be danced, with a whistle that sends sound between the worlds.

CB: Please say more.

PE: I can only tell you so much. I’d heard stories about the wooden whistle that you hold in your mouth when you dance, but I didn’t appreciate how important the sound quality was. When you look at the masks in the Chateau Musée, in the Pinart collection, and when you turn them over, the back of the mask can reveal as much as the front. The insides of the round-holed singing masks are finished very smoothly in the mouth area, which suggests that the audio tone was very important. I think in a way these were tuned instruments, and the whistle used was a very controlled sound, but we’ve never found one so we don’t know. We’ve gone through the literature. You’ll read two hundred pages to glean a line. There’ll be one line that’ll give you a clue. You accumulate these single lines; you start to put them together and you get images.