Edward Byrne, Tracery

 

Behind the weather
the storm

behind a
rhetoric of clouds

Behind capital
the war

at odds
with the adages
argument conceals (“(TRACER)”)

I’ve been enjoying the poetry collection Tracery (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2022), the latest from Vancouver poet and editor Edward Byrne, a lyric meditation of in-transit pinpoints and sequences that collect together to form a kind of thinking portrait of daily and domestic thinking. His poems are composed via short takes and phrases, accumulations of hesitations, pauses and small points, akin to a lyric reminiscent of the poem-length lineations of Monty Reid, Cameron Anstee, the late Nelson Ball, or possibly Robert Creeley: each poem offering a meditative slice of dailyness composed through a single, ongoing, staggered line. “You are a point of no return,” he writes, in part six of the numbered thirty-poem sequence “MORNING SONGS,” “this and every morning / where my thoughts / exit from dream’s grasp / never grasped / all the little signs / all your stars blinking out [.]” Byrne composes a precision of small points along a continuous thought, offering a pacing of slow, accumulative and artful steps, each one carefully set. As the first poem in the six-poem sequence “(TRAME)” reads: “This morning on Union Street / I saw Arthur Rimbaud on a girl’s bicycle // And then / close behind him / Jean Seberg // They smiled at me and waved // Then came Antonin Artaud / weaving and shouting curses // None of them wore helmets // I worry about their heads / which I adore [.]” Byrne’s pacing demands an attentive eye, composed with care across each phrase, each line. His poems exist simultaneously in the present moment as well as across vast distances, allowing the short form to contain such enormous volumes. Composed, as the back cover offers, “in a time of plague, through dreams and daily life,” Byrne moves easily through his translations of lyric form and the shimmering space between dreaming and daily tasks, catching memories across the dawn’s sweep of early morning clouds. He traces his lyric, one might suggest, around and through the minutae of his present moment. And, closing the collection, his engagements with responding to works by poets such as Blaser, Aragon, Rilke, Artaud, H.D. and Dante allow for the shape of not only influence but response, offering a lyric of experience and fine craft:

The wayward conveyance
of these small songs
against the fog of morning
before the rain
by slight of hand
where the letters are mobile
a variant turning
by the ear’s fine judgment

There is something curious about how so much poetry out of Vancouver is centred on movement, whether Bryne’s compositions while riding BC Transit, on bicycle or on foot, comparable to Meredith Quartermain’s walking [see her 2005 collection Vancouver Walking] or George Stanley riding a similar Vancouver bus route [see my review of his 2008 collection Vancouver: a poem here], to George Bowering thinking his way through Duino Elegies via Kerrisdale. In comparison, there aren’t many poems I’m aware of composed overtly across the lines of the Montreal Metro, or Toronto’s GO Trains, let alone their expansive subway system (although bpNichol famously spoke first-draft thoughts into a hand-held tape machine while driving the distance between Coach House and Therafields). In certain ways, there’s almost something comparable to Vancouver’s transit-poems to England’s handful of poems composed on foot, responding to the uniquely-English meditative tradition of walking vast countryside distances [see my review Mark Goodwin’s 2014 collection Steps, for example, here]. Frank O’Hara may have composed a collection of poems during his lunch break, but, more recently, Mary Austin Speaker composed her 2016 collection, The Bridge, while riding daily commuter distances across New York’s Manhattan Bridge [see my review of such here]. How much, we might begin to ask, has literature been shaped through the physical requirements of each author’s particular geography? As Byrne offers as part of “MORNING SONGS”: “I saw Kirilov / fifty years ago / on the Barton Street bus / and again this morning / on 6th Avenue // One of us hasn’t changed / in all those years [.]” Or further in the same sequence, writing:

Woke this morning
without the burden
of love and loss

Cold air of October
ate my hopes
as I returned
to where I fell

The crows
at war
in the high branches

The Capilano Review 3.32 : Summer 2017

Our point of departure for this issue was “translation,” in scare quotes because we’ve grown weary of the imperialism of the concept. At some juncture, we began calling it “polyvocal translation,” later shifting to “polymorphous translation,” to mark an element of perversion or disavowal in the concept, along the lines of: we know that this is not English, and yet it is.

            Translation is no more innocent than poetry. Neither of these is a value in itself, any more than “Canada” is. They too have not been nice for 150 years, to “translate” the pernicious Roots slogan. We don’t need to look elsewhere for poetry with blood on its hands: the “Confederation Poet” and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott might be a better example than the Nobel Prize winner and bureaucrat Alexis Leger (St. Jean Perse), or the Stalinist Neruda. Of the current celebratory slogan, the filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril says: “Every single time I see a Canada 150 logo I want to take a Sharpie and add a couple of zeros to the end of it” (quoted in The Guardian Weekly, 02.07.17). (Ted Byrne and Catriona Strang, “Editor’s Note”)

As the editor’s note describes, the latest issue of The Capilano Review (3.32 : Summer 2017) surrounds ideas of translation, both the complicated and the straightforward, including some of the difficulties that emerge when attempting to shift any writing or idea from one language and culture into another. The responses, questions and straight translations are incredibly rich and varied, as Sonnet L’Abbé writes in her poem “CV”: “Let not my colonized verse be called la misanthropie.” There is some really fascinating work in this issue, including an interview with Jean-Christophe Cloutier, editor of Jack Kerouac’s French language writing, Deborah Koenker’s Tortilla Portraits, further of Sonnet L’Abbé’s “Sonnet’s Shakespeare” sonnets (which appears as a trade collection with McClelland & Stewart in 2018), and further of Michael Barnholden’s work on and translations of Louis Riel’s poetry, specifically one of his final compositions, the poem/lyric “Riel’s Composition”/”Riel’s Song.” Both Cloutier’s and Barnholden’s work can’t help but shift consideration for their individual subjects, and most of the work in Cloutier’s volume of Kerouac’s French writing, published in 2016 as La vie est d’hommage, the introduction to the interview writes, was “not known to exist until quite recently.” As Cloutier responds as part of the interview:

All this to say that we can detect the “doubleness” that you allude to in your question all over the map during Kerouac’s formative years. The country is going through it, in the midst of the Great Depression, but Kerouac is living all sorts of personal tragedies and dramas of a particular sort as the son of French-Canadian immigrants in an adopted nation, learning an adopted language. In fact in Visions of Cody, Kerouac gives us a formal enactment of his doubleness through the “split” page where his “French-Canadian side” speaks on the left column and the Anglophone side translates the speech into English on the right column. He calls this, in his 1951 journal, his “Canuck dualism crap.” Isn’t that great? And as I say the doubleness is palpable in Visions of Gerard: we can detect both an effusive pride, love, and nostalgia for French-Canadian culture and manners of being, yet simultaneously a disgust, a shame, a desperation to get away from the hermetic snare of it. To give you an example, he writes with such tenderness and warmth about family suppers, everybody at the table, including his beloved brother Gerard, and explains one of his fondest memories involving the gliding of bread into homemade gravy, a process he and his brother had baptized “passes.” Kerouac also makes sure the reader understands this is a French word, and that it had also a particular pronunciation: “because of our semi-Iroquoian French-Canadian accent passe was pronounced PAUSS so I can still hear the lugubrious sound of it and comfort-a-suppers of it, M’ué’n pauss.” I’ve always loved this passage because of its familial intimacy, and because of the perfect way he found to “sound-spell” the phrase “donne moi une passe,” rendering it phonetically as “M’ué’n pauss.” Now we can really hear it, we can properly reimagine the scene and conjure up the history as it was lived and remembered.

What is fascinating to me through working my way slowly through the work contained in this issue is the realization that even translation shouldn’t be seen as benign or innocent, and the implications of translation can be quite complicated, and even damaging, if done poorly or thoughtlessly. As the editors discussed in their introduction, the idea of translation was their “point of departure,” opening the issue to a wide range of possibilities, from poetry to straight translation and images to memoir, including three powerful memoir-esque prose poems by literary translator and legal worker Lida Nosrati, that include:

In the interest of time

Let us not dwell on the fact that you’ve been humiliated chronically, your language criminalized, your child a guest at the holding centre because such facts are inconsequential anyway. Let us instead discuss the effects of acute humiliation on your del-e bi’arezoo (wishless heart), treat life as a non-adversarial process, for argument’s sake, and try our best to rebel in reverse for no apparent or noble cause. Let us focus on learned helplessness, on normal responses to abnormal events, and remember that absence is proof of nothing, that chance is damaged beyond repair, that your fear is billable, and your evidence sufficiently normalized. Let us be courteous but not nice. Let us have the last word, and demonstrate that reason was unlawful, not unreasonable.

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.