Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory

 

The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resist assimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way, poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’ (Charles Bernstein)”)

I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?”

Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stop looking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipher in its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

The more I write, the more meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountain rising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)

ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik

 

It must be noted that Hall is one of the most widely and deeply read people I know. Years after he won the Governor General’s Award, he told me that, “It’s very, very difficult to recognize a good work.” Moreover, Hall has a Master’s degree which he completed at the University of Windsor in the 1970s. No small feat, considering Hall was the first person in his family to finish high school. When I asked Hall why he didn’t pursue a PhD (which he’d considered) he said, “Because I didn’t want it to dry me out.”

The idea for this Festschrift was inspired in 2021 by the publishing efforts of the inimitable polymath Nick Drumbolis and his remarkable imprint LETTERS. And though this Festschrift is a gathering of writings for Hall as he turns 70, it is not a birthday party. It is an opportunity to give thanks for the years of steady friendship, mentorship, and work that he has provided. (Mark Goldstein, “Preface”)

I’m not usually in the habit of reviewing a collection I have work in, but recently a Canadian contemporary said they didn’t know what a “festschrift” was, so thought that prompt enough to discuss the recent ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024). Unlike the more formal essay series produced by, say, Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the literary festschrift allows for more of a range of responses-as-celebration, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs.

Festschrifts produced by a trade publisher do occasionally (very occasionally) emerge, but over the past few decades in Canadian writing, at least, it had been the journals doing the bulk of this kind of work, with a variety of special issues through The Capilano Review focusing on works by Robin Blaser, George Stanley [see my review of such here], Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here] and George Bowering, among others, or Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (1965-2013), a journal that included special festschrift issues on bpNichol, Steve McCaffery [see my review of such here], Barbara Godard [see my review of such here] and Ray Ellenwood, not to mention a variety of other journals over the years that have less frequently featured special issues on particular writers, whether Arc Poetry Magazine on Erín Moure, Prairie Fire on Dennis Cooley or The Chicago Review on Lisa Robertson [see my review of such here], etcetera. Given how far the festschrift seems to have fallen by the wayside (mainly through a slow decrease of proper publisher funding and that 1990s drop-off in library funding, which reduced their purchasing power), I began producing a series of similar chapbook-sized festschrift publications during the Covid-era through above/ground press (I thought the Covid period could use some increased positive)—the “Report from the Society” series—with more than a dozen published volumes to-date, which also includes one on the work of Phil Hall (a reworked version of Susan Gillis’ piece from mine appears in this current collection).

There might be those who recall A Trip Around McFadden (Toronto ON: The Front Press/Proper Tales Press, 2010), the festschrift produced by Stuart Ross and Jim Smith to celebrate David W. McFadden’s 70^th birthday, or the combined four hundredth issue of 1cent/thirteenth issue of news notes that jwcurry produced on the work of Judith Copithorne (“for Judith with love”) [see my review of such here], but how many might recall Raging Like a Fire: A Celebration of Irving Layton (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1993), the festschrift edited by Henry Beissel and Joy Bennett? There are probably others, naturally, that I’m either unaware of, or simply can’t recall at the moment, but either way, there simply aren’t as many out there as should be. Volumes such as these are important parts of literary conversation and acknowledgement (as are volumes of selected poems, something that occurs far less since the Governor General’s Award declared them ineligible for consideration back in the late 1990s), none of which is occurring nearly enough, so a volume on award-winning Perth, Ontario poet, critic, editor, mentor and teacher Phil Hall, especially one so brilliantly and thoroughly done, becomes an essential commodity.

In many ways, one can’t get much better than the short essay “Landscapes,” by Br. Lawrence Morey, a contributor who lives as a Trappist monk at the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, that opens: “I first became aware of Phil Hall’s existence when I was in grade 9 and he was in grade 10. I had taken out the book Cariboo Horses by Al Purdy from the school library, which I loved. Those were the days in which you would write your name in the back of the book on a small, pasted-in form, along with the due date, which corresponded to a card in the librarian’s files. In front of my name on the form, I saw the name Phil Hall. I knew Phil to see him, but didn’t dare approach him, since I was a mere 9^th grader and he lived at the exalted level of the 10^th grade.” This particular perspective on Hall’s ongoing work is wonderful (and Morey’s biographical detail, itself, provides a curious insight into Hall’s Gethsemani sequence), as Morey writes, later on:

            Though poetry is Phil’s main medium, he also loves to make quirky sculptures out of found objects, bottle caps, paperclips, and other things. Like the work of Kurt Schwitters, his sculptures grow like living creatures. His journals are a mixture of writing, drawing, and pasted words and images. I think this reflects his working methods beautifully. In everything he does, he takes disparate pieces of things, letters, words, phrases, sequences, and molds them into something new, something surprising and revelatory.

Over the past decade, Toronto poet, editor, critic, publisher and book designer Mark Goldstein has evolved into one of Hall’s most thoroughly-considered supporters and critics, having now produced three full-length collections by Hall through his Beautiful Outlaw Press—Toward a Blacker Ardour (2021), The Ash Bell (2022) and Vallejo’s Marrow (2024)—as well as a chapbook (Essay on Legend, 2014) and postcard (Rampant, 2022) in small editions. Produced and co-edited by Goldstein, ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL may be wonderfully expansive and even exhaustive, but it should be noted that his own contributions include the essay “A Maker’s Dozen: from Eighteen Poems to Killdeer,” a whopping sixty-six page essay that examines, as he writes at the offset, “Phil Hall’s published body of work from 1973 to 2011. With a focus on form (as well as syntax and subject), I will investigate Hall’s line through thirteen trade editions and how it changed over the nearly forty-year span since he first saw his work published.” Living writers, especially those still active and engaged, are rarely provided such thorough, thoughtful examination, and Goldstein should be commended for not only this piece, but his ongoing critical work, which itself is provided not nearly as much attention as it deserves [see my review of his 2021 Part Thief, Part Carpenter: SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION, produced through Beautiful Outlaw as well, here]. As Goldstein writes as part of his lengthy essay:

            To be clear, by employing the term poetic form, I am pointing to the structural and organizational patterns of a poem, including its (subtle or more obvious) rhyme scheme, meter, stanza structure, lineation, sentence structure, and other elements that shape its overall configuration and design on the page. In light of free verse, poetic form has played a significant role in the development of contemporary poetry, as poets like Hall have experimented with new forms and pushed the boundaries of traditional structures to create highly readable yet neoteric and innovative styles of writing.
            As I’ll show in this essay, Hall’s sense of form was first influenced by both traditional and modern forms of poetry found within the canon, and later it was increasingly written in concert and conversation with contemporary and postmodern poetry itself. Hall is a careful reader of all types of poetry (and literature) and has thought deeply about form. He has considered his own use of free verse and, rather than adhering to accepted rules or anti-rules of meter and rhyme – whether outmoded or contemporary – he has, over time, experimented with myriad structures and patterns in his poetic line. This has likely afforded Hall a greater flexibility in expressing his ideas and emotions in poetry. This has also pushed him to develop new poetic forms of his own design, as well adapt or redeploy older ones – such as the prose poem and the haibun – to his own unique use. Moreover, Hall has slowly gravitated toward an expansive use of his own idiosyncratic forms and sub-forms which are drawn from the dictates and necessities of his own poetry’s deployment.
            Against a more prescribed approach to form, Hall has said, “What are we making? Sausage?”

At more than three hundred pages and twenty-six contributors, ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL includes poems, essays, reminiscences and interviews by George Bowering, Erín Moure, Don McKay, Sandra Ridley, George Stanley, Steven Ross Smith, Tom Dilworth, Cameron Anstee, Br. Lawrence Morey, Mark Goldstein, Susan Gillis, myself, luke hathaway, Nicole Markotić, Fred Wah, Louis Cabri, Karl Jirgens, Arthur Craven, Chris Turnbull, Ali Blythe, John Steffler, Pearl Pirie, Donald Winkler, Ronna Bloom, Andrew Vaisius and Angela Carr, as well as an array of photographs of Hall over the years—including an early 1980s photo at Michael McNamara’s apartment on page 272 where he looks the spitting image of a late 2000’s former Ottawa poet Jesse Patrick Ferguson—and a healthy bibliography of Hall’s published work. The responses run the gamut from the personal to the intimate to the critical and the celebratory (with most incorporating most if not all of those features), many of which I’m still working my slow way through reading [the video of the zoom-launch for the collection, which included readings by Hall, Moure, Blythe, Ridley and myself, is now online]. As Angela Carr writes to introduce the first of two interviews she conducted with Hall: “Phil Hall is to poetry in Canada what style is to reason.” The essay by Pearl Pirie is easily the strongest critical work I’ve seen by her to date, and both Moure and Blythe offer pieces that delight in their scale and intimate scope. The collected pieces offer such appreciation and delight, attempting to share or discern the shapes of how Hall reacts, presents and writes, and both the generosity and curiosity of a writer decades-deep into an appreciation of how the poem moves, or might move, or could move. It becomes hard to highlight much in this collection without wanting to reproduce whole pages, which I won’t do here, but I shall leave the last words to Hall himself, out of one of those interviews conducted by Angela Carr, where he speaks of the late Stan Dragland in such a way that it could be applied to Hall and his work, as well:

It is a style (one thing reminds me of another) that can easily go wrong. If a writer seems to be padding, if a writer seems to be flailing or name-dropping, if the examples seem too carefully or metaphorically fetched. But Stan makes in his essays each step of his argument seem inevitable, so that we say, “Of course!” Then, at the end of an essay by him there’s that feeling of having participated in a dance – & having gotten somewhere unexpected, wider.

It has a lot to do with texture. And character. And with a widening of community. During the time I knew Stan, from 1984 until this year, he moved toward an on-rush of critical herding & gathering that can be breathtaking to read. Breathtaking in its humility & faith. He had a deep faith in us. He believed that we, his friends, were worth it – worth every quirky added bit – and worth every word.

Erín Moure, Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)

My review of Erín Moure's Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Chus Pato, The Face of the Quartzes, trans. Erín Moure

 

Galicia is a promontory of stone sitting on the Iberian peninsula above Portugal. Its language, Galician, derived from Latin, is the root language of modern Portuguese and stubbornly survives to the north of Portugal. Through long parts of Spain, Galicia, with its Celtic substrate and different history and language, has never become simply Spanish. The Face of the Quartzes is rooted in Ourense, the Galician interior city bisected by the Miño River, where the poet was born and raised during the long 20^th-century Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Ourense was long ago the Roman city of gold (ouro) and of dawn’s golden light (aurora); Galicia may have been at the fringe of the Roman Empire but it was a country of philosophy, and of international travel and influence. Its mountainous rocky interior was mined for gold and iron, metals key to ornament and armament. Its ports were cosmopolitan. Its fishermen were known from the Baltic to Africa to the shores of Newfoundland and Maine. It was a place peripheral and central at the same time. Though today Galicia is even more peripheral in world politics, Chus Pato’s poetry recenters it. (“Passages and the Unrequitable Gift: The Face of the Quartzes by Chus Pato, A translator’s introduction”)

Sorting books in a corner of my office, I realized I hadn’t yet gone through Galician poet Chus Pato’s latest work translated into English, The Face of the Quartzes, translated by Montreal poet, translator and critic Erín Moure (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2019). A prolific translator, above and beyond her own extensive catalogue of writing (working through French, English, Spanish and Galician), Moure has been translating the work of Chus Pato for a number of years now, through five prior collections in English translation produced through BuschekBooks, Shearsman Books and Book*hug. Set with the English translation on the right and original Galician on the left, Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes offers a lyric suite of observational thought that scrape against the boundaries of perception, offering a light touch across a sequence of gestures, deep and dark and considered. “We redden the rose / using blood,” they (I say such, given the collaborative nature of translation) write, to close one particular lyric. One could describe each poem as untitled, at least in the more traditional manner, with either the opening word or opening phrase set in bold type, offered as title directly incorporated into the body of the text; reminiscent, slightly, of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, who would offer, most notably through his infamous Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) [see my note on the reissue here], the beginning of the book-length poem on the front cover, ending finally on the back. The body of the book was too big to contain him, after all; the titling and outside still existing within the body of the text. “Winter gave way to rain,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “and the rain gave in to itself / we await a truth of language / I was born to hear the bark of dogs [.]” There aren’t too many poets working their titling in such a manner, opening the poem immediately, and the structure is curious, offering more of an ongoingness and interconnectedness to the larger, book-length structure of this particular suite. In certain ways, one could see The Face of the Quartzes as a singular poem, simply portioned into a sequence of moments, one thought directly set against and furthering another; one that moves through concerns around language, culture, ecology, and how we both move through and interact with the world, both immediate and further beyond. There is something very large about the way Pato encompasses the minutae of her world, something captured, fortunately, for those of us who exist only in English.

The hand assembles words
my hand
that misjudges the size of the letters and width of the wall
Up above
a bullet cuts through the cry
separates the letters
the syllables
bodies tumble from the peak
The hand returns beside the others
they’re archaic
red black ochre
they agitate
like a handkerchief waving goodbye
They sleep underfoot
upside down
like bats