Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker

            Nicole Brossard’s work is both thrill and balm – and now, in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, readers can encounter the full range and scope of her trajectory. We have worked to curate selections that will be relevant and, we think, exhilarating to new and returning readers of Brossard’s work, and we have moved across genres and through time, not in a linear way but in a way that fits the always-aliveness of her work. If Utopia seems impossible to readers in 2020, Brossard’s work reminds us that when we gather – either on the page reading, or in rooms together – our co-presence conjures the possibility of Utopia.

            Over a fifty-year period, Nicole Brossard has published more than forty works of poetry, prose, essays, and non-fiction. She has broken through the bonds of sexual and linguistic repression, and in doing so has reached across several generations and two solitudes to enchant avant-garde, feminist, and academic readers and writers nationally and internationally, creating a radical, complex, and influential body of literature. It is work that never forgets the importance of pleasure, and that never loses hope in the possibility of Utopia. For the scholar Susan Rudy, Brossard’s writing is comparable to Virginia Woolf in being ‘uncompromising’ in its ‘critique of patriarchal reality, unrelenting in her love for women, and unequalled in [its] aesthetic experimentation.’ Has any other Canadian writer enjoyed the kind of feverish collaboration and translatory attention paid to Brossard? And has any other Canadian writer had the kind of attention that comes not from the established literary complex down but from the ground up? Poets, writers, and translators have taken up Brossard’s work largely as a labour of love. This is quite impressive when you consider that at the core of this fervour is a radial lesbian innovative writer who comes to English only through translation. (“AVANT DESIRE, THE FUTURE SHALL BE SWAYED,” An Introduction by Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker)

Sitting at more than three hundred pages, Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020) is a “selected works” of fifty-plus years’ worth of Montreal writer Nicole Brossard’s works in English translation, from, as the back cover attests, “her best-known writings but also includes hard-to-find interviews, essays, and lectures.” From the very beginning of her work, Brossard’s work has been uncompromising in their experiments with language and form, and engagements with sexuality, desire, politics and social politics, and this new collection attempts to acknowledge the myriad threads of her work through thematic sections—“Desirings,” “Generations,” “The City,” “Translations, Retranslations, Transcollaborations” and “Futures”—a noted difference from, say, a more temporal editorial structure. The book is built as a sequence of threads pulled from Brossard’s translated work, from her numerous books-in-translation to more obscure pieces, including elements included in her prior selected through the University of California Press. The collection offers pieces from published works such as French Kiss, or, A Pang’s Progress (Coach House Books, 1976), Turn of a Pang (Coach House Press, 1976) and Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon (Coach House Books, 2005), but also the collaboration “Mauve” with Daphne Marlatt, originally published as a chapbook produced in an edition of thirty copies back in 1987:

La réalité est un sursis au-delà

et du reel lorsqu’on observe

en l’apparence virtuelle, courbes

de ceci qui ressemble ccombien de fois

les images : la bouche au féminin

dose de sense émotion dorsale

Real that of the under-bent

curves of the virtual we take for real

a gap  delayed that-over-there  re

semblance the images repeat

mouth in the feminine, dos€

of sense making a dorsal

commotion

Brossard’s influence on writing and culture can’t be overstated: the ways in which her work has been the forefront of what became a wave of writing engaged with theory and literary form, form and theory engaged with desire, and desire engaged with the politics of gender, sexuality, language and the body; centred in Montreal but rippling out in waves throughout Quebec, Canada and beyond. Her writing has consistently worked to explore boundaries, engaging with questions and concerns that originally exploded across the culture throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. One just has to think of the number of touchstones her work offers, including the incredibly powerful piece she wrote in response to the Montreal Massacre, “6 December 1989 / Among The Centuries” from Fluid Arguments (translated by Marlene Wildeman): “Mysogyny, phallocentrism, sexism, and anti-feminism are four words that could seem to be easily interchangeable. It would be, however, a serious mistake to confuse one for another, for they play very specific but oh so complementary roles when it comes to the alienation, domination, and exploitation of women.” As Lisa Robertson wrote in her introduction to Brossard’s Theory, A Sunday (Robertson’s essay is also included in this collection): “The feminist writers of Montréal have altered their city irrevocably. When women write about and from the cities they live in, they are transforming the material ccity into a web of possibility and risk. The description of the city bends back on itself – it not only represents, it opens up a site for the political imagination. Through the fictive and theoretical act, the city is reinscribed as a space for radical otherness.”

Her work continues to explore the boundaries of what is possible with text, blending lyric with theory, and a retrospective of this sort is, honestly, long overdue. One could imagine how easily such a volume could have been twice as large, given Brossard’s near-constant engagement and exploration through prose, prose poetry, the lyric essay, poetry and works for the stage over more than five decades-to-date. There aren’t too many contemporary Canadian writers who have predominantly been known as writers of prose fiction who have incorporated so many ideas of poetry and the lyric into their work and their thinking (the late Robert Kroetsch might be another example of this), as well as such overwhelming engagements with political concerns, especially early on in her writing career. And yet, every inch of her work could be considered overwhelmingly and thoroughly present, no matter when one might be encountering it. In an interview Catherine Mavrikakis conducted with Nicole Brossard and Nathanaël, translated into the English by Katia Grubisic, Brossard responds:

The French poet René Daumal said, a novel says something while poetry does something. The whole posture is different, certainly in terms of language, and of the tension in language. Because a writer can shift from one genre to another, we can also ask the question of prose poems, for instance. Why not write a poem, why write a prose poem? It’s because prose balances the peaks of tension, whereas the poem always exists because of the tension in meaning, and therefore in grammar, syntax, and rhetoric. It’s always in the present when you’re reading it, and when you write it. Even if it takes six months to work on a poem, you’re always in the present, you are always in the moment. When you read it, too. And you can’t negotiate with a poem, you can’t say, I love this part of the poem. You love it, or you don’t. A novel – you can like parts of a novel, while other parts you don’t like so much, but it’s negotiable. And it has to do with the span of the text, obviously, its length. It really is a different way to relate to the world, to look at the world, and of course another way to live in the present, to experience one’s own present moment in the language, I think.

Ploughshares : an interview with Erin Wunker

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my seventh post is now up: an interview with Erin Wunker, author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy (BookThug, 2016).

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including an interview with Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, an interview with editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, an interview Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, an interview with Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, an interview with award-winning Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and an interview with award-winning Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

Erin Wunker, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy

I think, now, that there are questions to be asked about access, ownership, and agency. I think, now, that claiming space and having a place at the table of Big Ideas and Important Thinking are not the same thing. I think, as I write myself into being a writer, that there’s a lot of work to be done on so many different levels. Figuring out where and how I stand, myself, seems crucial in order to try to stand with others who are affected differently by aggressions of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, class, and, and, and… (“Introduction: Some Notes for You, Reading”)

The second title in BookThug’s “essais” series, edited by Toronto poet Julie Joosten, is Erin Wunker’s articulate, irreverent and thoughtful Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on everyday life (BookThug, 2016). Borrowing her title from British writer and academic Sara Ahmed’s research blog feministkilljoys, Wunker utilizes the idea of a “feminist killjoy” as one who sees feminism (a term she discusses as being complicated, multi-faceted and even willfully misunderstood) as the belief that all genders have equal value, and the foundations of the patriarchy, a presumed-standard which see maleness as vastly superior, as an argument worth kicking against. Given this, how could any thinking, feeling human imagine anything wrong with feminism? For Wunker, and Ahmed, theirs is to take away the “joy” of the patriarchy via the arguments of feminism. As she writes:

One place to start is with the term “feminist killjoy.” When I told my mother that I was thinking of writing a handbook about how to be a feminist killjoy, she expressed concern. Why did I want to make things harder for myself? Aren’t there enough epithets about willful subjects circulating without me deliberately taking one up for myself? Well, yes and no. The term “killjoy” tends to be derisive: someone who is a wet blanket, who rains on the parade. The person who says “quiet down” to people engaged in riotous laughter. But when appended to the term “feminist,” “killjoy” acquires nuance. “Feminist” is too often understood as inherently and problematically militant. When brought together, “feminist” and “killjoy” trouble the habitual understandings of each other. Double positives? Not quite, but taken together they usefully disrupt expectations and so-called common sense.

Wunker also writes about her own privilege through the process of writing from her own cisgender, white and middle-class perspective, and how the experiences of feminism with one isn’t necessarily the feminism of another (something that has become more prevalent in the arguments around Pride: how whiteness privilege, whether deliberately or otherwise, has pushed aside the founders of the movement that allowed for Pride: women of colour and the trans community); to presume otherwise would be severely reductive, false and counter-productive. Utilizing personal anecdotes, historical and contemporary examples and academic material, Wunker quickly establishes a deceptively informal tone that would allow even the most casual reader an easy entry, as she opens the book into a series of conversations and musings on some rather difficult subject matter. Through the course of her essays, Wunker attempts to discern how best to think, feel and simply be in the world in a positive, respectful and productive way, despite a series of acts and beliefs that work heavily against anyone not exlusively straight, white and male.

I think, upon reflection, that it has to do with what Ahmed warns the feminist killjoy about. It’s not that anger isn’t useful or even necessary for feminist killjoys. In fact, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed writes about the necessity of anger for the feminist movement. Rather, what I read in her words as a caution: Don’t let your anger—especially if it is righteous, especially if you know you’re on the side of right—fool you into thinking that it makes you right. Don’t be precious about your anger, warns Ahmed. Don’t let your anger become a site of oppression—for you, for others—when it can be a site of struggle. Don’t let your own experience of anger—feminist, justified, understandable—become totemic. Don’t let your anger be a stopping point. Don’t let your anger stop you from doing the hard feminist work of killing the joys of a patriarchal culture. Don’t let your anger blind you to the anger others experience, differently. Don’t think your anger is universal. Don’t think because your anger is feminist that it is meaningful for all women. Don’t fetishize your anger.

Composed as “notes,” the book is structured as any critical thesis might be—“Preface: Letter to My Daughter,” “Introduction: Some Notes for You, Reading,” “Chapter 1: Notes on Rape Culture,” “Chapter 2: Notes on Friendships,” “Chapter 3: Notes on Feminist Mothering” and “Postscript: Sometimes Refusal is a Feminist Act”—Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy is smart, funny and visceral, terrifying and wise, and constantly attempting to comprehend, unpack and negotiate into language some extremely complicated cultural and human activities. Her writing is deeply personal and inviting, moving from conversation to theory in a completely natural way, utilizing theory to further that conversation that she knows she is but a small, but necessary, part of.

What if H. and I asked the questions differently? What if, instead of How am I going to teach him not to rape; how am I going to teach her about rape without teaching her to be afraid all the time, we put the questions this way:

How am I going to make sure that he isn’t taught to rape? How am I going to make sure that she isn’t taught to be afraid at a cellular level?

The difference between these questions and the original ones is that they presume a different future is actually possible. Both my friend and I were assuming the inevitabilities of rape culture in our infants’ lives. And that’s understandable. We’ve learned those narratives and inevitabilities ourselves. They’ve become our frames of reference. That’s the joy that needs killing: the sense of inevitability, that sense that rape—doing it or having it done to you—is somehow an inevitable, ever-present reality. Shifting our questions shifts our action, energies, and affects from within (I hope, I hope, I worry, I fret) to with each other. We move from the internalization of rape and rape culture as inevitable towards dialogue with others that positions rape, rape culture, gendered violence, and the associated traumas, big and small, as sites of struggle.

Given the lens of the results of the election south of the border, her chapter on rape is even more chilling, as she writes a recent history of reactions to an act of intimate violence that still manages to be dismissed by media, employers, universities and the law itself. Consider the recent story of the college student who raped an unconscious woman and was barely slapped on the wrist, as a judge suggested that he shouldn’t pay his whole life for a single act (oddly, an argument that wouldn’t fly if it were, say, murder), and that it could hurt his career opportunities. That might be terrifying enough, but to know that a rape charge isn’t enough to even prevent an electorate from voting for President is beyond unthinkable. As she writes:

If, as my editor and friend J. says so astutely, rape culture doesn’t have a linear history in either social memory or in our own biographies, then rape culture is atemporal and it requires atemporal, non-linear methods of putting words one after another to tell it and to tell it again. So if you find yourself automatically rejecting this, rejecting me as your interlocutor, take a moment to reflect on where the root of your rejection stems. From me? Or from the enormity of the joys that need killing?

I found her subsequent chapters – on female friendship and feminist mothering – rather enlightening, including the racist origins of the trope of the “angry black woman,” and her thoughts on feminism and mothering (given our own recent experiences around such, I found some of the personal stories she told of childbirth and mothering utterly charming). Really, anyone interested in culture and how it reacts with itself, or people and how they react with each other need to read this book. Visceral and heartfelt, Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on everyday life is well-researched and clearly thought, bringing in a variety of disparate threads into a coherent comprehension into contemporary culture. There is an enormous amount of information she unpacks here, and clarifies. This book should be considered essential reading.

I’ve read about female friendships described as romances and as the last bastion of truly platonic desire. This narrative appeals to me—it’s resonant with [Lisa] Robertson’s dark body of friendship—but it also makes me wary. It seems to me that recycling one storyline—the romance—means dragging all the sedimented associations of that storyline with you. I’m more interested in naming the ways this world does not make room for female friendship and discussing the ways those frienships form and thrive, despite the world as it is.

And working to build new worlds.

Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras, selected with an introduction by Erin Wunker

Thus far, twenty-first-century poetics has been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other nondominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? (Erin Wunker, “Of Genre, Gender, and Genealogy: The Poetry of Sina Queyras”)

Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras, selected with an introduction by Erin Wunker (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) is the latest ‘critical selected’ in the Laurier Poetry Series, a series now over a decade old and more than two dozen titles deep. Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras includes selections from Queyras’ five published poetry collections—Slip (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001), Teethmarks (Gibson BC: Nightwood, Editions, 2004), Lemon Hound (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), Expressway (Coach House Books, 2009) and M x T (Coach House Books, 2014) [see my review of such here]—leaning far heavier on the more recent collections and less on the earlier books.

The future at a hundred miles an hour, mouths stretched like windsocks. I hate your seamless layers, you know that, but you scratch by, and I am thinking of all the Trojan horses this bay has seen, eleven of them now, bobbing in the harbour, containing who knows what army of product.

Unbelievable views, never did take them for granted. There is a spot just outside the pillar and glass where, when you stand in the pea gravel and whisper to me, standing where I am standing by the totem at the edge of the continent, we can hear all the dead ones singing. (“‘Water, Water Everywhere’”)

The poems that make up Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras show outspoken Montreal-based poet and critic Queyras—author, as well, of a collection of critical prose, Unleashed (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House, 2011)—to be deeply engaged with a poetics in constant flux, and one that works to engage with identity politics, as well as the divide (both real and imaginary) that exists between lyric and conceptual writing. Her writing has long been known for both a pervasive restlessness and an engaged ferocity, and one that has little patience for half-measures. Queyras engages Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in the same breath as she might also speak of Mary Oliver, Lisa Robertson and Vanessa Place, and the breadth of her view somehow manages only to focus her attention. As critic and editor Wunker writes in her introduction: “Queyras’s poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of the collections of poetry she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric, while also leveraging the genre open and letting conceptual in.”

One of the benefits of such a collection, even by those already familiar with Queyras’ work, is in the reminder of just how powerful her writing is, pushing to constantly challenge boundaries, margins and safeties. If you read nothing else, be aware that the longer poem-essay “‘Water, Water Everywhere’” is perhaps the finest example of everything Queyras is doing and has done, all set in the space of a few short pages, writing:

I read Mary Oliver’s poem about angels dancing on the tip of a pin and I kept thinking, She is writing about a penis, Mary Oliver is really a gay man and everything is about AIDS, which made me want to carry Mary Oliver in my pocket.

I could think of no finer way to close such a collection than Queyras’ “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress” (interestingly enough, Queyras is not the first poet in the series to close their collection with a piece more in the shape of a poem than straight prose), reinforcing the notion that hers is a poetics that continually adapts and re-thinks, refusing the fixed point, and willing to constantly be learning. The idea is reminiscent of Jay MillAr, who, after the appearance of his anthology Pissing Ice: an anthology of new Canadian poets (Toronto ON BookThug, 2004), an anthology constructed in part as a more experimental/avant-garde response to some of the more formally-conservative anthologies of Canadian poetry that were appearing around that time, resisted composing a fixed introduction or “poetics.” One can’t set down, easily, if at all, a moving target. As Queyras writes in her end-piece:

Lyric Conceptualism is a poetics of the sentence, but it does not turn its back on the relationship between words, nor the power of prosody, nor the possibility of lyric propulsion. On the other hand, nor does Lyric Conceptualism shy away from the knotted and the complex.

Lyric Conceptualism imagines herself a boat, fluid, without handles, able to slip through definitions, anchor at will.

Lyric Conceptualism is interested in achieving the sculptural.