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

 

Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory: “Spirit, Experimental Poetry & 21st Century” (final issue)

The tradition of avant-avant was historically & culturally predisposed towards many theological predilections, we agree and admit. Okay, so hello to a logic of ‘of course-ness.’ Even if the every-act of allusion was denial and subversion and impulse. But the roundness is a lineage and the veins thin and ebb, but never sever: … Four Horsemen, bill bissett, D.A. Levy, Gary Snyder, … Susan Howe, And now we can consider Darren Wershler’s the tapeworm foundry as confessional liturgy and Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina as souled text robot-god. History persists in our mystical ever-present. (kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jake Kennedy, “Editorial Invocation: Hearts are Words Living Inside Everyone’s Language-Spirit!”)

It’s sad to see the final issue of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory hit the stands after some five decades of publication [see the profile I did on Davey and Open Letter over at Open Book: Ontario this past spring, here]. Through its lengthy run, overseen by editor, publisher and founder Frank Davey, Open Letter has critically explored and encouraged the Canadian and international avant-garde through essays, interviews, manifestos, festshrifts, conference proceedings and the publication of works that would be difficult to find otherwise, and the loss of the journal, despite the possibilities of the internet (online journals such as Jacket2 and Lemonhound have since picked up some of what was, for years, a mandate nearly exclusively seen in Open Letter), will be felt for some time. The fall 2013 issue of Open Letter (15^th Series, No. 4) is “Spirit, Experimental Poetry, & 21^st Century,” guest-edited by frequent collaborators kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jake Kennedy. The collection of pieces, set into sections “Meditations,” “Mediums,” “Epistolaries” and “Rites,” is quite magnificent, including essays, interviews and creative work by, with and about Marie Annharte, bpNichol, Andrew McEwan, Robert Majzels, Jordan Scott, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jeremy Stewart, Mat Laporte, Fenn Stewart, Sina Queyras, Tim Lilburn, Ken Belford, Kathleen Brown, Jonathan Ball, Robert Fitterman and Mark Goldstein. The mixture is lively, energetic and even confusing, managing a fantastic energy that make me wish that perhaps these two could have even taken over the journal.

Poetry as a Spiritual Endeavour

In the small mostly white Albertan city where I grew up, most kids went to Sunday school even if their parents didn’t attend church. I rejected that God a long time ago. I couldn’t reconcile my Chinese grandma going to hell, and there was already a lot of hell on earth in my childhood and I didn’t have time to worry about the one that would come later. So, although I’m not religious, I do see poetry as a spiritual endeavor.

            For me poetry functions as a cathartic and catalyzing force. Whether to make space to mourn, to learn, to think through, this is the affective strategy and spiritual intent of my poetry. It is imbued with the same sense of hope I derive from seeing the eagles soaring over the Women’s Memorial March every year. The march, which began in 1991 in response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, honours the lives of missing and murdered women, and reminds the public that poor and racialized women continue to be disappeared and murdered. I don’t know what to believe in when I see so much injustice. But when I bear witness to the eagles guiding us at the march year after year, that they know, then I believe all is possible. (Mercedes Eng)

There is an interview-conversation between Toronto writers Mat Laporte and Fenn Stewart that is quite striking, some thoughts on Walter Benjamin by Mark Goldstein, and some very cool visual works by Robert Fitterman, Billy Mavreas and Kathleen Brown. One the real highlights of the issue has to be Jordan Scott’s interview with M. NourbeSe Philip, “Witch is Which?: Sycorax and Setaey within Zong!” in which the interviewer renders himself (on the surface, at least) invisible, allowing the author to speak without interference:

Prospero calls her out of her name – the “blue ey’d hag,” “the damn’d witch” who lay with the “devil himself.” She is Sycorax, Caliban’s mother – the cipher, named yet unseen, who stands in for all that is subterranean and subaqueous. Sycorax’s genealogy stretches back and forwards to include those like her who carry a certain kind of knowing; within that genealogy I place Setaey Adamu Boateng (she is identified as the voice of the Ancestors on the cover of Zong!) – she who recounds the story that can only be told by not being told; the story that can never, yet must, be told. Perhaps, it is she who is the story that is always told yet never told.

Another highlight has to be the magnificent “Alternative Approaches to Indigenous Literary Criticism and Resistance Writing Practice” by Marie Annharte:

What if there was no longer need to refer wistfully to a “renaissance” because of the great frequency that Indigenous authored works now enter the North American literary canon or bookstore? What to read and study might equally confound any novice or advanced academic scholar. Because many published Indigenous authors are university instructors or educators, the continuance of their literary careers would certainly help multiply publications. They could buddy up with other Canadian writers to enjoy the fruits of labour rewarded by a government-subsidized publishing industry and writing awards or grants. Personal resources like a higher and regular income would no doubt further ensure latent abilities to voice one’s own story or even that of others. This elite corps would provide leadership and inspiration to attain more representation of diversities within the ranks of both aspiring and established Indigenous writers. Moving right along to join the ranks of political leadership, the Indigenous writer or “word warrior” would be an impressive force for change. It is all to the good except for the nagging question: would they necessarily be engaged in a resistance writing practice? Would understanding the diversity of Indigenous literatures alone be enough momentum to increase the participation of Indigenous writers? Would engaging in literary criticism increase more of a readership base within Indian Country itself? What if the continuous nature of Indigenous everyday reality was to intrude into a developing phenomena of more Indigenous writers and more writing?

Perhaps the only frustration over the years with Open Letter over the past number of years has been in terms of relative availability, given the possibilities of the internet, and the limitations of print (and Canada Post). We will both celebrate and mourn you, Open Letter; and we will strive to do better at what you managed to do so very well for so very long.

Profile on Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, now up at Open Book: Ontario

My profile of Frank Davey's Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, with a few questions, is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

Open Letter, Fifteenth Series, Number 2: Olson @ the Century

Despite the occultation of Olson’s reputation, a return to his ideas and writing is more urgent than ever. What are the stakes of polis in an imminent world of neo-Liberalism, the quantitative accumulation of wealth in a small coterie of corrupt malefactors, the rise of fundamentalist ideals proactively eroding the boundaries between State and Church, and the immersion of heterogeneities into the economic and fiscal homogenous condition dubbed globalization? Olson is the poet who introduced scale and ontology into poetics, radically revising natural history into the human universe, seeing the earth as our home. His Copernican revolution within poetics (“man is himself an object”) together with his commitment to a theory of communication and information that goes far beyond the centralized cerebellum of the Cartesian cogito, rendered him the exemplary poet of the Cybernetic Age. And with the earth on the brink of ecological disaster and language enmeshed in the age of informatics, Olson appears as a prophet and perhaps a destroying angel. (We should also pay credit to Olson’s pioneering work in what later emerged as Ethnopoetics. His studies of Mayan glyphs, though hardly resulting in a decoding, do inflect an interest in non-Romanic writing systems and in pre-Columbian culture that offers an eccentricating parallel to his theory of proprioception). (Steve McCaffery, “Introduction”)

With talk of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory winding down after some forty-plus years comes an issue guest-edited by Steve McCaffery, “Olson @ the Century” (Fifteenth Series, Number 2, Spring 2013). As McCaffery writes in his introduction: “With the exception of Frank Davey’s, Stephen Fredman’s, and Miriam Nichol’s articles, the present collection of essays is based on papers initially presented as part of Olson@ the Century. An Archival and Projective Reconsideration, a symposium held at the University at Buffalo October 14-16, 2010. Conceived less as an homage to or an attempted reinstallation of Olson’s ideas and theories, the symposium was envisioned as a double-vectored reassessment along the two trajectories named in the title: archival and projective. The ‘projective’ reassessments are presented first; three archival contributions end the gathering.” The issue comes at an interesting time, when most of the current attention on that particular period of American poetry is focused on Robert Duncan, with the publication of Duncan’s The H.D. Book (eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman; University of California Press, 2011), The Collected Early Poems and Plays (ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2012) and The Collected Later Poetry and Plays (ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2013), and the collection of essays, Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (eds. Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons; University of Iowa Press, 2012), as well as Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus (University of California Press, 2012). Given that the conference happened three years ago, why is this collection only coming into print now?

Place, as it unrolls in The Maximus Poems, is not simply a geographical point; it is an intense, multi-dimensional nexus of vectors that include a prehistory, a geological narrative, a geography, multiple human histories and criss-crossing myths, technological mediators, and as well the individual’s own genealogy and inner landscape. Olson draws on state of the art contemporary discourses such as Einsteinian physics, Jungian psychology, Sauerian geography and Whiteheadian philosophy to put together a locus that is complexly alive. He then suggests that individuals hold themselves responsible to it. (Miriam Nichols, “The Closing of the Field: Modernism at the Wall”)

There is an interesting selection of letters from Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, four letters stretching from 1953 to 1970, selected from The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley that Kaplan Harris, Rod Smith and Peter Baker have put together for the University of California Press, to appear this fall. The letters highlight aspects of Creeley’s encouragement, shaping and working Olson’s image. One footnote reads, “The letters chronicle the fact that Creeley was instrumental in shaping the Olson canon. We see Creeley take an active hand in the publication and promotion of Olson’s writing. We also see Creeley continue to be involved with Olson legacy for the duration of his own life, from editing Olson’s Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1993) to advising friends and colleagues on approaches for teaching his work to a new generation of students.” What becomes clear about this collection of pieces on Olson and his work is in how each contributor to the collection manages to talk about Olson directly by dealing with him indirectly, nearly through the works and words of others. Miriam Nichol’s essay, “The Closing of the Field: Modernism at the Wall traces a compelling thread from Charles Olson’s views of history and identity through Ezra Pound to Erin Mouré’s work on the idea of the citizen. As Nichols writes:

            Elsewhere, in the poetry collection O Cidadán, and in her essays, My Beloved Wager, Mouré links her on-going meditation on such transformative properties to a study of citizenship. For Mouré, the inequity and suffering caused by globalization do not call for a return to nationalism in the traditional sense because nationalism implies entitlements and exclusions dependent on a concept of origin. She writes that “historical and national entitlement (a notion warped and split by colonialisms) always seems to mean some people have to die or be denied full citizenship in the policy, denied use of their language, because of their origins. Faced with this, what use are ‘origins’?” (159). Instead, Mouré speaks of “assemblages of the person” or “coalects” (MBW 156, original emphasis); borders that are porous and leaky, bodies that are permeable, identities that are fluid, wonderstruck and eager for transport. The self, she says, has its “two avenues (that of autonomy, standing before the self, and that of the other, standing before those who precede one)” and those “play through and against each other […].”

A particularly interesting essay is Davey’s end-piece, “Olson in Canada,” writing about Olson’s influence on Canadian writers and writing, particularly his lack of influence on writers in eastern Canada, such as Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek. The influence Olson had on writers in the west, particularly Vancouver, is well-known and Davey names names, including Ottawa poet William Hawkins, who drove west with Roy MacSkimming to participate in the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. Considering that Souster brought Olson up to Toronto as part of his infamous Contact Reading Series, the lack of change in Toronto poetry reads as particularly willful by some. As Davey writes, “Overall, this period of Olson’s contact with Canadian writers appears to do little more than make them aware of his poetics and of the formal possibilities they offered. Only Dudek shows any significant understanding of them, and is unimpressed. Souster is impressed but seemingly unable to understand well enough to make sustained use of them.” The interaction made little difference on Souster’s writing, but impacted his editorial significantly, as Davey notes a number of future Contact authors who picked up elements of Olson’s writing, including George Bowering and Davey himself. Still, one of the most striking parts of Davey’s essay is the clarification of how exactly Olson’s work influenced Canadian writing: “One of the oddities of Canadian attention to Olson is that even though most of it occurs during the 1960s, it is the Olson of the 1950s – of ‘Projective Verse,’ written in the late 1940s and first published in 1950, and of the first three books of ‘The Maximus Poems,’ that are most influential. Only those who followed him to Buffalo – Wah and Hogg – seem to have found much to learn from in the later books.” About Souster, Davey writes:

Souster’s lack of change, however, may not have been as conscious or deliberate as Whiteman hints. There are several places in his letters to Olson where he appears to regret not understanding Olson’s poems and theories as fully as he would like, or where he apologizes for the limitations of his own poems – in one instance sending Olson a new poem and commenting “not much, I’m afraid, but I suppose typical stuff right now, not really making it” (78). Acknowledging one’s own limitations does not necessarily mean that one has choen to have them. Moreover, Olson seems to have received positively what poems Souster did show him. When Donald Allen proposed to include Irving Layton and Gael Turnbull in his The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology in order to show that the new poetry had international reach, Olson quickly replied “lawd if you are going to include Canadians, above all pick Souster for yr center, there – especially for such an anthology, for he and not that Englishy slicky Layton or that nice Migrant Gael: lawd Souster is the one who has for years caught on that the American thing exists for use: ex/ his Contact-Combustion, as against anything Montreal etc” (Maud 60).