Jordan Abel, Injun

a)

he played injun in gods country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

where girls turned plum wild

garlic and strained words

through the window of night

he spoke through numb lips and

breathed frontier (“injun”)

The first work I encountered by Vancouver poet Jordan Abel was blind, as part of my time judging the 24th annual Short Grain Competition for Saskatchewan’s Grain magazine in 2012 (he came in second), and the work leapt up at me in a way I’ve rarely experienced. Now some of that same work finally appears in a trade collection, his third—Injun (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016)—after The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Un/inhabited (Talonbooks/Project Space Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. Injun extends Abel’s remarkable series of reclamation projects (or: project) that bring such a freshness, lively energy and engagement to Canadian and North American poetry, engaged with conversations attached to Idle No More and Truth and Reconciliation, and Language/Conceptual Poetries. Anyone suggesting that conceptual writing has no heart, or that contemporary poetry has exhausted itself, really needs to start engaging with Abel’s work.

b)

he heard snatches of comment

going up from the river bank

all them injuns is people first

and besides for this buckskin

why we even shoot at them

and seems like a sign of warm

dead as a horse friendship

and time to pedal their eyes

to lean out and say the truth

all you injuns is just white keys

Abel’s book-length projects open a series of conversations on race, colonization and aboriginal depictions, utilizing settler language and blending an exhaustive research with erasure to achieve an incredible series of inquiries and subversions, twisting racist phrases, ideas and words back in on themselves. In a recent interview posted at Touch the Donkey, Abel wrote: “[…] if your writing is only resistant, only oppositional, only focused on decolonization, you kind of end up writing yourself into a corner. That resistance alone is somehow insubstantial and unsustainable. More or less, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it’s exceptionally important to balance out that resistance with presence. Or perhaps balance out decolonization with resurgence.” He continued:

Primarily, the texts that I’ve focused on as source texts have all been written from a settler-colonial perspective, and, I think, have pointed towards the kinds of foundational knowledges that should be resisted. My challenge, so far, has been to articulate an Indigenous presence from within those texts. TPOS is probably my most accessible example of this. From within Barbeau’s voice comes my own voice, an Indigenous voice. In that resistance and disassembly of Barbeau’s writing an Indigenous presence emerges.

Further, in an October 2014 interview conducted by Elena E. Johnson for Event magazine, Abel discussed the research and erasures that make up the individual book-length components of this ongoing project (specifically, his previous book, Un/inhabited):

Un/inhabited is a study in context. The book itself is draws from 91 Western novels that total over 10,000 pages of source text. Each piece in the book was composed by searching the source text for a specific word that related to the social and political aspects of land use, ownership and property. For example, when I searched for the word “uninhabited” in the source text, I found that there were 15 instances of that word appearing across the 10,000 page source text. I then copied and pasted those 15 sentences that contained the word “uninhabited” and collected them into a discrete unit. The result of this kind of curation is that the context surrounding the word is suddenly visible. How is this word deployed? What surrounds it? What is left over once that word is removed? Ultimately, the book accumulates towards a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.

Abel’s project both engages and works to unsettle, attempting both an ease and unease into the ongoing shame of how aboriginals are treated and depicted in Canada through repetition, erasure and settler language. Simply through usage, Abel forces us, the occupiers, to confront our language, in an effort to reconcile, restore and heal, none of which can truly exist without real conversation. The poems in Injun exist as a single book-length erasure and reclamation project, one with the result of seeing sketched erasures alongside exploded characters that are difficult to replicate within the space of this kind of review. Lines and phrases explode across the page. At the end of Injun, he includes this short “[ PROCESS ],” that writes:

Injun was constructed entirely from a source text comprised of 91 public domain western novels with a total length of just over ten thousand pages. Using CTRL+F, I searched the source text for the word “injun,” a query that returned 509 results. After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three- to five-word clusters. Sometimes I would rearrange the pieces until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together. Injun and the accompanying materials are the result of those methods.

Grain magazine 41.2: matchbook

Frank O’Hara smokes cigarettes and avoids me. Frank O’Hara has adapted his party-mingling so that he’s always on the balcony of Grace Hartigan’s apartment when I’m in the front hallway, always in the living room when I’m in the kitchen, pinned there by James Schuyler, that bitch, rattling my cage. “It’s just embarrassing,” says James, gesturing my dignity away with a highball. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.” (Ben Rawluk, “Frank O’Hara is Never Home”)

The first thing that struck my eye in the new issue of Grain magazine—41.2, “matchbook”—was the poem “Frank O’Hara is Never Home” by Vancouver writer Ben Rawluk. I can’t imagine anyone reading that first stanza, quoted above, and not immediately being charmed. While I do like that every issue is given a name, I’m unclear, exactly, how this one fits. What do they mean, exactly, by “matchbook?” As editor Rilla Friesen writes in her “Editor’s Note,” “Think of this issue of Grain as an incendiary device. What kind of story could spark a change in your life, in the way you think about the world?” It all seems rather arbitrary, honestly, no matter how much I enjoy the work inside. Although I do enjoy the idea of each issue being titled, I do suppose it would be impossible to connect with every one. This issue includes the contest winners to their annual “Short Grain,” with poetry judge Méira Cook picking pieces by Richard Kelly Kemick, Megan Clark and Caroline Wong as her first, second and third place winners, and fiction judge Stan Rogal picking stories by Dylan Levi King, Scott Bartlett and Seyward Goodhand as his first, second and third place winners. As Cook includes in her “From the Poetry Judge” note:

What is the opposite of poetry? It is boredom, it is words following one another in single file, through one-track meanings, through denotation and dumbfounding. Poetry is an indifferent conductor of electricity, I think, which is one of its great strengths. You want those words to short and blow out, you want those synapses to crackle.

            In her introduction to Short Talks, Anne Carson writes about the avoidance of boredom, which if you are a poet is a lifetime’s ardent task. Here is her eloquent, jagged plea: “You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough” (Brick Books, 1992).

There is something fascinating about the poem by Richard Kelly Kemick that won, his “A Note Left on the Dresser,” for its expansive prose-line, somewhere swirling around similar structural territories to Carson and even Cook herself, that includes:

What the Book of Amos calls the Seven Sheep and Edmund calls

Ursa Major, the Inuit call the Caribou. This is because caribou are

one of a paw-full of animals passed over by the blue-atmosphere of the Bible

and Shakespeare. I don’t respect the fact that they didn’t know

the animal existed when all they had to do was look up.

Before you fell asleep, you asked me to define our relationship.

These are the analogies I’ve come up with. I’m in the kitchen, making tea.

The issue also includes six new poems by Toronto writer George Elliott Clarke from “The Canticles,” providing also a short note on the work-in-progress (some of which also appeared in the tenth issue of ottawater, as well as a recent chapbook through above/ground press). As he writes, “Do my ‘Canticles’ follow Pound’s Cantos? Yes, but in retaliatory pursuit.” He writes:

Every writer who claims an “African/Negro” identity must consider slavery sooner or later, for it is the vehicle that transformed our ancestors from being independent peoples to being suppressed beings, mere chattel and seldom citizens (except for when courts mandated their execution). Worse—or better yet—the wealth that still floats the NATO nations derives from the four centuries of branding “Blacks” and disbanding “Indians.” Behind the amassing of that lucre there lurks, however, a history of rape and massacre and pillaging: The Terror that Europe unleashed on Africa and the Americas. This chronicle provides the grounds for my epic-in-progress, which follows Pound’s dictum that the epic traces history.

            I began “The Canticles” In Zanzibar in February 2008. Its tripartite structure is vaguely Dantean. I: “The Book of Origins” is my Inferno, featuring discourses on racism and slavery—pro-and-con, espoused by characters both historical and invented. II: “The Book of Beauty” is a kind of Limbo, offering revisions of religious texts according to “Black folk” theology. III: “History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia”—my Paradiso—narrates the rise of the African Baptist Church of Nova Scotia (proclaimed into existence in 1853).

            Three pseudo-Oulipo constraints also govern this writing: No poem can be written in m current home city of Toronto. (These poems are travel writing, in a sense, then.) Moreover, in most of the poems, I cannot know what I am going to write until I have already begun to write. Surprise—organic—is the method. Thus, the “Caprichos” poems got started automatically at a bullfight in Madrid, Spain, in October 2012. (A visit to the Prado convinced me that the speaker could only be Goya.) Similarly, the Tangiers poem got written in Morocco. However, “The New York Times Uncovers Arson” got inked in a surprisingly nice (airport shuttle-connected) hotel outside Venezia, in September 2012: Thus, I was astonished by the carnage that my reporter witnessed. Thirdly, “The Canticles” must be written in real ink by fountain pen: No substitutions permitted.

And then, of course, there is the intriguing and utterly charming statement by “Featured Artists” in the issue, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, that reads:

These paintings are the result of our regular practice of meeting on Wednesday evenings and making paintings while looking at books and listening to music. The paintings are meant to be complete thoughts when finished.

            There is no imagery for its own sake. It adds up to something.

            A frog crawls out of a woman’s nose. Why is it there? It’s perfectly natural. It’s a frog’s nose. A lion cries his eyes out. Why is he so sad? Because we all know that lions have thorns in their paws. A woman marries an evergreen tree. We all know it won’t last. Even she knows it won’t last, but it’s what is in her heart at that moment and she needs to play it through. A grandfather becomes a literal dinosaur with spines growing out of his back to cool his blood. A single red shoe hangs from a branch, because you should always be aware of what might happen in the woods.

            You only get a bit of the conversation, but you know where it’s going. Home is where the heart is.

grain magazine 41.1: home-myths

My artistic practice is and always has been based on the creation of fictive characters who perform distilled psychological, social and experiential narratives in painting tableaux, drawing, and painting-based installation. Central themes that have occupied my work have included issues of desire and sexuality, gender identity, intimacy, and relationships to self and other. Over the past number of years I have worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing an intuitive and improvisational layered painting process to determine the eventual form and content of the work. In this way, my process has the quality and sensation of being a director, writer, casting agent, costume and set designer, for a compressed film or fiction that slips and glimpses, and that occupies a single field—yet remains unfolding. (Eliza Griffiths)

It’s great to see the work of former Ottawa visual artist Eliza Griffiths featured in the new issue of Grain magazine, subtitled “home-myths” (a detail of her "Love Story/Fear Eats the Soul (after RWF)," 2013, is reproduced on the cover). Griffiths was one of the early members of The Enriched Bread Artists collective over on Gladstone Avenue, and I featured her work in an issue of Missing Jacket magazine back around 1996. There is something about her work that has always been quite striking; able to paint variations of similar faces, and yet, each managing their own personalities. As always, the details are deepest in the eyes, becoming more ghost-like as the image ripples outward. The characters she paints exist almost entirely within the scope of the face, and she manages to create real people we haven’t yet met.

The issue themes around a fairly familiar trope – the idea of home, and the myth-making that can’t help but occur. “We mythologize our past,” editor Rilla Friesen writes in her “Editor’s Note.” It harks back to a line from John Newlove, in which he reminded us that the past is, indeed, a foreign country. As Friesen writes: “The works in ‘Home-Myths’ each have a different balance of geography/love. If there is no fixed home place, the need for love is increased.” I’m uncertain I agree with her thesis—she should read the piece Yann Martel wrote, “Philadelphia Green Blue – Musings on the Meaning of Home,” from the anthology Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1997). Home is simply an idea, and to have no specific sense of home does not necessarily make one groundless. Still, there are some impressive pieces in this issue, from the short, descriptive lyric of Anita Dolman, the myth-lyric of Jessica Bebenek, and the two historical/myth lyrics by Catherine J. Stewart. There are pieces here on Snow White, Daphne and Apollo, weddings, Lamborghinis, Mahler, Freud and Nazis, millennials, and various incarnations of what could be called home.

Galena

Claim staked in 1883—

Jubilee Mountain marked,

measured, owned.

____

Over 70 years, Galena ore—

silver, lead, zinc—clawed out

of the mountain, ballast

shipped out of the valley.

____

Barite, white dust dredged

from the tailings ponds, rose

from the ore trucks and settled

into the clothes hanging on the line. We

wore it to school, basketball games.

We danced in it.

____

The ducks we plucked

on the hillside, breasts filled

with shot made from Galena ore,

lead finding its way home (Catherine J. Stewart)

Grain magazine 40.2: short grain contest issue,

A

he played injun in god’s country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

where girls turned plum wild

garlic and strained words

through the window of night

he spoke through numb lips and

breathed frontier (“injun,” Jordan Abel)

The “short grain contest issue” of Grain magazine is newly out, along with poems by the three prize-winners I picked as poetry judge. Picking from a stack of numbered poems, I selected a piece by Sean Howard for first prize, a piece by Jordan Abel for second, and a piece by Kate Marshall Flaherty for third. The fiction judge this time around was Lawrence Hill, who selected short fictions by Susan Mersereau, Madeline Sonik and Alexandra Sadinoff for first, second and third prizes. Before judging this contest, I hadn’t even heard of Vancouver poet Abel or Toronto poet Flaherty, and was quite taken with the work of Abel, to the point that I immediately had to find out where he was, and solicited a chapbook manuscript from him (his above/ground press title appeared earlier this month, and he even has his first trade collection out this year with Talonbooks).

The judges for this year’s contest, deadline April 1, 2013, are Toronto writer Stan Rogal for fiction, and Winnipeg writer Méira Cook for poetry.

Not that the issue is only and all about contests; Sandra Ridley has two remarkable poems in the new issue, titled “XIII” and “XV,” obviously part of a longer sequence that I would love to see at some point. Part of “XIII” reads:

When your darling thinks of it. When she was concerned with it then. When she believed in the meticulous awareness of sundries of detail. Despair became her whole history. She had a lack of willingness. A lack of discipline.

Her crudest form.

With the same insistence. She is compelled to tendency. Falls with a rigorous ferocity.

Perpetual.

            Bitten arms.

                        Bitten hands.

Each imposition accumulated a certain privilege. A catechism given willingly. Or by force. A little later. You relegated her to her bed where you attached her true name. There. Your darling remains. Her body more constant than her mind.

                                                            Beside herself. Each confusion interchangeable.

She comes along. She comes happy.

Poet Emily Carr also has five new poems in the issue, influenced by the Tarot deck. As her biographical note reads, she is the author of “a Tarot novel. While Writer-in-Residence at Camac Centre d’Art, she composed Straight No Chaser on ‘the poetry of fear.’”

MESSIAH ON PAROLE

knight of wands

As if you were grass or dead—

The truth hums, the truth trembles. The truth holds.

(What do you want you ought to make up your mind.

Solitary for months Lord & she has learned to live directly—

(There’s been a change of wings at the drive-in.

Whitely I am ready to be Liberty says broken apart, revealed,

reborn—

(Or do you believe I have no plot, even this was taken from

me, as all lies are…

(Would you catch that feeling: in fire & algebra, as windows

are opened, & a bomb is manoeuvered—)

& how she had become human to survive. & would she survive.

Quixotic when you say what is this festival of wet everywhere?

When you say “the sun burns & the lark is singing” what do you mean?

Come again?

What is the heroine to/do when love becomes transparent,

I mean treacherous—

The journal also celebrates forty years, a landmark that Toronto journal Descant recently celebrated as well. What does one gift for the journal that turns forty?

Here is the short “from the poetry judge” note I wrote, included in the issue:

There is an argument I’ve heard against author bios, most often heard after I make any kind of public complaint about a journal that excludes them, whether New American Writing or BafterC. Just who are some of these writers I’m reading? It’s the first thing I usually read in any lit journal. I always want to know more, get some context to the writing in front of me. Is there more I can read? A book, a chapbook, perhaps?

After going through the poetry entries for the 2012 Short Grain Competition, I think I understand the counter-argument a bit better now, able to read through a wealth of poems without interference or biographical baggage. I still haven’t changed my mind on the matter, but at least now I understand.

Perhaps this was why former Grain editor Sylvia Legris thought to bring me on to judge this year’s contest. Legris, who disagrees with me entirely on the issue. Perhaps this was her way to show and not tell, allowing me to come to my own realization. Or, perhaps, I’m simply reading far too much into this, as I so often do.

Contests can be difficult things, for a whole array of reasons, the most notable being, simply, that it is one person’s particular point-of-view. This might not be the list that you, reader, might have picked. This list is short, and simple-sweet. I picked the poems that struck me, and wouldn’t let me set them aside. I picked the poems I thought were doing the most interesting things, in the most interesting ways, according to my own particular biases. This is more difficult than one might think, if you haven’t gone through the process.

“Judging” implies so many things, a word packed with connotations. Let’s just say I opinioned, instead. Let’s just say I offered. As requested, here are the poems of this stack of pieces I thought deserving of prize-winning, in order:

FIRST PRIZE: "something like being (five flights, for rafi),"

I’ve long favoured the sequence, and this short-lined poem is fragmented, and entirely compact, packing in a space slightly smaller than the poem. Not all needs to be said to be articulated. In this poem, speech is made out of single words, and less than. It can be that simple, that complicated.

SECOND PRIZE: "injun,"

I’m fascinated by the movement here, the halts and spaces, the rhythms of this abecedarian-fragment, poems “j” to “o” of “injun.” Is there a full sequence somewhere of these? I’d love to see them. I liked very much how the poem questions and keeps questioning, the troubled naming of the title, the troubled past and complicated present. The politics and social upheavals are here, patterned through the broken words, the broken speech and hypnotic movements. I am so taken with just how this poem ebbs and breaks, and ebbs and flows.

THIRD PRIZE: "Gullywash,"

It was the last couplet I kept returning to, again and again. Something about those last two lines entirely struck, sharp and fantastic. There is a flood that happens, “Clears whole towns / in its wake.” Incredible. Otherwise, the opening strikes for its ruckus laughter, its language-play nearly subversive for the fact that it looks so damned fun. I admire the joy that moves through here, especially given the dark places the poem goes, without dismissing or diminishing the seriousness of that dark. Why do so many poems have to be dour?