Ian Williams, Word Problems

 

While a white man waits for me to answer he is searching his inner Wikipedia for a fact or a current event about the island or continent I am. Carnival, genocide, pirates, cruise lines, a woman he used to work with, blood diamonds on the soles of her shoes, a-wa a-wa. The list could be longer. He knows a lot about where I am from whether I am from there or not. (“WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM”)

In Vancouver poet and fiction writer (and multiple award-winner) Ian Williams’ fifth trade book and third poetry title—after You Know Who You Are (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2010) and Personals (Calgary AB: Freehand Books, 2012)—is Word Problems (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), he manages to explore a series of impossible and ineffable questions through the context of the grade school “word problem” with incredible tension, compassion and intelligence. There’s an enormous amount of play going on in these poems, the kind of “serious play” that the late Toronto poet bpNichol also strived for, allowing language and word-play combined with potentially weighty subject matter. Williams’ play includes swirling visuals and a twist on the classic grade-school “word problems,” including a back-cover “Answer Key,” that begins: “Capitalize Black. Please correct your pronunciation. / Don’t nobody love you, playa. / The world is not a schoolbook math problem. Solve for y. / Keep your hands off people.”

Holly is first in the program to welcome members of government. She has forgotten the names of the land on which she is living. As the caregiver of a father with dementia, she recognizes this lapse as satisfying one of the diagnostic questions. She checks. She knows what month it is. She can recall the name of the Prime Minister. She used to live in Vancouver. Now Squamish, Musqueam, and three syllables. Who in the room will behead her online? (“WORD PROBLEMS”)

Williams sets his attentions on the limitations of language even as he manages to expand their possibilities, writing out the ways in which language and people often take time to catch up to new ideas, and how difficult some of those navigations can be. Too often, progress is hindered by outdated considerations that dig in their heels, and through Word Problems, Williams approaches complicated and uncomfortable issues of language, race, inequity, poverty and class issues via word games, reveling in wordplay and visual flourish to articulate serious questions. “You believe bicycles / will save mankind.” he writes, in “ICEBERG,” “You’d find a more gender-sensitive / word for mankind. You are kind. Not one of a – one of a / genus maybe but not – kind. I know three evenings / of you. Everything else I had to make up in the night / so they wouldn’t steal your body. For instance / or is it for example your parents rolled you from / their flippers then when you hatched your father spit / milk you’re your tiny beak.” Utilizing crossword puzzles and theory, visual poems and blind spots and microaggressions, he wants you to pay attention better than you have been. He wants you to do something with that attention. Are you?

 

The Capilano Review 3.34 (Winter 2018)

It is uncommon on this unceded Coast Salish land called “Vancouver” to see the radiant faces of so many black people in one room; more familiar are we with those rare, unexpected moments when we see another solitary “i” in this city, as Ian Williams so aptly notes in “Our eyes meet across yet another room,” that the on-stage dialogue last June between Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, and David Chariandy felt like a long-awaited gift. We left invigorated. What was the work of words for us as students, activists, creators? David Chariandy—our professor for only three months that summer but someone we now envision as a lifelong mentor—encouraged us to follow this thread. He connected us with The Capilano Review’s former editor, Andrea Actis, another new mentor, and thus this special issue of TCR on “the work of words” was born.

            When we began to curate this issue, we were unsure of how the submissions might come together, as might be the case with any collaborative venture. We’d invited contributors with the prompt What is “the work of words” for black creators now? and excitedly awaited their interpretations of the question. Despite our uncertainty, we were awestruck by the conversation that we saw between the pieces. This issue is not just held together by blackness, nor does it attempt to provide a definition of blackness. These pieces capture a multiplicity of black joy, fear, desire, communion, sorrow, and life. (Emmanuelle Andrews and Katrina Sellinger, “Editors’ Note”)

Guest-edited by Emmanuelle Andrews and Katrina Sellinger, The Capilano Review 3.34 (Winter 2018) centres itself around, as the editors suggest, the “work of words” for black creators, including works by a wide range of contemporary writers and artists including Sonnet L’Abbé, Emmanuelle Andrews, Phanuel Antwi, Juliane Okot Bitek, Deanna Bowen, David Bradford, Dionne Brand, Lila Bristol, David Chariandy, Wayde Compton, Pedro Daher, Caleb Femi, Jalen Frizzell, Joy Gyamfi, Aisha Sasha John, Lucia Lorenzi, Canisia Lubrin, Cecily Nicholson, Katrina Sellinger, Christina Sharpe, Ian Williams and Mariko Yeo. One of the highlights has to be a conversation between Brand, and Sharpe after they delivered the 2017Shadbolt Lecture at Simon Fraser University on June 9, 2017, “an edited excerpt from their onstage dialogue moderated by David Chariandy”:

DC: Earlier, Christina was generous enough to visit my class. Some of my students are here right now. And there was a moment in which you invited us—in this powerful way—to contemplate what is the weather like here, how do particular ecologies of anti-Blackness work out in specific sites of the African diaspora?

CS: Right. How do you have microclimates where you can actually get something else done, so that there are lateral moves where you have a kind of microclimate. You’re working toward liberation, but you have these micro-moments—like in Bail Out Black Mamas in the US. You’re working toward prison abolition, and you’re working toward the end of cash bail. But you have these moments where, in the midst of working toward that, you also do this other thing, I think of those as microclimates within a larger climate of violence in which you try to create a sustainable life. In which you don’t accede to everything that would try to suffocate you, to all of the forces that are intent on that kind of suffocation.

DC: Which is why, I must say, I find work written by both of you so profoundly important in that you allow us to chart those connection between those microclimates, those different spaces, landscapes, and geographies. Your projects have never been confined to specific national or regional spaces. They prove themselves global in orientation while demonstrating close attention to specific places.

DB: I also think that just writing, itself, is that. It creates those microclimates, if you will. Because to make a poem, for me, is to create the space where not only the vulgar and brutal exists but language opens places where someone might actually recognize themselves outside of the short instrumental stereotypic location that in public they occupy—or in the public they occupy. So, I think writing is in itself a space where that happens or can happen.

When Drake hosted Saturday Night Live in 2016, he appeared in the sketch “Black Jeopardy,” which attempted to highlight the fact that American “Blackness” can be a very different thing than Canadian “Blackness,” in part due to an entirely different set of experiences, references and ideas, despite whatever commonalities might exist. And yet, this is something that seems less obvious than the fact that a myriad, even a cornucopia and potential series of contradictions, of “Blackness” exist within each country, much of which is still being articulated, whether by Morgan Parker, Eve L. Ewing, Tonya M. Foster, Shane McCrae, Danez Smith and multiple others in and across the United States, and by Canadian writers including those in the current issue, as well as Kaie Kellough, JustJamaal the Poet and George Elliott Clarke (and so many, many others). This is a small part of a large, evolving and ongoing conversation, and one that I am pleased to engage with, as both reader and listener. As Ian Williams writes as part of his poem “Where are you really from”:

While a white man waits for me to answer he is searching

his inner Wikipedia for a fact or a current event about the

island or continent I am. Carnival, genocide, pirates, cruise

lines, a woman he used to work with, blood diamonds on

the soles of her shoes, a-wa a-wa. The list could be longer.

He knows a lot about where I am from whether I am from

there or not.

snow day (excerpts from a work-in-progress,

            Here is a system. Time pours from its mouth.

                        Lisa Robertson, The Weather

First thing this morning, Christine and I each receive an email regarding the cancellation of buses across the school board. The warmer temperatures bring the potential for freezing rain. We live too close to the school to take the bus; for the cancellations to affect us. I still bundle both children for the sake of our Rose, and another day of junior kindergarten. Neither cancelled, nor snow: what kind of snow day is that?

Anna Gurton-Wachter responds to my email. Monty Reid responds to my email. Nikki Sheppy responds to my email. Stephen Brockwell responds to my email. Neil Flowers responds to my email. Pearl Pirie responds to my email. David O’Meara responds to my email. Annick MacAskill responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Sarah Burgoyne responds to my email. Shazia Hafiz Ramji responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. natalie hanna responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email.

Ian Williams responds to a photograph of my home office: “Don’t you feel perpetually overwhelmed?”

“I saw the photo of your writing desk and wanted to close the door.”

*

When I repeat a story, it is because I am close to learning something new about it.

The willingness to explore an already familiar terrain. Freezing rain.

Rose barely notices. Our toddler, Aoife, remains unimpressed. Fixed, in a grimace.

My father’s boyhood story of his overactive dog, losing a leg to machinery. My father’s boyhood story of his overactive three-legged dog.

The snow and the driveway and the entire fabric of nature. Out of memory, out of sight. I will not leave the house.

When I repeat a story. What might I have missed.

Reading Kate Greenstreet, I’m held by the integrity of her collage and coherence. “All our bones, and the mountains.” Rereading Rosmarie Waldrop, the linear abstracts of her Blindsight. I am attempting, yet again, to describe.

Snowmen, sizzle. A break in the tide. Are we meant to apologize.

For the weather, I mean. The snow. A Canadian stereotype. I’m sorry.

*

A year ago, I wove a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair into a poem. In the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, a lock of her chestnut brown set under glass.

Mt. Holyoke, where Emily Dickinson was classmates with the Robertson sisters, far from their Glengarry County. Margaret Murray, who would go on to become a successful novelist, and Mary, called home by her father, for the sake of marriage. Mary, who became mother to novelist Ralph Connor, literary pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Gordon, who himself would become father and grandfather to novelists.

That I could write. That I could also write. As I am writing.

Sacred Emily. From Gertrude Stein’s 1913 notebook: “Foolish is foolish is.”

The first impulse with fresh snow: to make a mark upon it.

In an email, Samuel Ace writes: “Emily haunts the whole valley on that side of the river – from Amherst to South Hadley. There’s a specific New England interiority – brought on by the snow and the quiet of the woods – that I feel so strongly when I’m there. One has to scratch one’s way into being.”