What’s
the matter with you
I remember my back pressed hot into the sandbar
one second before my brothers pour water from red buckets onto my tanned belly
and I jump up screaming. Exactly one second later I downplay my reaction to not
give them the satisfaction. It’s a game of pretend I continue for a lifetime.
Elif Batuman in The Idiot writes, “It can be really exasperating to look back
at your past. What’s the matter with you?
I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, he
would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.” We regulate our responses to be
likeable thereby rendering ourselves weak and undesirable. Only to ourselves,
though, only ourselves.
Flourish (Toronto ON: ECW
Press, 2019) is Vancouver poet Jacqueline Turner’s fifth poetry collection,
after Into the Fold (2000), Careful (2003), Seven Into Even (2006) and The Ends of the Earth (2013), all of which have been published by ECW Press
through editor Michael Holmes. Some of the poems in Flourish are reminiscent of certain works by Margaret Christakos,
Rachel Zucker or Anne Carson for their own lyric explorations, composing poems
as small studies, and allowing different levels of the personal and
interpersonal into the body of their poems. The poems of Turner’s Flourish, predominantly a book of prose
poems, utilize an exploration of language as its base, and the materials of her
life as the means through which she makes those explorations. We might even
compare the idea to similar structures of language exploration Vancouver writer George Bowering utilized in his Autobiology
(Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1972), but Turner’s,
while writing out a number of remembrance single-stanza prose poems, is more
conscious of reading and writing, source materials and the composition of the
poem-essay. Turner writes out memories around her children and of them growing
into adulthood, memories of her own childhood and siblings, and the low
expectations put upon her (as a girl growing up in the 1980s, and into the
1990s), and of her experiences moving into and through emerging author, of “a
desire constructed for me by books and also television.” (“New York
Intellectuals”). As part of a 2013 interview, Turner spoke of the beginnings of the manuscript:
I’m working on a new manuscript called Flourish because I’ve spent quite a lot
of time on dealing with the ends of things so I thought it would be good to
explore how language operates when things are going well. I like the idea of an
exuberant text so I’m experimenting with letting the writing break open and
burst forth. The rush is an element I’ve used formally in my writing — the rush
of the long line prose poem — as well as the mode of compression where language
is put under pressure in short imagistic stanzas, so I guess I want to see
what’s between the extremes of concision and excess.
Set
in five sections—Flourish: Studies,” “New Nostalgia” “Flourish: Poems” and “Flourish:
Declarative Sentences”—the title of her first section suggest writing as a
field of study, and her prose poems do come through in a rush; one that appears
highly considered, each word and phrase weighed before set on the page, but
with such an ease of flow akin to a sudden release of water. What becomes
curious is in the title of her third section, highlighting and specifying “poems”
in a section where the pieces included aren’t prose poems or prose sections,
but shaped in the more traditional structure of lyric poems. As the poem “‘Texts
against images and vise versa’” opens:
it was meant to be simple
like teaching the alphabet to a plant
we repeated our favourite lines over
and over until they divided and multiplied
a clipping, a letter is all there is
at the start of things
a lush touch a rush of fingers entwined
we know it means love in the raw sense
but we reach for the poetic anyway still
Flourish is a collection that
works to take stock, looking forward, back and at the present moment,
attempting a sense of placement, of movement, striking out with every source of
information she can muster, from the source materials of her own memories to
that of her own reading. Flourish is
a celebration of the present, even as she works to take it apart, so that she
might better understand it. “The parts of a whole are indicated in partial
modes of remembrances.” she writes, to open the poem “Putting the World in a
Box”: “Loss is a continual gesture of nostalgia.”
Speaking
in Paragraphs
I don’t but I know people who do. Fully formed
ideas fall out of their mouths with captivating hooks, building action, and a
clever return back to the beginning just as they are winding down. People who
verbally process their experiences do not like to be interrupted. They are
likely to barrel over interjections unless I’m so uncharacteristically forceful
that I can’t be reasonably ignored. Their resulting exasperation is palpable
enough that I almost feel bad for trying to take up space with my fragmentary
hesitative speech parts. bpNichol wrote, “The mouth remembers what the brain
can’t quite wrap its tongue around & that’s what my life’s become. My life’s
become my mouth’s remembering, telling stories with the brain’s tongue” and I also
feel beholden to “the brain’s tongue” – trying to find language for what
continually slips from memory, yet insists on its messy present moment anyway. Internal
reverie strangles but slides. The momentary um “what my life’s become.”
