Julie Joosten, Nought

  

She walks across a field to
thinking how thinking
accompanies life. Lavender caves, an
abundance of loss. Wondering if
thought is also an affair
of the skin. Cowbells, cowbells,
cowbells. Her memory blushes pink.
A partial eclipse, the sun visible
like a quarter moon. Her skin trembles
the little weights and textures of gone
things. A nation of birds, some
clouds. The future arrives before
she recognizes it. A future thick as fur. (“Nest”)

The follow-up to Toronto poet and editor Julie Joosten’s Governor-General’s Award-nominated debut, Light Light (BookThug, 2013) [see my review ofsuch here] is Nought (Book*hug, 2020), a lyric suite of fourteen sections—“Nest,” “Necklace,” “Swoon Revolt,” “On Nothing,” “For Nor,” “Love Poem,” “’Of Ground, or Air, or Ought,’” “Dear Friend,” “Second-Hand,” “, touch,” “Silence, an Index,” “[whose hair is yellower than torchlight],” “On Anemones” and “This, Seeded in a Glance”— that write on being, belonging and perception. “Quiet narrows the mind’s / circumference.” she writes, as part of the third suite-section. “I’m looking for a form.” she writes, at a different point in the same piece. She also includes a prose afterward, “An Opening,” that offers what led up and into this current work, including her engagement with the work of (as well as working directly with) Toronto poet M. NourbeSe Philip, the effects of her two traumatic brain injuries, and the persistence of thinking on style and perception. As the afterward opens:

In the years before I began writing Nought, I found myself obsessively reading and thinking about styles of perceiving and being. I was struck by a question I couldn’t—and still can’t—stop thinking about. In The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, Shigehisa Kuriyama asks: “What goes into a perceptual style?” The question addresses the development of two styles of reading the pulse in classical medicine: Greek practitioners measured the pulse’s rhythm, the blood’s vetical rise and fall to and from the body’s surface; Chinese practitioners attended to the pulse’s nature, whether the blood and breath’s horizontal streaming was “floating,” “hollow,” “hidden,” or “leathery.” Considering this distinction, Kuriyama incisively notes, “when we study conceptions of the body, we are studying conceptions not just in the mind, but also in the senses […] [T]he puzzling otherness of medical traditions involves not least alternative styles of perceiving.”

The poems that make up Nought are crafted into a single, delicate lyric thread; a suite of suites, held together as a long poem on physicality, connection and attachment. “I’m trying to write to you of an arrival,” she writes, as part of the “This, Seeded in a Glance” section, “whose form / is departure (I can almost bear it now, [.]” Nought is a poem of hesitation, pause and pulse, of patterns, fragments and disconnects, set in a sequence of small studies on how the heart and body connect beyond itself, and to another. This is, in essence, a love poem. “What is a fact: unsettled feeling / disperses listening through my heart,” she writes, as part of “’Of Ground, or Air, or Ought,’” “This is an epithalamium for yous [.]” There is a darkness that permeates this work, but one that emerges into and through the lens of a loving optimism, even as her optimism is occasionally desperately-held. In the same section, she writes:

A combination rubbed into air –
that oneness / twoness the liver recalls
as a longed-for relief from wanting –
veins think grief deadly
but I describe it in the style of a thousand laments –

This is a ballad of despised women
We sing a ballad of despised women

 

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.

Margaret Christakos, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies

It was as if I could not write now offline. It was as if I needed the writing itself to be public to believe my voice existed. It was as if my voice had stopped existing. It was as if some essential vitamin was missing. It was as if I only mouthed the words. It was as if there was no point to the fact of writing. Why write. Why write anything. Isn’t the world full of writing. Isn’t the world just so full. Erase the crap. Erase the crap erase the crap erase the crap erase the crap out of it already.

The thing is you never know what has been erased and what has not been erased. (“Étude 5: Up Into Her Hole”)

The first title in editor Julie Joosten’s “Essais” series through BookThug is Toronto writer Margaret Christakos’ remarkable lyric essay/memoir Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016). Composed in ten numbered “Études”—“Her Itinerary,” “She Comes From Everywhere,” “Retreat,” “Chips & Ties,” “Up Into Her Hole,” “One Body,” “(Iphigenia-as-) Siri, a series,” “Cellphies,” “Her Paraphernalia” and “Cavort”—the opening sections exist as part sketchbook, part travel diary and part lyric essay, moving through the details of a search for the points-of-origin of her grandmothers. She writes: “I also, though, can track a mini-history of enamoured mutual liaisons that veered toward an outcome of eventual unrequired sexual love. It was as if the movement from pleasure to the deprivation of the sexual love object was a turn-on almost more than any other factor. It was a diversion that led me to poetic writing, I see now.” Opening the book with an acknowledgment and exploration of the women from whom she is descended, Christakos pours through what information she can about each of them and how each of them ended up in Northern Ontario into Sudbury, later allowing her parents to eventually meet and marry. She writes:

When I began this project what I loosely knew was that all four of my grandparents had arrived from elsewhere: Nanny from England, Grandad from Upstate New York, my father’s father from Molaos near Sparta, Greece, and my Nana from a small mountain-backed seaport village on the east coast of the Peloponnese. By 1915, they were all residents of the Sudbury region in northern Ontario, separated from their birthplaces, new immigrants, shaping their imaginations of what would become real to them, each cleaved from the phantasmic memories of where they had come from—where I come from. (“Étude 1: Her Itinerary”)

As part of her research into grandmothers, she travels to England to explore London and Bath, sketching notes and taking pictures, writing emails and texts and even taking a lover. She travels to Athens, Greece and, later, to Sudbury, Ontario, all for the sake of exploring the physical spaces of her genealogy.

Walking in Athens my first morning, bewildered and anxious at my adriftness without English, I think of how Mom’s stroke produced a sudden slight of tongue slipping away all recognizable signs and sounds, replacing them with unreadable untranslatable glyphs. Before leaving Britain, I’d asked M while we were still flirting about the parts of his Algerian-Russian childhood he’d experienced in Arabic and Russian. “Who were you, who are you, when you think of your past? Are you the same person in your first language as you are now, in French and English?” He said, “I don’t change who I am, I am continuous,” and then seemed to be willing to volley some of the differentials, before we simmered into what seemed to be inevitable and intense physical speech, lol. But somehow I wondered this about Mom; did she sense how she existed in her past, before the loss, and was it anything like how she existed now? It still seems unassessable. (“Étude 2: She Comes From Everywhere”)

Throughout the course of the ten sections, the book has many centres that she returns to, from her four grandmothers to her own mother to herself and her daughter, moving back and forth between them across a rather wide canvas, allowing myriad interconnections between the generations, and even a rippling between them. The centre, then, becomes the connections between the generations themselves, shifting the narrator/author Christakos as both centre and but one of a line, a lineage, of women.

I am only fifty-two. These emotions seem like they should belong to a woman in her seventies or eighties. But no, now I see, to become fifty as a cisgendered woman can mark a scraping off of sexuality and subjectivity that, no matter how much prepared by a hurrah feminist intentionality for agency, operates like a self-aware social trouncing. Did my mother feel these losses and erasures as she entered her sixth decade, sleeping separately in the house, all of her children entering adulthood, myself at age nineteen involved in a serious live-in relationship in Toronto? I saw my mother as vibrant, full of life and rich in community, eclectic, powerful, a small electric ball of opinion, always changing, actively learning, fearless, driven, unsleeping, free. I did not identify her as lonely, or ailing, or missing sex. I didn’t have such words to attach to the older women of my family, although it seems day-plain to me now that nobody was getting any. (“Étude 1: Her Itinerary”)

Through family history, selfies and introspection, Christakos writes and rewrites her whole self into being in an utterly fascinating way, composing a layered, lyric and complex portrait/selfie that is deep and considered, raw and determined, through the lines and lineages of precisely what her subtitle tells us: motherliness, sex, blood, loss and selfies. After discussing sex, grandmothers, the death of her mother, children, the loss of children some of her family endured, divorce and what comes next, Christakos includes a definition of “paraphernalia,” furthering what she includes as epigraph to the book, writing that the word “arrived into use in the mid-17^th century” and emerged from what property, outside of the dowry, a woman is allowed to keep despite marriage or the death of her husband. As she writes: “Until the Married Women’s Property Acts in the late 19^th century a husband became the owner of all his wife’s property when the couple married. A partial exception to this was her purely personal belongings such as clothes and jewellery, which she could keep after her husband’s death. These were her paraphernalia.” So then, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies is not only composed as a portrait/selfie, but one explored at a very particular point in the author’s life, working to ground, and reaffirm, herself before any possibility of eroding. Hers is a clarity hard-fought and hard-won, and gets to the very core of genealogy and the self, and how we are affected by those who came before us, through what we choose and what we can’t help but become.

Reality is a set of agreements about what exists. I am a seer, more than anyone or myself will allow. I have a voice in me that is full-spirit, wearing the skin of an ordinary woman, but bigger forces abound. There is a misfittedness in me; daily modern life holds me in its reins. I feel an otherness, a kind of pantomime of unfurling. The world of death is as real as the world of the living; grind it and shred it all you like, larger energies rise up and shimmer, shadow us; it is not a time for ordinary speech. This is where poetry exists. Poetry is not the scrawl of shitheads hoping for stardom. Poetry is the otherness beyond ordinary speech, the after-image of the dead inside my organism, the after-image, that is, of my mother’s death to come. And the death of my grandmothers, and their mothers. And so on. (“Étude 9: Her Paraphernalia”)

COUGH #7

Notes Towards Touch

Air abdicating from the wind blows open the door, admits

nothing—my eyes light on the doorknob, fall into the faint lines

of a fingerprint, as if to live there, the brain extending into the

world as the rhythm of the eyes becoming a skin becomes

perceptible. The rhythm, having gained dimension, displaces

the sky: the tumbled clouds, humming, the sticky sun,

fumbling—

I’m trying to write you of the whole body—the brain touching

itself and attaching us to life, the curve at the edge of hearing,

the netting of nerve and thought girding the stomach—

This kind of touch, this attachment to life, means only what the

pulse does—this ‘this’ (beat, beat), almost unseen. (Julie Joosten)

I’m always pleased to see a new issue of COUGH, an occasional journal that appears through a small collective of writers in Toronto. Unfortunately, with the distraction of toddler, I’m only realizing now that I haven’t seen an issue in a while [see my review of COUGH #3 here]. Guest-edited (“this turn”) by Dominique Russell, COUGH #7 [see a video of the October launch of such here] features new writing by regulars and irregulars alike, including Joanne Kyger, Julie Joosten, David Peter Clark, Beatriz Hausner, Michael Boughn, Jonathan Pappo, Oliver Cusimano, Dale Smith, Enrique Enriquez, Android Spit, Emily Izsak, Tyler Crick, Laine Bourassa, Victor Coleman, Jacklyn Pidiuk and Dominique Russell, as well as illustrations by Rob Kenter, Emma Russell-Trione, Luca Russell-Trione and Bruno Russell-Trione. As always, part of the appeal of COUGH is in the variety and delight of the work included, from the expansive sketch-poems of Oliver Cusimano [see my recent review of his chapbook here], the lyric sentences of irregular member Julie Joosten, Android Spit’s accumulative “Shrinkrap” and the sequential precisions of Jaclyn Pidiuk, to the casual meditations of such an established guest-poet such as Joanne Kyger. The issue includes drawings, visuals, experimental pieces, prose, lyric poems and other works, in a wonderfully playful, inclusive and expansive jumble, collected in such a way that each issue feels less “all over the place” than a cohesive whole. Apart from Joosten’s prose pieces, some of the work that really jumped out at me included the excerpt from Dale Smith’s sequence “Dogstar,” Emily Izsak’s playful lyrics and the two short pieces by Laine Bourassa:

Berlin, 2200 hours

faces here so fresh your own swells and wrinkles

newborn in an old land

happy outbreaks

someone brought rope and hung

from rafters to dip Berlin

in liquid bandaid words

a door in the closed wall

heaves of coal black locks above ground

Six Questions with Julie Joosten: 2014 Gerald Lampert Award Shortlist,

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Toronto poet Julie Joosten, whose book Light Light (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Award. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Julie Joosten grew up in Marietta, GA and lives in Toronto.  She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from Cornell University; her first book Light Light was published by Book Thug in 2013.

1. Light Light is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
I wrote the manuscript for Light Light over three years. I wrote the middle of the book first, in a workshop I took at the Toronto New School of Writing to help me break a year of silence after I graduated from my MFA. Only a handful of lines and a few poems in Light Light are from my MFA thesis, and it felt good essentially to rebegin. The other sections I wrote slowly, guided by my reading, which was guided by emerging interests that became obsessions, all of which surprised me. I realized as I working on the poems that I’m continuously curious about movements of thought and thinking and about how they relate to modes of feeling. I wanted to explore the question of forms of thought that take place as feeling—how do they occur, what do they consider, how can they be experienced?  This interest became intertwined with my developing fascination with the relationship between botany and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. I think the process of writing the manuscript was a way of exploring these concerns together.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Anything and everything by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, Amitav Ghosh, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Rousseau, Emily Dickinson, Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, Clarice Lispector, the list goes on! . . .

3. In an interview posted on The Malahat Review website, you speak of how, in “The Sun Estate” (the poem that won their 2011 Long Poem Prize), you were “interested in the way that a landscape can be a subject […]” I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you in Iowa City and Toronto, as well as the physical landscapes of the two, might have contributed to your work, and the differences you saw between them?
I could also have said I’m interested in the way thoughts that get shared among a community can form a landscape that can be a subject! I really like this question because I feel strongly that the thoughts and feelings and words and ideas and imaginations of other people have formed Light Light. It’s a pleasure—at times an uncomfortable one—to sit with their language and thinking and feeling and to be changed by it. I’ve been very grateful for the communities of writers I know and also for those I don’t know, whose influence has come to me through their works. 

As for the landscape in Iowa, for me, it was especially about experiencing all of the angles of the sun. As you drive out of Iowa city and out across farmland and plains, there’s nothing but field and sky and cloud and sun. I grew up in Georgia and have spent most of my adult life in the East of the US and now in Toronto--places full of beautiful trees the sunlight moves through. But living in the Midwest, I had my first unobscured relationship with the sun. It was opening.  Now for the first time in my adult life, I have two dogs.  And I walk them everyday, often twice a day through Toronto; we have several routes that we repeat periodically throughout the week. I love these walks because we’re essentially low to the ground and we repeatedly return to the same trees, plants, houses, gardens, road kill, graffiti, billboards, corner shops, schoolyards, etc. watching everything alter minutely over days, weeks, and seasons. 

4. Later on in the same interview, you discuss “the page as a field to be explored,” and I’m curious about the connections there might be in your mind between the field of the page (in the Charles Olson sense), and the fields of ecological attentions you bring to your poems. How might your two fields connect?
The field is something alive, something that can be active and activated, and I like to think of the white space of the page as part of the poem and the poem as part of that space. They form an ecology that the reader’s eye traces. 

5. How do you feel about the form of what is emerging as “eco-poetry,” and how do you think your work connects to some of those traditions and concerns? What works and/or writers might have been your models for such in Light Light?
I think of what is now often called “eco-poetry” as a form that has been around for a long time.  Lucretius’s and Virgil’s works are examples. My models are more contemporary, but not entirely contemporary:  Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Clare, Keats, Rousseau, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Darwin, and Maria Sibylla Merian have been my greatest “eco-poetry” influences. Recently, I’ve enjoyed reading works by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, C.S. Giscombe, Brian Teare, Leslie Marmon Silko, Juliana Spahr, and Cecilia Vicuña.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Awards are certainly not a meritocracy, and I take my own work being shortlisted with a grain of salt. But awards and shortlists do help build an audience for books and authors that they might not otherwise have had, and I appreciate that aspect of them.