m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : o u r _ f i r s t _ f o u r _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

Our first four essays include:

Aimee Herman on Kathy Acker

Leslie Stark on Tori Amos, Elizabeth Smart, Jeanette Winterson and Sylvia Plath

Nam-Chi Tran on Trinh T. Minh-ha

Amanda Earl on Sandra Ridley

Please check out our submissions page for more information.

Forthcoming essays include: Susan Rudy on Nicole Brossard, and Emily Izsak on Mina Loy.

 

Aufgabe 10

It makes no sense to speak of contemporary French poetry—except in the sense that, increasingly, all literature that doesn't fit into any other category gets called poetry, a trend I highly champion, as it broadens the definition of the art. And that's also what contemporary French poets are doing: broadening the definition of la poésie to include and encourage an ever-diversifying array of approaches and forms. The one constant is exploration, and much of that is eroding the boundaries of the genre, of genre itself, and even of media.

Much pressure has been put on the line in contemporary French poetry, to such an extent that for many writers it has disappeared altogether as a formal principle, and in many cases that pressure has been transferred to syntax, either underscored through elaborately formal or distorted sentence structures or spotlighted through inventive violations and innovations. Where the line does remain, it is often given a performative stance and at times, in turn, performs an immediate graphic gesture on the page. (Cole Swensen, “Dossier: Contemporary Poetry in France”)

The tenth annual issue of the poetry journal Aufgabe, produced out of Brooklyn, New York by Litmus Press under the poetry editorship of E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson and Julian T. Brolaski, includes a lengthy feature on “French poetry & poetics guest edited by Cole Swensen.” With works by various poets unknown to larger North American poetry audiences, it includes writing by Oscarine Bosquet, Marie-Louise Chapelle, Sabine Macher, Anne Parian, Nathalie Quintane and plenty of others, and seemingly extend a series of conversations throughout American publications, from Verse magazine's triple-issue on French poetry and poetics (2007), or even back to an anthology of French writing edited by Norma Cole, one of the translators of the current issue, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000). Given the amount of attention that English-language American journals and publications (Burning Deck features regular book-length translated works, and has for years), might the south-of-the-border audiences have the ability to be far better informed of such French-language works than we, here? Even translated works from French from Quebec seem harder to find, since the days of Coach House Press, or even more recent Anansi works. Where has all the translation disappeared to?

Africa is a Flat Tint

On the entirely devoured dirt the difference

between consonants hardly

distinguishes

O O / I O

I O / I

E IA /

A /

A E OU /

the ones lilt in the others

it is between them that savagely we say

indistinct in the haze of the land far from here

Africa is a flat tint

I'm afraid of the you

shine up to here the precious names of ore bed

and it is not about loosing your grip. (Oscarine Bosquet, “from Present Participle,” trans. Ellen Leblond-Schrader and Sarah Riggs)

I, myself, have been fascinated, specifically, with the movement of the poetic line over the past few years, and so many of the translators in this issue, themselves, are poets that have altered my consideration of what is possible with the line, including Norma Cole, Lisa Robertson, Eleni Sikelianos, Cole Swensen, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop and Andrew Zawacki (one of the editors, also, of Verse). Many of the translators and translated in this issue also seem to work heavily within the prose poem, some of whom are doing some quite magnificent things.

3.

I myself will I haunt. Maybe one day find an elbow a hand of Harry to mark them later on their side of the wall to be a memory in the body of the other a shadow in a movement.

An elbow in a gesture in two parts for who knows how to play the rerun and when I'm already dead then while the one to feel immense sky the other to stay around friends become (Caroline Dubois, “from How's that I say not sleep,” trans. Stacy Doris and Chet Wiener)

On top of this, it might even be easy to overlook that the issue also includes over a hundred pages of poetry not included in this feature, with new works by G.C. Waldrep, Robert Glück, Catherine Meng, Alli Warren, Harold Abramowitz, Joan Retallack, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, her “Draft 107: Meant to Say,” that includes:

I wanted to know about making art and telling the truth.

Where does this thing come from

why does this engineered apple taste dull, how did we get here

from what to what and

how did we decide to? or what flood of slough

drowned us where we stood.

The issue also includes a number of critical prose works at the end, including Robert Glück's “CUNY Talk: Uncertain Reading.” As he writes to introduce the piece, Glück's talk “was for TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice, a series at the CUNY Graduate Center curated by Tim Peterson. My panel included Trish Salah and Rachel Zolf and took place on October 29, 2009. TENDENCIES explores the poetic manifesto as it intersects with writing practice, queer theory and pedagogy.” I'm intrigued by such a series; might a collection of such pieces appear in print at some point, or might these pieces be available somewhere online?

Many of Acker's strategies keep the reader off-balance. That's why it's rather difficult to write about her work, because the best reading is an uncertain reading. I want to offer my confusion as an ideal. Rather than drawing conclusions, developing identifications or thematic connections, that is, making judgements that lead to knowledge, Acker creates a reader who is lost in strangeness. She pitches the reader into a welter of contradictions that do not resolve themselves, but replace each other continuously: a text that hates itself but wants me to love it, sex that dissolves and amalgamates, a disempowered self that tops its heated bottom-act with cold manipulations, a confession that is therapeutic without the possibility of health. Her aesthetic is founded on double binds whose brilliance captivates me as I struggle against them.

Ongoing notes: early June, 2011

House-sitting in Old Ottawa South again, this week. See, here I am, writing away at the Starbucks (I know, I know...).

Have you been catching all these interviews on Kevin Spenst's website? Recent ones include Stan Rogal and Ken Norris, and then there's this less-than-recent interview with Phil Hall; apparently he has a new book, Kildeer, out with BookThug I'd love to get my hands on, as well as the new Rae Armantrout (see Amy King's recent interview with her, here). And don't forget that the Niagara Literary Arts Festival, simply because I'm finally home from such, is still actually going on. And have you seen the Trillum shortlist, including Ken Sparling's Book [see my review of such here]? About damned time.

Keep your eye on: the literary component of WESTFEST, as I read fiction alongside Jon Paul Fiorentino, Gabriela Goliger and others on June 11; a reading I'm doing at mother tongue books with Pearl Pirie and Monty Reid on June 16; the Toronto Small Press Fair I'll have a table at on June 19^th; the ottawa small press book fair, June 25, with pre-reading the night before at the Carleton Tavern. Where will you be for all of this? At all those places, I'd hope. I'm even doing a reading in Perth on August 12 with Christine McNair, if you can wait that long.

Vancouver BC: Presented as a talk on a series of readings is Vancouver writer Michael Turner's pamphlet Three Readings: Camera, Tape and Sound (Kathy Acker, Steve McCaffery/bpNichol, and Kevin Davies, as introduced by George Bowering) (Wednesday, January 12, 2011) as part of Western Front's “Past is Prologue” series, “an ongoing research project considering the Western Front Media Archive.”

The literary reading is a relatively recent phenomenon. Implying a written text, it is closer to Gutenberg than the pre-contact conveyance of Salish myths and legends or the Homeric tradition of poetic oration. Words spoken from a page, as opposed to those that come remembered.

As a reader and a writer I have participated in hundreds of literary readings. Sometimes I look forward to them; other times they fill me with dread. In preparing my visit to the Western Front Media archive, I chose to focus on the collection's literary program, curious to see if the documentation of readings at a centre known for interdisciplinarity differs from those at a literary festival or a writers' club.

What follows are three instances where a reading and its documentation combine to form a third event. The first focuses on the camera; the second on the videotape; the third on the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.

The fact itself that such is happening is astounding enough, as so many artist-run centres seem to be unaware of what exactly they're sitting on, given such staff turnover over the years. In Ottawa alone, I've witnessed both Saw Gallery/Video and Gallery 101 participating in such purges of their archives, as the first sold off, among other items, three first edition copies of Michael Ondaatje's Governor-General's Award-winning The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) for fifty cents each (a book that, at the time, went for roughly $700 on Abe.com). Gallery 101, on the other hand, simply handed items out or left them on the curb to be collected, for their lack of space.

We now have decades worth of artist-run centres and literary readings in Canada; one can only admire Turner and Western Front, infamous for various literary readings over the years, including a large Talonbooks poetry launch in 1980, enormously for attempting to not only keep the records, but critically explore those same archives. In the first section, “Camera,” Turner explores a reading by Kathy Acker on February 2, 1977 from what would become The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978). The second, “Tape,” writes of The Four Horsemen reading on November 21, 1977, and the third, “Sound,” explores a benefit reading for MacLeod's Books on October 22, 1983, focusing specifically on the segment by Kevin Davies.

The relationship between McCaffery and Nichol's performance and the deficiencies of the tape is uncanny, with the initial buckle acting as both muse and omen, or a transformational device that sets the stage for what is to come. Prefacing their performance is a story Nichol told at the conclusion of his Martyrology reading. When asked why his poem contained so many references to God, Nichol replied: “I decided a long time ago that anything that came into the poem I would leave in the poem. So I suppose that's in the way of explanation, not an apology.” What came into the documentation of McCaffery and Nichol's poem was just that.

One can only hope that this project continues, and possibly makes its way into some further printed documents, whether as an online archive of texts, and/or even a book-length study of the literary activity at The Western Front. If we don't understand just what it is we've done, what's the point of doing any more?

While a literature exists on the documentation of performance art (the performance document as object and the anxieties that result), I have found nothing on literary readings and their relationship to the (video) camera. One explanation could be the predictability of the format: the author, attached to the podium, reading from a text as if it were a script, one the audience might well be familiar with. A format such as this has little need of a camera operator; one merely presses “record.”

England: I recently received a small assortment of chapbooks by smallminded books, produced and curated by Stride editor/publisher Rupert Loydell, barely large enough to notice.

Nightclub

The Abyss: an apology for god's nightclub.

A calumny, a glorious denunciation of its

permutation on a kerygma: incomprehensible octagon.

In retrospect, it was always dark as anthracite,

propelled to decipher its reversion to

permutations.

So a penultimate home –

penultimate glorious calumny –

now The Anthracite nightclub. (Mike Ferguson)

Putting large poems in tiny spaces, I now own the splay and splendour of Peter Finch's The Insufficiency of Christian Teaching On the Subject of Common Emotional Problems (2011), the odd and sharp containments of Mike Ferguson's Found In Dissonance (2011), the wordplay of Richard Kostelanetz's Doublefulcra 2 (2011) and the wonderment of John Levy's Imagine A Whale (2011).

My

thoughts, she replied, are

like looking at a moving

whale with a magnifying

glass. (John Levy)

I can't find any real internet reference to these small items, although a review of one of Levy's previous in the same series exists here. These small, odd chapbooks remind in part of the Poems-For-All series out of California, tiny booklets small enough to leave in the most unlikely places, created as much for the sake of discovering new poetry audiences as astounding longtime readers. Just how long has he been making these, and how are they distributed?

Philadelphia PA: Recently in the mail, I received the most lovely letterpress object, Agnes Fox Press' sold out and numbered edition of fifty (I have number 19), Philadelphia poet Hailey Higdon's I WRESTLE HOME THE PAPERS (May, 2010). Produced as a five-page accordion strip, her meditation begins:

I wrestle home the papers.

I do.

Your divorced tendencies make you.

They make you.

He says: like baking cookies

you already put in the sugar

you can't get it out now

you have to throw away the whole batch

This is such a lovely piece, and I'm tempted to quote the entirety of such, being that it's short enough, but I won't, allowing it some future space to breathe on its own; considering they went out of print so quickly, might Agnes Fox Press produce another run? I'm caught by the thoughtfulll sadness of this small piece, encountering tweaks of loss, absence, blame, through the suggestion of divorce papers, and the possibility that eventually the feelings of loss will be gone, and the possibilities that this might, in fact, be entirely worse. Higdon, a pre-kindergarten teacher and poet living in Philly, is also the author of the poetry blog Palinode Project, as well as the Agnes Fox Press chapbook How To Grow Almost Everything (February, 2011), which I haven't yet seen. I am intrigued by what else she is capable of.

is it because I stopped meditating?

is that why I feel so asleep all the time?

why do

I have the urge to press my face against babies?

be near their heads and smell them?

this is a shape

I draw it with my fingers