Louis Cabri, Hungry Sling Shots

The Mother Contends With the Sky

Skies alive—forty

Billion tons young, from the deep end of enchanted carbonic

        shadow

Sootpuff on cheek: a charmer, friend-of-family, La Breeze

Dust up, birds wriggle

And we flip

Pictures, and cry

Stars

Reflected with lacrimal reflex

by lysozymic propulsion due to an errant wingtip?

A distant spectral emulsion

Salves the anticipation and solitude

Of tears

Poet and critic Louis Cabri’s latest poetry title is Hungry Sling Shots (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2020). The author of The Mood Embosser (Coach House Books, 2001), Posh Lust (New Star Books, 2014) and Poetryworld (CUE, 2011) [see my review of such here], Cabri’s poetry has long been propelled by sound and theory, making him one of the few language poets so deeply engaged with how a poem sits and sounds on the page. One might mention other contemporary Canadian poets that work so heavily with texts engaged with and influenced by sound such as bill bissett—who engages with sound, image and chanting, but not necessarily theory—and Adeena Karasick—who does engage with theory, but leaning slightly, in comparison to Cabri, on the side of theory over sound. Consider Hungry Sling Shots’ opening poem, “Video Goes Whip Tom Kelly,” a piece that includes elements comparable to birdsong; the poem opens: “one; two; three; four; six / hip; hip; hip hurrah boys; spring is here / chortle-deeeeee // chew-chew-chew / listen to my evening sing-ing-ing-ing / tic-tic-mcgreer // shook-shook-shook-shook-shook / je-je-je-je-je-je-je / pill-will-willet // ra-vi-o-li / kit / cheer-up; cheer-a-lee; cheer-ee-o // whoo-eek / jeeeeeeee / check [.]” As the press release offers: “For Cabri, more than most poets working today, meaning is all about how it sounds.” The distinction there is interesting, suggesting sound over meaning, where a poet such as Karasick engages with more of a blend, or even with theory over sound (the distinction in her work might easily be negligible; the interplay of back-and-forth might instead be the point). And yet, Cabri appears to utilize sound as a way to approach and engage with theory. The second section, for example, is “The Mommy Collection” (from which the poem, above, emerges), a section with the sub-header “After Roses de Noël (1843-1878) by Théodore de Banville.”

There is something of Cabri’s work generally that does tend to get overlooked, in part, possibly, due to a readership that doesn’t quite know how to approach his work, and his work offers no clues but for the work itself (which one argues should always be more than enough): approach on the basis of sound, and see where that might take you. Given the amount of quality work he’s produced over the years, he’s certainly due for some deeper attention.

Roy Miki, Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden

All Roy Miki’s collected poetry and critical writing swirls around one historical maelstrom, but without sinking into it, the general terms of which Giorgio Agamben pessimistically diagnosed as “the new biopolitical nomos [law, custom] of the planet” (176): the concentration camp. Miki lived through one specific form of its apparatus as a Canadian child, his family forcibly removed from Haney, B.C. to Ste. Agathe, Manitoba during the Second World War, the repercussions of which, due to displacement and financial loss, internment, and coerced racialized identity as Japanese Canadians, instigated a context and reality of social trauma for tens of thousands of people. Today, the optimistic legal outcome and renown of his social justice and cultural activism remain of precedent-setting significance for all, and in particular for communities still extricating themselves from Peacekeeping Canada’s sordid domestic history of conflating race with citizenship and democracy with unacknowledged racism. (Louis Cabri, “Floward”)

New in the series of “collected poems” editions that Vancouver publisher Talonbooks has been producing over the past few years (including collections by Fred Wah [see my review of such here], Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Nancy Shaw [see my review of such here], Roy K. Kiyooka and Artie Gold) is Vancouver poet, editor, literary critic and cultural activist Roy Miki’s Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018). Flow: Poems Collected and New encompasses some six hundred pages of work by Miki, covering all five of his published poetry collections—saving face: poems selected, 1976-1988 (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), random access file (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), Surrender (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; Toronto ON: Mercury Press, 2001), There (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006) and Mannequin Rising (New Star Books, 2011)[see my review of such here]—as well as a healthy selection of uncollected work under the header “Cloudy and Clear (2018).”

SEAWALL NOTES

1

Cast line

    initiates

perambulation

Figures emerge

    ease of

permutation

Inclinations

    brought

to moment

2

Lone heron

    waives

breakfast signs

Flutter wings

    pose

take flight

3

Diffuse light

    low

hanging

Cloud lining

    fog hint

supple lens

Miki’s is a poetry that might have emerged through an interest in studying literature, but developed as an indirect means to articulate and engage with some of his other literary and cultural works, including his lengthy battle for redress from the Canadian government for Japanese Canadians. It becomes fascinating to see how Miki’s poetry, then, exists in parallel, or even in response to his other works, existing entirely in tandem with his critical and cultural works. In the introduction to his lengthy interview at the end of the collection, “Inter View,” editor Michael Barnholden speaks to what he calls the “multiplicity” of Miki’s work:

            Since then I have come to see that multiplicity is the key to all of Roy’s work: there’s a lot going on and Roy always wants to get it right. He’s also a public intellectual through his writing, editing, publishing, and teaching. A quick look at his bibliography suggests a seemingly impossible breadth and depth. Sure, there is the poetry, but there is also the scholarly work on William Carlos Williams, bpNichol, Roy Kiyooka, and George Bowering, a couple of volumes on groundbreaking literary criticism, activist archival, and political work, even a children’s book written with his wife, Slavia Miki. And to those accomplishments we must add editor of Line magazine, later merging with West Coast Review to become West Coast Line, and publisher of a chapbook series, pomflit, with Irene Niechoda. And of course there is his long and storied career as a teacher. A list of students he has influenced, who have gone on to accomplish much with his help and guidance, would be lengthy. I consider myself lucky to have been among that company. Oh yes, and when he retired from teaching full-time, he taught himself digital collage technique.

I quite like that the collection ends with an interview with Miki, a focus on his own words on his work that I appreciate, providing multiple insights and entrances into his writing and thinking:

M: Those early poems in saving face are connected to scholarship because they have an archival component. You are looking at an archival document, your parent’s internment ID card, and the poem begins to compose in ten parts. Once you find that method of composition, it seems to me that your scholarly pursuits lead to your poetic pursuits. They inform your poetic pursuits in many ways.

R: Yes, I’ve tried not to separate the two activities. Poetry as research and research for poetry have been mutual concerns. An obvious connection can be seen in the various poems I’ve written using found language from my archival research. Sometimes I’ve simply restructured some found text in poetic lines, as for instance, “higher learning,” albeit with the addition of a title. Other times I’ve inserted found texts in a poem.

What becomes clear very quickly, as any reader of Miki’s already knows, his is a poetry of syntax and politics, and one that engages with collage, overlap and collision, writing out short phrases, images and sketches intended to interact with and against each other. The perception of a single image is forced to shift in even the most subtle ways through the interaction of what might follow. Since his retirement from teaching, this collage-element has simply become more overt with his work in digital collage, something he has incorporated into his poetry, and are included as part of the collection. His work had long been grounded in image, even incorporating photographs from his personal archive in early works, but, over the years, the blend has become more complex, overt and far more subtle. Despite all of this engagement and multiplicity, there is something wonderfully understated about Miki’s writing, something that, unfortunately, has possibly caused his poetry fly under the radar of a wider Canadian readership, even against the fact that his Surrender won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. And yet, Miki’s poems are, in their own way, a forceful, consistent calm against a series of raging storms, and very much worth engaging, and sinking slowly into. “without reading,” he writes, in the poem “KIYOOKA,” “there is // no body[.]” The poem continues:

dis     sem      blance

paternal sputter

let the utter &

outer skin

to skin

Tripwire #12 : AKA VANCOUVER

paint under sticky licks of amber finishes

here this canna lily medicine ornament

for use on a journey

this air

fresh commodity

mouthful of water a liquid gem

lead in the blood of your children

may we all

feathers incline in planes side by signal

encased I fly some thousands of miles home my life

has not yet covered on foot

streams below stream by pink the plane races

the sun western lines deepen red. sun wins and I win (Cecily Nicholson, “Rebuilt to Oar”)

I’m very taken with the issue #12 of David Buuck’s Tripwire out of Oakland, California, constructed as a hefty feature on Vancouver writing, “AKA VANCOUVER: WRITING FROM THE UNCEDED COAST SALISH TERRITORIES.” The opening section includes an absolute ton of new writing (and some visual art as well) from Mercedes Eng, Anahita Jamali Rad, Amy De’ath, Cecily Nicholson, Danielle LaFrance, ryan fitzpatrick, Roger Farr, Sonnet L’Abbé, Phinder Dulai, Jordan Abel, Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, Andrea Creamer, Fred Wah, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Carolyn Richard, Donato Mancini, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Lawrence Yzhak Braithwaite and Tiziana La Melia & Vanessa Disler. The works included in this list are just incredible, and represent some of the finest contemporary poetry to come out of Vancouver, and a list of writers and writing that you need to be paying attention to right now. And, while I agree that the work should stand for itself, I still would have liked to see an introduction of some sort to the section, just to have a sense of the framing of this section of nearly one hundred and sixty pages of writing and photography from Vancouver. How was this issue compiled? Etc.

Focusing heavily on the intersections between language and political poetry that have been building in Vancouver for quite a long time, it is important to note that editor/publisher David Buuck is also engaged in an ongoing activism, both in and beyond his own poetry, such as his participation in BARGE — The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. One might say that Oakland, California and Vancouver, British Columbia exist as sibling-communities, given their shared aesthetic of experimental writing and activism.

My life is a ferris wheel. Chairs rotating around a pin. I’ve never known true happiness, true compassion for another person. I can applaud the architectural firm that made this sentence possible, though I find it hard to think at this level for long

The poets are coming. The Avant-Garde is Coming. We all need our vices. I want to break the fourth wall. THEY should pay our tabs.

I suffer like you have no idea. You can help me with this. Every thing I have done is because of an injury. Give me a smile. Not so big.

Now think of “the Social” as a waiting room, in a Care Facility, by the beach, under construction, one minute past Happy Hour. (Roger Farr, “from The Care Facility”)

Further into this Vancouver issue, Tripwire #12 includes sixty pages of a tribute to the late Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) [see my obituary for him here], including uncollected writings, essays on his work, remembrances, an interview, archival material and other pieces, by Culley himself as well as Elisa Ferrari, Louis Cabri, Colin Smith, Rolf Maurer, George Bowering, Lisa Robertson, Chris Nealon, Lee Ann Brown, Stephen Collis and Jonathan Skinner. One of the first pieces to really strike in this section has to be Rolf Maurer’s short essay-reminiscence, “Peter Culley, Pleasure Poet,” that provides both homage and overview of Culley’s work and life in and around Vancouver:

Peter Culley emerged from, instead of into, the West Coast literary mainstream, in the early 1980s. Jack Hodgins had been a high school teacher, and early mentor; the painter Mina Totino and the poet Kevin Davies were classmates. His elders saw Culley’s promise and his first book was named Twenty-One in part beause that’s what he was when Oolichan Books issued it. Culley later more or less disowned that book, not because of any bad publishing experience, but because even as it was going to the printer his poetry was turning away from the first-person I of those poems to the camera I at the centre of all his later work.

For his part, Louis Cabri includes materials from Culley’s reading in Ottawa in 1991, via Cabri and Rob Manery. Cabri writes:

In Ottawa, Ontario, Rob Manery and I ran, with our poetry magazine, hole, a poetry event series called The Transparency Machine, and Peter Culley presented in it on Nov 2, 1991, at Gallery 101. Peter selected texts to contextualize his poetry (this was the simple idea of the series), and we distributed those texts in newsletter form weeks before his event. The event was an informal discussion during which Peter projected his texts with the aid of an overhead projector. What follows are the invitation card to Peter’s event, three of his six selected texts including from his 1987 chapbook Natural History (after Gilbert White) (Fissure Books, ed Susan Lord), and a photo Rob took of Peter reading. The Transparency Machine event series idea has continue over the decades under different names and in other cities, most recently in Vancouver through the Kootenay School of Writing with additional help by co-curators Ted Byrne, Listen Chen, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Cecily Nicholson, and UNIT/PITT Projects.

To round out the issue, there is an impressive mound of further pieces, including a conversation between David Buuck and Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad on their former collective/journal, About a Bicycle, and critical pieces on works by Cecily Nicholson, Mercedes Eng, Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Jordan Scott, Jordan Abel (two pieces: including one by me) and Colin Smith. I’m deeply impressed by the heft and thoroughness of this Vancouver feature, perhaps the finest I’ve seen in a journal in some time.

And, as Buuck reminded me recently, the first ten issues are available on the Tripwire website as free downloadable pdfs.