DM Bradford, Bottom Rail on Top

 

                                                Not a poem

but plantation dining room
    ceiling pulley fan
boy fatherlands and rope

I’m just now seeing a copy of Montreal-based poet and translator DM Bradford’s second full-length collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a follow-up to Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed across an accumulated thirteen poem-sections, from “rope to” and “ashes to” to “new corps” and “lil chug,” the short poems of Bottom Rail on Top exist as sketch-notes, lyric bursts that suggest the gesture but are intricate and precise in their execution. As the back cover offers: “Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sees D.M. Bradford stage one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation—a call and response between the complications of legacy and selfhood.” There is a kind of call-and-response to how these poems assemble, a through-line of notes and their commentary, akin to a kind of Greek chorus or counter-narrative. Each section, a cluster of short sketch-poems, with the occasional prose-commentary, providing a blend of further narrative, additional information and a kind of summing-up, set at the end of a handful of sections. The third section, “stock,” for example, ends with a prose block that begins: “Not a poem but a succession of little cuts. You hear about Sally Hemings over and over again. You don’t hear that much about Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s first wife, being Sally’s half-sister. You don’t hear much about Betty Hemings, Martha’s father’s enslaved mistress, Sally’s mother. You don’t hear much about the other half-siblings, how many of them Martha, along with Thomas, inherited, the Hemings family among 135. Commonplace horrors.” Not a poem, Bradford repeats as a mantra across the title of each poem and the opening of each commentary, suggesting a push against the impossibility of the lyric while simultaneously offering its artifice, even as the poems work through and across it, connecting Bottom Rail on Top to works such as M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008) [see my archived review from The Antigonish Review here], for example. “Not a poem,” Bradford writes, near the end of the fifth section, “but to write at last / past the old place / one last time // by boat / the breeze and the sunshine / north by fatherlands / ten days and ten nights [.]”

As Bradford’s debut worked through an absent father, Bottom Rail on Top also runs as a book-length project wrapping around layers and application of lyric study around history, ancestry and echoes of slavery and the American south. To close the first section, Bradford’s untitled prose-block begins: “Not a poem, but a big house is a big house. Imagine I’m standing in one being told every brick that makes it up was made on site by children. That said children didn’t not look like me, and kept the fire going around the clock. Imagine the tour guide announcing all this, dressed to look like the mistress of the house. Someone helps dress her in the morning, pile the whole thing on, button it up the back.” The shadow of history is long indeed, even moreso if one doesn’t attempt to understand it, as Bradford writes to open the acknowledgments:

This work would not exist without the tether of ancestors enslaved in the so-called United States and Jamaica. In these outgrowths of the simple history I was raised with, that was meant to raise a Black man and an American, I look for them and find I can’t possibly know them. Looking at my life, I’m certain those ancestors, along with the many enslaved Africans this book is indebted to, would sooner recognize its mastery than its subjection. This work was in no small part shaped by that thought. And everything that connects me to them despite it.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) might be Milan Kundera’s best-known novel, but I was always partial to Immortality (1990). This is a book, of course, I can’t locate in my library. I know I still have it around, although it might still live in our storage unit, two-plus kilometres east; a storage remnant of our two years’ past basement flood and extensive downstairs reconstruction. I remember first reading Immortality when I was twenty-four years old, and I told myself for some time that the novel ‘changed my life,’ although I can’t remember exactly how. That was nearly thirty years ago, after all. Since those days, I’ve admired Kundera’s ability to equally blend elements of the political, philosophical and the intimate, a goalpost I’ve worked to reach in my own fiction. It’s hard to do well, and easier to see when it misses the mark, and Kundera managed to articulate novels from within a period of turbulence, writing of political and social upheaval. I read a debut novel some twenty years ago that went back and forth between a political thread and a romantic thread, but only one of those threads was compelling, which meant the other lay fallow. At the end of my paperback copy of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he closes an interview conducted by Philip Roth with this:

I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

While he remains one of the great writers of the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring, and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, certain elements of Kundera’s work don’t exactly age well. His depictions of women, for example. And yet, his an example of living, breathing and writing through the midst of great crisis. Writing as a way of thinking, of documenting. Of processing. How does one write in a crisis?

And crisis is relative, of course. There were those on both sides of Quebec’s language debate in the Bill-101 years that Mordecai Richler wrote about in his non-fiction blend of politics and satire, OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! (1992), that saw themselves as the victims of unrelenting crisis. One could also begin to finally ask, also, why there have been water advisories in certain communities, predominantly aboriginal communities, in Canada at all, let alone some lasting four decades or more? How do we allow such conditions to continue, especially those we’ve the ability to change? I dread to think of how hard some of these communities could be hit, through this crisis, in part due to their lack of basic necessities, even before any potential access to masks, gloves and ventilators. How does one write in a crisis?

In the introduction to Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (2019), editor Nyla Matuk writes: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” She continues:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

I think of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019), where he writes: “Let us undertake an ethnomusicology of tears. I am after the frequency of NDN grievability. My hunch is that the pitch interrogates itself, like a hymn.” I think of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), writing: “But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated / boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us / anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is ever truly attached to emptiness whatever it is / I feel now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better / stated as a form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference; [.]”

I might ask how one writes in a crisis, but to many, the very question broadcasts my lack of awareness of the larger world in which we live. To some, crisis has been here for hundreds of years. None of this is new.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Ongoing notes: late May, 2016

Further to our baby distractions, I thought I should add a second entry of brief reviews, acknowledging the books over the past two years-plus that I started to review, but, for whatever child-related reason, I wasn’t able to complete as a longer, full-sized review. Here are some notes, if not even regrets (I’m surprised at how many scraps there are, and how long they’ve been sitting, unfinished, upon my computer), on a couple more books that I wish I’d more time and attention to properly discuss (as they each, obviously, deserve).

The Belladonna* Elders Series 6: M. NourbeSe Philip, Gail Scott, Kate Eichhorn (2009): In many ways, the most interesting element of this all-Canadian volume of The Belladonna Elders Series is Kate Eichhorn herself, composing works that build upon what her two chosen elders, M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott, have been working on for years. In two interviews, later included in longer versions in the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) [see my review of such here].

NB: Because for me when I work in English, I always feel as if I am working in a foreign language.

KE: Even with your mastery?

NP: I never ever take it for granted. The course of the foreignness is the awareness that this is not my tongue. Mind you, I think that all writers and poets have this sense. As you write your poem, you have this idea of perfection, but of course, what I am talking about is slightly different from that. I'm talking about this sense of utter foreignness in what is supposed to be my mother tongue. When I was working on the poem, I remember sitting in this room on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto that I rented from a doctor, my doctor in fact. I had a room at the back of his office, and there were some days when I felt that I could actually taste the foreignness of these words. I can't apply profound theoretical language to it. I can only go to the body and tell you what it felt like. There was this awareness of that and all I could do was weep and weep. Maybe it was some sort of collective memory.

In her “Preface: The Elder Function,” Eichhorn writes:

The Belladonna Elders Series has proven far more controversial than anticipated. Some critics have charged that the term “elder” is inherently ageist. Others have suggested that the structure of the series reifies problematic notions of artistic lineage. A few detractors have even implied that the Elders Series is symptomatic of a generation of writers unable to invent anew, choosing instead to linger indefinitely as a parasitic presence on their “host” (an older and apparently more vital generation of writers). These objections have arrived from critics speaking across generations and genders. But as Belladonna* curators Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman have repeatedly explained, running counter to prevailing definitions in our culture, the term “elder” is neither synonymous with “old” nor does it signify a stable identitary position.

I came to appreciate the complexity of the elder function during one of my first interviews with a writer in the early 1990s. Maria Campbell, a Métis writer and storyteller, had been invited to speak at a Native elders conference hosted by my university. She graciously offered to spare a few minutes of her time but explained that this was an elder's conference, so I would have to conduct the interview in the presence of her elders, and because they would potentially be better positioned to respond, she might not speak at all. In the end, this was not an interview with an author but rather an encounter with a writer/storyteller speaking amongst others. I had arrived well prepared, or so I thought, to navigate the complexities of power and appropriation this encounter was bound to raise. I left perplexed, wondering whether I had carried out an interview at all (I don't recall asking any questions). This, of course, is precisely the kind of productive trouble wrought by elders, and for this reason, adopting the category for an avant-garde reading and book series may be surprising, but it is by no means antithetical to the work of a project such as Belladonna*.

Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology, eds. Evan Jones and Todd Swift: Evan Jones and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology (Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 2010) certainly lives up to its initial hype, despite the inclusion of poets David McGimpsey, Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson, in being an anthology of “Modern” Poets from Canada (those exceptions, I’d note, are also poets possibly known and read better outside Canadian borders than from within). Going through the list of authors—W.W.E. Ross (1894-1966)? Alfred Bailey (1905-1997)?—I initially wondered if this was an anthology aimed at what they saw of the British poetry audience, once that doesn’t necessarily jibe with what little I’m aware of such, from way across the pond, mind you. As the editors write in their introduction: “It is now more than fifty years since an anthology of Canadian poetry was edited for a British audience. As editors, and as Canadian poets living in a foreign clime on a new shore, it has appeared to us that there is little or no groundwork on which to build, no models towards whom we could reach. In Britain, there is scant knowledge of Canadian poetry.”

Despite an awareness of British poetry favouring formal models over experimentation, my original question was this: is this an anthology for those interested in contemporary poetry titles by Carcanet, Bloodaxe Books and Faber over, say, titles by Stride, Shearsman, Salt or Reality Street Editions? Instead, I’m realizing this an anthology directed to the classroom, given its historical swath across a century and a half of Canadian writing, working to produce an anthology that exactly pushes the mandate of the “modern” period. But then, how do McGimpsey, Robertson and Carson fit in?