from the green notebook,

, reading Michael Boughn, Audrey Thomas, Maggie Nelson, Maggie Smith + Vladimir Nabokov
, further (spring 2024) notes from a work-in-progress,

[see multiple other sections from this project over at my substack]

 

 

Today is Aoife’s penultimate day of grade two. Rose finished grade five last week, and she is currently in Picton with Christine’s father and his wife, most likely in their pool as we speak. Christine is laid flat with a cold, a trickling virus that has tendrilled through the house over the past few days. It ignores Aoife, and Rose seems to have missed it, but I swat at the potential of impending summer cold with both hands. I will not get sick.

Reading through elements of Michael Boughn’s new Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (2024), I’m struck by his descriptions of some of those “poetry wars” during and around the period of American poetry that developed The New American Poetry (1960). The term “poetry wars” has come up a bit again recently, in reference to conflicts in Prince George, British Columbia a decade or two back, as Jeremy Stewart and Donna Kane were putting together their folio of poetry and prose to celebrate the life and work of Barry McKinnon (1944-2023) that I was posting online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Nothing any of the three of us wished to re-ignite.

I’ve never been interested in participating in wars. Ken Norris used to speak of poetry wars, some of which he got caught up with in the 1970s, with a kind of resigned inevitability. As I understand them, most of these conflicts didn’t seem to stem beyond someone saying something confrontational and others responding, or simply a matter of different aesthetics falling into the perceived requirement of a personal clash. What does it matter that one person writes a poem in a different way? There is work I am interested in and work I am less interested in; people I am interested in and people I am less interested in. I think you’d be surprised how often those considerations blend into different configurations.

For the longest time, one of my absolute favourite humans was Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), her early death a devastating loss for everyone that knew her. A particular favourite spot of hers in Ottawa was Zoe’s, the bar lounge of the Chateau Laurier, where we’d always meet up when she came through town. She quite literally glowed with energy, enthusiasm and creativity, and we were able to support and encourage each other despite having little overlap, it seemed, in reading or writing interest. Most of the writers and writing she admired and was influenced by I had little to no interest in, so how much could I really appreciate her work, no matter the quality?

There are numerous writers it would be lovely to be able to sit down and have a beer with, and conversation; but somehow, for some, aesthetics prevents us. There is so much that can be learned from alternate perspectives on writing and thinking, and it becomes far too easy to fall into our bubbles. Is the goal not to expand our thinking? Is our goal not to improve, and make new? Why have a war?

*

Today is Aoife’s final day of grade two. Rose remains in Picton, for at least two more days. She is older, there.

I am moving slowly through final proofs for these short stories, and thinking about how words get shaped on the page. Simultaneously, I am going through a recent reminiscence by Canadian writer Audrey Thomas on the late Alice Munro, sent out by email newsletter to members of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Thomas writes of heading to do research in England in 1987, and convincing Munro, simultaneously aiming herself to Scotland for the sake of her own research, to not fly to Scotland, but to join Thomas by boat. Thomas makes the trip sound delightful enough it almost makes me consider the same. Thomas writes of their sea-faring adventure, the two of them learning a handful of daily words in Polish, until a storm at the very end of the trip, upon entering the English Channel.

“I’m sorry it turned out to have such a terrifying ending,” I said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Alice.

*

Los Angeles writer Maggie Nelson references Alice Munro as part of The Argonauts (2015). I had pulled the book from yesterday’s shelves, opened it seemingly at random, and there it was: Munro’s work providing Nelson’s teenaged-self a perspective on sexual experience, violation, lust “and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life.” The gift of clarity the greatest one can offer, after all.

I’ve been thinking of Nelson again recently, having caught inklings via social media that she might have a new title either out or forthcoming, which made me curious. Naturally I haven’t yet set down to verify this. I’ve enough other reading in-progress I should probably attend to, first. What of those essays on Sheila Heti and Lydia Davis? But I am curious.

This morning, reading through a recent poem by Andy Weaver. He was good enough to comment upon my work-in-progress elegy for Barry McKinnon, “I wanted to say something,” so it just seems fair for me to do the same for him. Sometimes one simply requires another eye.

“There’s a moral / here or there // isn’t,” he writes, as part of this sequence, “Cut,” “how a straight / edge creates the curved // cut that will heal / in a crescent shape.” There has always been something quietly powerful about Weaver’s work, comparable to the work of Ottawa poet Jason Christie for their stretches of lyric concreteness across lengthy meditative stretches, considerations of writing the complexities of fatherhood, the long form and their own modesty. I’ve been attempting to get these two to interview each other for some time now, to clarify, perhaps, some of their overlap, but as of yet, I have been unsuccessful.

*

In a recent substack post, American poet Maggie Smith writes:

The writing life is one with many paths. There’s no one way. I wish I’d thought more about this when I was starting out; it would have relieved a lot of pressure. And I wish I had realized how many writers—most of us!—have jobs outside of writing books. We’re teachers, editors, arts administrators, and technical writers. We’re therapists, receptionists, and childcare providers. We’re doctors, yoga teachers, and small business owners.

When I say, “I’m a writer,” I’m telling you about more than what I do for a living. I’m telling you who I am.

There’s a lot swirling around in those few sentences worth commenting upon, at least from where I’m sitting: a variety of responses of what I might think, or have thought, or might say, or have said. Smith is entirely correct, obviously: as many ways to write as there might be practitioners. As many grains of sand on the beach, say, or stars in the heavens. The first decade or so of my own foray into serious writing included having to figure out how best to approach my own writing. It isn’t enough to learn how to write, but learn how best I should be writing the things I should be writing. There are no clear paths, nor across-the-board solutions. What might work for one might be anathema to another.

I work best through routine, and by scratching out attempts to figure out shape. My first drafts can often be leagues away from where the poem, the story, the manuscript, might finally settle. Although, I say “settle” as though the process inevitable and smooth, of which it is neither; there are drafts upon drafts upon drafts, including multiple on paper and those through my own head. I used to take thirty to fifty handwritten drafts to make it to a single page, a single poem. Now the process is much more internalized, but my literary archive still grows in leaps and bounds, in pages scribbled upon and reworked. There is an endless array, even down to the copy-edit. A word, moved. A word, excised. The occasional typo.

*

Someone posts a paragraph by Vladimir Nabokov to social media, on how he attempted to discern the difference of taste between a poisonous and non-poisonous butterfly. Why did he do this? And what have we, as readers, learned through his experience?

end-of-summer something-something, : sainte-adèle

It took us five months [see when we were here last], but we managed another away-weekend at mother-in-law's cottage. Christine, our young ladies and our persnickety cat, Lemonade, three days of Sainte-Adèle, Quebec, just up along the Laurentides. As ever, the leaves were already beginning to turn (before they do back in Ottawa). Naturally, I now approach such awayness-ess as marathon reading sessions, where I attempt to make first-notes on as many books as possible towards potential reviews (I did get through about half of this stack, if you can imagine, although I was also focused on edits on the manuscript-so-far of "the green notebook," my day-book in-progress).

The Maggie Nelson title, LIKE LOVE (2024), was a particular highlight, although there were certainly others (watch my reviews across the next few weeks). I've noticed over the past few years that I tend to pick up a longer book of prose or two for such trips such as these for my reading attention, whether Anne Boyer, Elisa Gabbert, Sarah Manguso or, now, Maggie Nelson, for poolside in Picton, or either in sunroom or on the porch of Sainte-Adèle. I haven't the opportunity for longer prose these days, otherwise (unless stepping onto a flight or a train, which I also get rather excited about, due to the potential for reading). Christine read her mysteries and worked on some things; I moved through a mound of new titles (mostly poetry titles) and worked on some things. The young ladies played downstairs for a bit, ran around for a bit; Rose is reading a series of young adult journals (not sure if fiction or non-fiction, I haven't looked at too closely), including one referencing the War of 1812, so she's learning all sorts of interesting things (that she is telling us, naturally). I am intrigued by what she is picking up.

And apparently one of her school-mates taught Rose chess at one point (which she was then teaching her wee sister), which she only pointed out at seeing Oma's chessboard (you know we have one at home, right? apparently she did not). We played a few games, and she's not bad. I remember teaching my eldest when she was just a bit younger than Rose is now, and we had that as part of our weekly routine for Saturdays, the travel-board we'd pull out in the food court of the Rideau Centre. I suppose I'll have to pull that out now for Rose.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

 

The aesthetic function of the novel, to my mind at least, is to whisper, to hide critique, to grab a reader by the throat with an invisible hand. I want no part in this. My provocations will be bare-faced. I wont trick anyone. Maybe what I want is to be violent in an epistemic sense; the blood will be not on my hands but on my words. This is why I’m a poet before all else. Maybe it’s best if I admit everything that is fucked up about me and my writing practice in the first paragraph of any piece of writing. Am I fucked up because I believe beauty is in short supply? That this lack is all I care to write about as of late? That the world is at once the condition of possibility for and addicted to this beautylessness? Probably. To be without beauty is an integral component of human life in Canada. There, I said it. Now no one needs to feel slowed down by this heretofore unutterable sentence. This act of avowal is no heroic feat; my desperation is creaturely. I spew verbal matter even when my mouth is shut. Truth is I feel savaged by language, by the History of Language, which is always-already a History of the NDN as an Endangered Animal. (“FUTUROMANIA”)

From Driftpile Cree Nation writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, comes his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020). The author of the poetry collections This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms:Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], A History of My Brief Body is a collection of short essays that blend lyric memoir, critical theory, life writing and confessional on his cultural and contemporary self, blended together into a commentary on grief, sexuality, gender, colonialism and the body across fourteen sharply brilliant and beautifully written essays. As he writes early on in “AN NDN BOYHOOD”: “Perhaps this pressurized orientation to memory—a body in the present—is always the case with life-writing. The writ  is called on by others to do the politically significant and ethically charged work of construction and then documentation. This is my job to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future.” Belcourt’s view is unflinching, writing on the cultural and sexual self and the contexts around which he emerged and exists, writing the dark underpinnings of racism and homophobia, the falterings of any coming-of-age and sexual awakenings, and the ongoing personal and family legacies of the residential school system, as well as multiple other concerns, experiences and explorations. As he writes to open the title essay: “Let’s start with the body, for so much is worn and lost, and lost and lost there.” The essays centre around the body, as the body is where everything is felt, everything ends, and everything begins. And from the foundation of the body, so too does he write on the requirements and statements around desire, and the possibilities, joys and complications of desire. And from there, his essays open into a meditative suite of incredible depth, range and complexity. As he asks early on, how does one exists in such a space of constant erasure and denial, citing experiences around his culture, his family and his sexuality? Later in the collection, as part of the essay FRAGMENTS FROM A HALF-EXISTENCE,” Belcourt offers:

            I believed the quirk that made novelists novelists was an ability to say no to the world. But as a poet, I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object. I said yes to the world again and again, sometimes to my detriment, if only to increase the volume of my selfhood, a performance of creativity I felt closer to than invention. One night in an empty bed (empty beds are for me a call to art-making in response to an imposed quietude) it occurred to me that what I wanted wasn’t to write a novel but to fall in love. Both were overwhelmingly possible, which perhaps explains why I accomplished neither.

Even as he writes on grief, there is an optimism in these essays, one that works through some dark passages, working to open up necessarily conversation on what has so often been brushed aside, including having to somehow exist, and attempt to thrive, from within an ongoing colonial violence. Remarkably complex and passionate, A History of My Brief Body is easily comparable to work by Maggie Nelson for its blend of theory and memoir, and its openness and engagement with a range of social and political inquiries, queer and cultural theory, and personal explorations around love, sex, joy, disappointment and belonging. Belcourt writes through how theory can speak to lived experience, and how lived experience can be articulated against trauma, negotiating and navigating how one arrives at the present moment, so as to be better prepared to move forward. So much of the book is heart-ripping, stunningly articulated, and utterly devastating, and the deceptive ease and straightforward matter through which he writes is startling for just how thoughtful and deeply felt this collection is, as he writes as part of “AN NDN BOYHOOD”:

I can’t blame my kin for forgetting that the form for my life’s emotional content isn’t, as one might expect, a family but an entire world, a wilderness ruled by unknowing inside which I’m a future relic. What binds us is the knowledge that it can be devastating to discover that a loved one has forfeited everything to that which you’ll never fully see yourself. To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.

 

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : s e v e n _ r e c e n t _ 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.

We've now more than forty essays posted! Our most recent include:

Amy Lauren on Alison Bechdel

Tanis MacDonald on Alice Munro

Dominique Russell on Louise Glück [pictured]

Jacqueline Doyle on Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Hélène Cixous

Rose Cullis on Maggie Nelson

Evelyn Deshane on Joan Didion

S. Nadja Zajdman on Ruth King Porter

Please check out our submissions page for more information (we are seeking submissions! we even pay a small amount!). We've also a Facebook page!

We are also still accepting signed books for our upcoming fundraiser! and check out our Patreon page! All donations go directly to paying contributors.

Jasmine Dreame Wagner, On a clear day

I stay up all night listening to you; I listen for you; I stay up all night to make sure the morning will still be there. It is.

A better world begins in the snow of the old one; a better television begins in the snow of the old one; a city under snow is an unauthored work of public art. Snow falls on the pyramids for the first time in 112 years. Celan writes: “Blessed art thou, No One.”

Celan is a work of public art. I stand in the snow and think Celan. Then I think of Sufjan Stevens. I think of Sufjan’s unsung States: possibilities? I feel violence in them, the violence of theft, as things that are possible—but kept from us—are stolen.

As there is theft in snow, in poetry. A new snow begins in the theft of the old one. A new poetry begins in the theft of the old one. To move toward poetry as a question itself is a promise of snow: I am compelled to continue beneath it, within it, above it; I am compelled to produce and continue producing tunnels encased in tunnels until I, only a source, am exhausted, am snow. (“Snow”)

American poet, artist and musician Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s second full-length collection is the absolutely remarkable On a clear day (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017), a collection of what are described as nine lyric essays. There is something quite fascinating with the way she blends poetry and prose in such a way that her work belongs equally to both forms, and her work invites comparisons to prose works by Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso and Claudia Rankine for their stunning interplay, intellectual curiosity and interest in an unsentimental, straightforward confessional. Rich, meditative and multi-directional, there’s almost the feeling that if Maggie Nelson composed poems, they might look like Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s On a clear day. In a recent interview for Speaking of Marvels, Wagner references the new collection:

I have a book coming out next year called On a Clear Day. One of my blurb writers wrote that I’d undertaken the project of loneliness. Am I lonely? It’s something I’ve wondered and truthfully, I don’t know if I’m lonely or if my wire is tuned to a solitary channel. I like being alone, taking walks alone, reading Twitter as though it were a divining practice in another century. When I’m with friends or witnessing art, I’m completely present, but I feel absolutely alive when I’m gorging myself on solitude.

Wagner’s inquiries move through a wide array of subjects, ideas and references, each wrapped around a particular idea, writing “Snow,” “Sunsets,” “Snow,” “Small True Things,” “Snow,” “Deserts,” “Snow,” “Aughts,” “Snow” and “On a Clear Day.” Wagner’s multiple inquiries are far-ranging, linking references across incredible distances, musing lyric and hard facts, contradictions, quoted material and the details of silence. Her work is gorgeous, thoughtful and sprawling, held together through a process that connects to itself constantly; no matter how far she might appear to stray, she never does, composing a series of perfectly executed theses in incredibly tight prose. By writing on snow, she describes the essential snowness of everything else. By writing on noise, she articulates silence. She writes: “For a moment, I forgot how I relish privacy. I want to share this.”

Jacques Attali writes of Brueghel’s painting Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent: “his angst is audible.” In Brueghel’s paintings, the clatter of human noise prefigures silence as power, specifically, the silencing of social order, of religious morality. The church’s policing of festival and carnival, of pagan joy, willed silence on the people and on their landscape. This was long before industry replaced festival and carnival as noise, before the air roared with turbines and silence split into two different ends: silence as luxury, silence as torture.

Silence as luxury: John Cage in Harvard’s anechoic chamber.

Silence as torture: Unknown unknown in solitary. Guantanamo Bay. Water drip. Electricity down the back. Ray Bradbury’s Margot in All Summer in a Day, the girl whose peers lock her away for knowing the sun, “how like a lemon it was, and how hot.” Her punishment: a closet. On the only day in seven years when the Venusian inhabitants would witness the rising and falling of their lifeblood.

At the end of the story: “They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it. Behind the closet door was only silence. They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.” (“Sunsets”)

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.

I know I’m a bit late to the game, but I was finally able to open Los Angeles poet and writer Maggie Nelson’s lyric essay, Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) while in Vancouver, and managed to read the book in a single sitting. Composed in two hundred and forty short numbered prose sections, Nelson’s Bluets is an essay around desire, thinking and the colour blue. Invoking Goethe, translation, Mallarmé, sexual fantasy and Warhol, Bluets moves with an incredible ease, blending literary theory, art history, philosophy and pop culture with a sharp and straightforward line. Hers is a scalpel, getting directly to the heart of the matter. Into the blue.

Given the book is already nearly a decade old, I would suspect it has long been discussed in reviews far meatier and lengthier, so I shall leave it at this: I know I need to read more Maggie Nelson.

I’ve read that children pretty much prefer red hands-down over all other colors; the shift into liking cooler tones—such as blue—happens as they grow older. Nowadays half the adults in the Western world say that blue is their favorite color. In their international survey of the “Most Wanted Painting,” the Russian émigré team Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid discovered that country after country—from China to Finland to Germany to the United States to Russia to Kenya to Turkey—most wanted a blue landscape, with slight variances (a ballerina here, a moose there, and so on). The only exception was Holland, which, for inscrutable reasons, wanted a murky, rainbow-hued abstraction.