Ongoing notes: late February, 2014

Toronto ON: Composed as “an ekphrasic translation of bpNichol’s ‘Allegories’ (from Love: A Book of Remembrances. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974)” is Toronto poet and editor Stephen Cain’s Etc Phrases (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013). There have been a small handful of chapbooks released over the past decade or so (including one from above/ground press), but some time since Cain had a trade collection of poetry, back to his third trade collection, American Standard/ Canada Dry (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), and his micro-fiction collaboration with Jay MillAr, Double Helix (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2006). Is Cain slowly and quietly working his way up to something, or simply in small, self-contained bursts?

Etc Phrase #16

Ebbing the ineffable.

The phonics of the palimpsest.

Expletive F exclamation.

Floating or floundering.

No horizon line.

B coming or being.

Thorny thrownnes.

E F Geworfenheit.

Still present despite the presence.

Not waving but sounding.

The chapbook intrigues in part through the playful coherence of collisons, pushing phrases against phrases to ascribe an accidental meaning. The thirty-two poem sequence of Etc Phrases makes for a wordy exercise of what jwcurry would refer to as “serious play,” counterpointing other short self-contained units he’s produced as chapbooks over the past few years. Is there a collection of collated units finally forthcoming upon that horizon?

New Jersey: Until now, Ben Fama is a name I’ve heard but never actually read, finally able to go through the poems of his Odalisque (New Jersey: Bloof Books, 2014). The seven poems that make up Odalisque are constructed as accumulations, nearly collage-works that build their individual ways up into a coherent shape, despite the sequence of seemingly-unrelated phrases he uses as building materials. His poems do seem an intriguing blend of collage, random statement and narrative flow, in the Frank O’Hara “I did this, I did that” kind of way, especially through his use of pop culture references. The final poem in the collection, “girlwithcat2.jpg,” even includes shades of what Montreal poet Jon Paul Fiorentino has been playing with the past decade or so, blending pop culture sensibilities and humour with a dark, even pessimistic bent.

FL NEUR

Fashion makes me less crazy

It should be looked at

Never discussed

It’s an honest joy

To be shocked by beauty

In the 21^st century

I was shocked when my lover was caught stealing

From Dean & Deluca

I was thinking of a line

By Robert Hass

The floor manager stopped us

We simply went to a different store

Poetry

A requiem for leisure, pleasure, thought

I cannot take your high school friend’s

Hoop earrings seriously

And every picture on my phone is obscene

Seriously, look at it—

All these fucking effetes

Boring travel stories

Details of somebody’s dreams

Champagne condensating

On leather seats

All summer long

I wish I could afford a room

At the Peninsula New York

Suites with TVs above soaking tubs

With city views

And all that sun on Fifth Ave.

I live inside it too

I am at Uniqlo

Buying underwear

And after I paid

I stayed and shopped again

A surprising second erection

After you’ve just finished

And you know it’s time

According to Wikipedia, the term “odalisque” refers to a “female slave or concubine in a Turkish harem, particularly the concubines in the household of the Ottoman sultan.” The title poem in the collection plays off that meaning, exploring ways of seeing and comprehending, and yet, the poem predominantly work through anything but, opening:

There’s a picture of you on my phone

I look at when I’m bored

It’s basically an American Apparel ad

In a world I have access to

I’m looking at it now

Or possibly through it

And listening to “Gymnopédie No. 3”

Sometimes I think it is a perfect song

I wonder what you are going to wear

To this cocktail event

At the Gershwin Hotel

We are going to tonight

Toronto ON: I’m very taken with the musicality of Marianne Morris’ Alphabet Poems (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2014), third in the NEW BRITISH POETS series edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De’Ath [see my review of the first two, here]. This is an intriguing series they’ve taken on, seemingly produced in pairs (Andrea Brady’s Dompteuse is forthcoming), and I would be very interested to hear the editors’ take on the hows and whys of curating such a series. Of Morris’ Alphabet Poems, I’m taken by the rush of the line, and the flow of the words like water, forceful and smooth and unrelenting. Alphabet Poems follows her first trade collection, The On All Said Things Moratorium [see my review of such here], which I would highly recommend. Born in Canada, raised in London, England and currently residing (according to the bio at the back of the chapbook) in Oakland, California, I can only hope that Morris manages to make her way north to perhaps read, as her pieces, as strong as they are on the page, give the impression that they are really meant to be heard to be felt, in full force.

THEIR TEETH

Something of darker mettle, they said. They requested.

Something of darker mettle. Them and their

Wants. Of organized mettle. Fuck you! I said.

Poured frayed panties from the broken neti pot into

The almost empty but resealable bag. Her earth hands.

Bag like I am.

A month on the lips, seventeen years in the hips

The holding-in sounds. The slipping-in sounds.

The groans, loaming archers, swoop low. I know

Them and a plastic container of oiled nuts.

To stop biting

At my own lips

For eighty dollars and a vial of my salt

Which I will replenish with the fat of something dead

So I can eat. A row of exes: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Morris’ “alphabet” is expansive, complex and richly textured. And it’s hard not to be charmed by the table of contents, especially when you sound out the titles, reading in order: “WON,” “TO,” “FREE,” “FOR,” “FIVE FLEE WITH SWORDS AND TWO REMAIN BEHIND,” “SEX” and so on.

Marianne Morris, The On All Said Things Moratorium

YOU POEM

you (walking up the road)

you, you (bird with a hole in its wing)

you you you (thought under pressure)

you you (didn’t see what I was) you you you

(now see what I was) you you (a space

opening up between me and myself)

you you (a breath I took through being alone)

you you you (thought reduced to doubling) you

(blatant reformation of) you you you (and me,

me, reformulating) you (a praxis) you (not

singing exactly) you you (can be forgiven for

everything) you (absolutely everything) you

(draw the lines according to what) you

(forgive, arrive late to the games) you

(a staging of battles) you you (just wanting more)

you you (of a nonspecific bounty) you you

(more and then less of me) you (music rising)

you you (up the stairs my thoughts climb)

you you (impose a structure onto the impossible)

you you (eternal suspension)

The back cover of Canadian/British poet Marianne Morris’ first trade poetry collection, The On All Said Things Moratorium (London UK: Enitharmon Press, 2013), includes a small paragraph by the author in lieu of blurbs:

As the documentation of culture, as the source material of history, and as a medium of resistance, we know that words have the power to shape us. The way that we speak to people shapes the way that they treat us, the way that we speak about ourselves creates certain permissions and impossibilities in our own lives. Therefore the specific, intentioned, and pointed use of language may also constitute an attempt to change certain ideas – political or otherwise – that depend on language for their perpetuation.

The back cover also informs us that Toronto-born but London, England-raised Morris “has been writing, performing and publishing poetry for over ten years.” What is fascinating about her work is in how the poems feel as though they’re being performed, even while on the page, managing a kind of breathless rush, an accumulation wave of energy, fire and language, enough to knock the reader sideways. As she writes in the poem “UNTITLED”: “You say you are trying to make the everyday / vibrant with being not / cleaving to pulsion and in so / doing seek in every / permission a man.” There is a fantastic and clear wisdom to these poems, and this is not just language poetry, but a language poetry married to performance, without either overpowering the other. The combination is staggering, and creates an entirely new flavour; one that owes as much to contemporary British poetry as anything (and yet, I don’t really know contemporary British poetry well enough to be able to cite specific examples, apart from Tom Raworth, of just what influences might be feeding her work). Where some poems have a more performance feel, others feel like extended train-of-thought essays, managing to be contained and in every direction all at once, with lines so tight one could bounce a coin off any of them. There is such a sharpness here, such a sense of joyful energy in this collection, such a joyful expression in poems that react, respond and rant, exploring a blend of language play, popular culture, historical references, social responsibility, and shades of the metaphysical, as well as what might simply be directly in front of her at the time. As she opens the poem “MEAT BEACH”: “Today is average but totally unique / I decide I am not going to blame myself / even though travel is clearly becoming a / series of attempts at psychological avoidance / & go instead artificially / winged.” Another of a series of uncountable highlights comes at the end of the poem “MAGDALENE” that reads: “By the way, I have / a set of postcards. Most depicting naked women, but some are technical / appropriations of a very famous building. I find a woman’s body / very like a famous building.”

THE MUTILATION OF IRONY

A pinprick. Langauges

sing in their dictionaries, the covers shut, considering the

soft fervor moments take on once they have passed

and it is safe to rewrite them. One says, on reflection,

that was such and such a moment, and perhaps another

will agree. But at the time no such thing existed

and in this way we are all authors. Generalities

and the uniqueness of certain things.

It’s silence that gives birth to them and

then swallows them up, the entire mystery

congealing in someone’s mind a vast

internal dialogue of birth and silence and death

can span any number of weeks, its longevity

coming to mean nothing if death is a certainty and it is.

As you are born, so you shall go: under pressure,

wrought in the privacy of how thought wanders

inventing the connecting wires, what shall we

talk about next. Viciously sweet moments ensue

passing between real eyes. Thought wanders again,

leaves the present company to reminisce about the

not-too-determined future and presses into its hands

the petals of a dying rose. Scentless pieces. The

thought returning each time to a

site of sadness that glimmers with the

compromise of return. Then all the other people

compromises become

laughable by turns having been silently exhausted having

never been tried. Measure out the cups of flour

press them to her neck turning her face away,

the shoes stuck on.