Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

Nicole Brossard, Distantly: translated by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue

 

            Brossard does not write in autobiographical or narrative detail, although it is clear that the speaker of her poems in Distantly is writing out of the specificity of lived experience, from the sensual impressions and responsive articulations of a particular embodied life. The poems are linked through the theme of life in cities (every poem title begins with “cities” or “city”). The poems are gorgeously lyrical in style, and the series as a whole is based loosely on the observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams of a female speaking subject. The cities of the individual poems are not described realistically, although they are full of reality-based distillations rather than “thick” descriptions of postmodern urban life, with a sharp awareness, hovering at the edges, of social, cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and political struggles for survival and intimacy. (“Translators’ Foreword”)

I was gratified to see Quebecoise writer Nicole Brossard’s latest English-language poetry title, the bilingual edition Distantly (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022), translated from French by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue. This is, I think, Brossard’s first solo poetry title since the appearance of the expansive and essential Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. This is also the first Brossard title to be translated by this particular pair of translators, and it is curious to go through my own archives and realize that Cynthia Hogue was also the judge of the “Poets Out Loud Prize” for the year it was awarded to Washington State poet Sarah Mangold, which resulted in the publication of Mangold’s Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2021) [see my review of such here].

Given Brossard is a poet, novelist and essayist so extensively published in English, a language beyond her original language of composition, it would be rather interesting, I would think, to hear from a potential round-table of her numerous translators-to-date on their processes of each working on a different element of the same author’s work. Are there some translators that prefer to work on Brossard’s poetry over her prose, or prose over her poetry? Are there translators preferring to translate her earlier work over her later? Are there two translators that might disagree on a particular word choice by another? I know Lydia Davis has discussed this, how different translators can often highlight different elements of structure, tone or even content of the same source text: what might these particular grouping of translators, all having worked on the same living author, have as a discussion?

“always I take up my cities again,” Brossard writes, to open her poem-shaped “Author’s Note,” “the same one, or another and its plural / with a taste of seafood, a painting by / Caravaggio, a suspension bridge, taste of / a foreign tongue that forces me to breathe / in the slowness and speed of my other / body of vertigo [.]” Distantly is a book of cities, as Brossard writes her lyric as slant points along an extensive and expansive grid, of thinking, feeling and allowing the world to exist within the body. “little by little we’ll say,” she writes, as part of “Cities with a face,” “the count of eternity’s / crossing our faces [.]” Distantly writes of cities and silence, location and dislocation, and the distances one travels between, amid and through. Her poems extend across sequential, stand-alone stanzas, stretching her line across the page and multiple pages, something Ottawa poet Monty Reid is known for as well: allowing the sentence a particular kind of opening—not open-ended per se, such as Robert Kroetsch or bpNichol—but extended. Her poems, long and short, sequence and sit together as a kind of suite or collage accumulation; less in sequence per se than around the central core of an image, an idea, as she writes between and amid cities, of cities, and a dream of cities, and their inherent elements of beauty and violence. As the second fragment of the five part “Cities really” reads:

in the distance with their yellow circles
or the closer tap tap of daily boredom
lap of fountain fairy-neons of night
cities with their tall vertical cabinets
Martinis 4 olives and murmurs
in the distance cities wooed by the haze of civilizations
our hands between supple joys
walls of mirrors and melancholy
electricity which falls through our hair

Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker

            Nicole Brossard’s work is both thrill and balm – and now, in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, readers can encounter the full range and scope of her trajectory. We have worked to curate selections that will be relevant and, we think, exhilarating to new and returning readers of Brossard’s work, and we have moved across genres and through time, not in a linear way but in a way that fits the always-aliveness of her work. If Utopia seems impossible to readers in 2020, Brossard’s work reminds us that when we gather – either on the page reading, or in rooms together – our co-presence conjures the possibility of Utopia.

            Over a fifty-year period, Nicole Brossard has published more than forty works of poetry, prose, essays, and non-fiction. She has broken through the bonds of sexual and linguistic repression, and in doing so has reached across several generations and two solitudes to enchant avant-garde, feminist, and academic readers and writers nationally and internationally, creating a radical, complex, and influential body of literature. It is work that never forgets the importance of pleasure, and that never loses hope in the possibility of Utopia. For the scholar Susan Rudy, Brossard’s writing is comparable to Virginia Woolf in being ‘uncompromising’ in its ‘critique of patriarchal reality, unrelenting in her love for women, and unequalled in [its] aesthetic experimentation.’ Has any other Canadian writer enjoyed the kind of feverish collaboration and translatory attention paid to Brossard? And has any other Canadian writer had the kind of attention that comes not from the established literary complex down but from the ground up? Poets, writers, and translators have taken up Brossard’s work largely as a labour of love. This is quite impressive when you consider that at the core of this fervour is a radial lesbian innovative writer who comes to English only through translation. (“AVANT DESIRE, THE FUTURE SHALL BE SWAYED,” An Introduction by Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker)

Sitting at more than three hundred pages, Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, eds. Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020) is a “selected works” of fifty-plus years’ worth of Montreal writer Nicole Brossard’s works in English translation, from, as the back cover attests, “her best-known writings but also includes hard-to-find interviews, essays, and lectures.” From the very beginning of her work, Brossard’s work has been uncompromising in their experiments with language and form, and engagements with sexuality, desire, politics and social politics, and this new collection attempts to acknowledge the myriad threads of her work through thematic sections—“Desirings,” “Generations,” “The City,” “Translations, Retranslations, Transcollaborations” and “Futures”—a noted difference from, say, a more temporal editorial structure. The book is built as a sequence of threads pulled from Brossard’s translated work, from her numerous books-in-translation to more obscure pieces, including elements included in her prior selected through the University of California Press. The collection offers pieces from published works such as French Kiss, or, A Pang’s Progress (Coach House Books, 1976), Turn of a Pang (Coach House Press, 1976) and Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon (Coach House Books, 2005), but also the collaboration “Mauve” with Daphne Marlatt, originally published as a chapbook produced in an edition of thirty copies back in 1987:

La réalité est un sursis au-delà

et du reel lorsqu’on observe

en l’apparence virtuelle, courbes

de ceci qui ressemble ccombien de fois

les images : la bouche au féminin

dose de sense émotion dorsale

Real that of the under-bent

curves of the virtual we take for real

a gap  delayed that-over-there  re

semblance the images repeat

mouth in the feminine, dos€

of sense making a dorsal

commotion

Brossard’s influence on writing and culture can’t be overstated: the ways in which her work has been the forefront of what became a wave of writing engaged with theory and literary form, form and theory engaged with desire, and desire engaged with the politics of gender, sexuality, language and the body; centred in Montreal but rippling out in waves throughout Quebec, Canada and beyond. Her writing has consistently worked to explore boundaries, engaging with questions and concerns that originally exploded across the culture throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. One just has to think of the number of touchstones her work offers, including the incredibly powerful piece she wrote in response to the Montreal Massacre, “6 December 1989 / Among The Centuries” from Fluid Arguments (translated by Marlene Wildeman): “Mysogyny, phallocentrism, sexism, and anti-feminism are four words that could seem to be easily interchangeable. It would be, however, a serious mistake to confuse one for another, for they play very specific but oh so complementary roles when it comes to the alienation, domination, and exploitation of women.” As Lisa Robertson wrote in her introduction to Brossard’s Theory, A Sunday (Robertson’s essay is also included in this collection): “The feminist writers of Montréal have altered their city irrevocably. When women write about and from the cities they live in, they are transforming the material ccity into a web of possibility and risk. The description of the city bends back on itself – it not only represents, it opens up a site for the political imagination. Through the fictive and theoretical act, the city is reinscribed as a space for radical otherness.”

Her work continues to explore the boundaries of what is possible with text, blending lyric with theory, and a retrospective of this sort is, honestly, long overdue. One could imagine how easily such a volume could have been twice as large, given Brossard’s near-constant engagement and exploration through prose, prose poetry, the lyric essay, poetry and works for the stage over more than five decades-to-date. There aren’t too many contemporary Canadian writers who have predominantly been known as writers of prose fiction who have incorporated so many ideas of poetry and the lyric into their work and their thinking (the late Robert Kroetsch might be another example of this), as well as such overwhelming engagements with political concerns, especially early on in her writing career. And yet, every inch of her work could be considered overwhelmingly and thoroughly present, no matter when one might be encountering it. In an interview Catherine Mavrikakis conducted with Nicole Brossard and Nathanaël, translated into the English by Katia Grubisic, Brossard responds:

The French poet René Daumal said, a novel says something while poetry does something. The whole posture is different, certainly in terms of language, and of the tension in language. Because a writer can shift from one genre to another, we can also ask the question of prose poems, for instance. Why not write a poem, why write a prose poem? It’s because prose balances the peaks of tension, whereas the poem always exists because of the tension in meaning, and therefore in grammar, syntax, and rhetoric. It’s always in the present when you’re reading it, and when you write it. Even if it takes six months to work on a poem, you’re always in the present, you are always in the moment. When you read it, too. And you can’t negotiate with a poem, you can’t say, I love this part of the poem. You love it, or you don’t. A novel – you can like parts of a novel, while other parts you don’t like so much, but it’s negotiable. And it has to do with the span of the text, obviously, its length. It really is a different way to relate to the world, to look at the world, and of course another way to live in the present, to experience one’s own present moment in the language, I think.