reading in the margins : Susan Howe and Stephen Collis

I've been working for a few years, since the Covid-era, short essays on works by prose writers, most of which I've been posting over at the substack for a while now, and two of the latest have now landed: on the work of American poet and critic Susan Howe, and on the work of Vancouver poet, critic and editor Stephen Collis. Prior pieces have been posting for a while now, on works by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Ernest Hemingway, Joy Williams, Kristjana Gunnars, Gail Scott, Jean McKay, Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, Christine McNair, Sina Queyras, Jordan Abel, Karla Kelsey and Lydia Davis. You can see where my reading interest lay: a bit lyric, a bit off-side. Certainly not the straightforward narrative. I don't know: I might be half-way through a manuscript of such? "reading in the margins: essays on prose writers." Either way, I know there are further to go. Michael Ondaatje? Dany Laferriere? Sheila Watson? L. Maud Montgomery? Elizabeth Hay? Elizabeth Smart? Ken Sparling? John Lavery?

James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall

 

a pink rubber rubber 

(it was behind a gate) 

Manchester-based poet James Davies, self-described as “a minimalist, conceptual and systems-based writer,” is the author of more than a handful of titles, one of which includes it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall (Pamenar Press, 2022). This is the first of his titles I’ve seen, despite having interviewed him in the “12 or 20 questions” series a year prior to this particular book landing. The two hundred-plus pages of accumulated short poems—the bulk of which sit at two lines per, with others not much longer—provide a curious heft, with the addition of some three pages listing musical and literary references that might have informed the collection. “The poems in this book are influenced by or make reference to the following,” his list opens, citing a wealth of specifics including literary works by John Clare, Stephen Ratcliffe, Gertrude Stein, Aram Saroyan and Ursula K. Le Guin, and albums by The Prodigy, Underworld, Yes and The Future Sound of London, as well as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, among plenty of others.

first ideas for box for cupboard 

(how a new spoon when)

The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. These pieces read different than the “poemwds” of American poet Geof Huth, or the particular minimalisms of poets such as Canadian poem-practitioners Cameron Anstee, jwcurry, Michael e. Casteels or the late Nelson Ball, or even elements of pieces by Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross. Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.

cracked a hole     but nicely

(it came from the same source i got them from)

 

J.R. Carpenter, Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast

  

between the ship and the quay
lies two metres of incompressible ocean 

two metres of light between the edge
of the sea and the horizon

I only recently received a copy of J.R. Carpenter’s Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023), a curiously-bilingual title by the Canadian-expat UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher. Carpenter is the author of a handful of books and chapbooks (such as one from above/ground, a while back), including the recent Measures of Weather (Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There aren’t too many Canadian writers working so purposefully across multiple languages in such a way: Erín Moure [see my review of her latest], Oana Avasilichioaei [see my review of her latest] and Nathanaël, for example, might work different threads of multiple languages through certain of their works, but less a simultaneously-produced mirror text, or counterpoint, a structure that seems closer to the novel L'homme invisible / The Invisible Man (Penumbra Press, 1981) by Franco-Canadian poet and writer Patrice Desbiens. As part of a note at the back of the collection, Carpenter writes: “In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.”

Constructed as a quartet of sequences, of increments and precisions—“La côte incrémentielle / The Incremental Coast,” “La côte technique / The Technical Coast,” “La côte grammaticale / The Grammatical Coast” and “Route de La Recherche / Route of La Recherche”—Carpenter composes her accumulated moments across a great distance; composing a line, a study, around an invisible centre, slowly given shape. Further to her articulations around the weather and attending language, Carpenter discovers the lyric held within such small points, distilled into a lyric of stillness, lines and absolutes. “here I enjoy an excess of precision:,” she writes, “a kind of maniacal exactitude / a descriptive madness [.]”

I leave for another world
as for a coasting voyage 

I make a sketch of the land
commencing with those parts 

which were the least liable
to change in appearance 

I savour the sway of formulas
the reversal of origins 

The ease which brings the anterior coast
back from the subsequent coast

One might think that Canadian poets, albeit but occasionally, sure to love to write about explorers, with examples including Vancouver poet George Bowering’s classic George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), the late Montreal poet Robert Allen’s Magellan’s Clouds: Poems, 1971-1986 (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1987) or Barrie, Ontario poet damian lopes’ poetry-multimedia installation Project X 1497-1999, his work that explored the “discovery, technology and colonialism by using the internet to re-examine Vasco da Gama’s first voyage from Portugal to Africa and South Asia in 1497-99,” although none, one might say as well, in any kind of straightforward way. For Carpenter, the details of her particular explorer are utilized as building blocks into something else, something other; utilizing the structures of language, document and philosophy, blending and repurposing elements to allow for a new line composed down her own articulations of coast, as she offers as part of her note at the end of the collection:

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’ throughout. The détourned philosophy is intermingled with sketches and excerpts from the scientific writing by the French hydrographer Charles François Beautemps-Beaupré, Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying (1823). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She become shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré 1791-1793.

I have retained certain antiquated syntax from these texts. I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, polyvocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.”

This work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

 

Julie Carr, The Garden

 

            In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking at the planter’s edge.

 

 

The smoke leaves her mouth, widening like a firth before it enters mine. We breathe, we bathe, we feel each other’s heat. (“Garden”)

The latest collection from Denver poet Julie Carr is the book-length sequence The Garden (Pamenar Press/Essay Press, 2025), a curious structural counterpoint to the assemblage of self-contained and dense lyrics of her UNDERSCORE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection that, itself, feels as though it came out more recently than a full year ago. If the poems of UNDERSCORE worked a particular kind of packed density, the seven poem-sequence-sections of The Garden—“Garden,” “Flame,” “War,” “Door and Ladder,” “Blasts,” “Oftening, Over-and-Overing, Aftering” and “The Dancers”—provide an element of ongoingness, a book-length suite of pulled-apart lyric description; a first-person book-length lyric essay composed utilizing elements of prose poem and lyric structures. There’s almost a shared tonal quality, a lyric intimacy and declarative alongside a simultaneous critical distance, one can see that echoes works by such as Erín Moure, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan or Lisa Robertson. Carr writes, early in the opening sequence: “The cities inside our bodies kept our bodies alert—I sat at the café table and my eye / itched. Then my cheek preferred her cheek. I was aging as if a rock growing lichen by a / ruin. The apples fall, pungent and then brown—rot—as all along the hellstrips, child-sized / bathtubs—or coffins—with scarcely a foot between, deter rest.” There’s almost an element of a timeless placement, anchored in a temporal and perpetual present. As the poem continues, further down the same page:

            Because I am allergic to wine, I drink it. From crown to vulva, I am poisoned—a mild intransigence against the self. These once vigorous clouds with their collapsing fibrous folds.

Sections move across the collection, akin to chapters, held together as a single, extended lyric mode of thinking and examining threads of art, desire, family, family history, writing and reading and friends, a pendulum of memory and her immediate present.

            Something was opening and at the same time remained lost, as my friend the playwright wrote. In Boston,
her girls licked their sugar sticks. 

 

            *

 

But in fact, I was interested in them—the angels, the malakim, or “messengers,” those between beings (laying waste to the categories)—as now, back at home, I found my mouth burning as if a fever of the tongue. The machine had crashed to freeze a man’s face, offering a prolonged view of the future, the static future where his generally youthful expression would turn ghastly, mouth agape, pupils like unseeing stones. Meanwhile, in the man’s bedroom where he somewhat was, time was continuing to move in ordinary beats. There, his unastonished voice had said new things, things about budgets and plans that he had in fact said before and would
            say again

Moving through this assemblage, this is a deeply complex layering of subject matter, with different elements moving in and out of focus. At certain point, the book suggests a foundation of family, and family history; at other points, art and writing and friends; of pause, of slowness; of loss, of death and mourning an immediate peer; further on, an underlay of a history of fascism, as it pertains to art, writing and to her own family history. And throughout, repeatedly and occasionally referencing Yoko Ono, as a kind of anchor. “It was all, as we all knew,” she writes, mid-point, “temporary. As Yoko Ono had said, if you carry stones the city will look lighter; if you carry enough stones, eventually the whole city will float away.” The swirls and layerings are brilliantly coherent, held together in amber across such incredible distance, each layer adding to the richness of the book as a unified whole. “With this / attitude of attenuation,” she writes, near the end of the collection, “I’d been reading the letters the now-dead poet had written from her seat on the patio of a rented house on an island.” Or, in the fourth section, writing:

            A lover of the ballet and of books, he’d especially loved a type of book not a lot of other people love—that is, reference books, especially book-length bibliographies, which was strange to thin kabout since those are the books most speedily outdated and that are only useful to people who, by using them to write about their research subjects, are eagerly contributing to their obsolences.

Carr is the author of a whole slew of previous titles, including Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007), 100 Notes on Violence (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2010; Omnidawn, 2023), Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015) [see my review of such here], Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Real Life: An Installation (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here], as well as the collaborative Climate (with Lisa Olstein; Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Her author biography also offers this curious tidbit, at the end: “Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years.” Is this collection part of that trio of titles? I couldn’t find anything within this particular title to suggest it might be, but it does make me wonder. What is “Overflow”?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jessica Sequeira

Jessica Sequeira’s books of poetry, novels, and essays include Taal (Pamenar Press, 2024; Pez Espiral 2024), Chacal Dorado / Golden Jackal, tr Diego Alegría (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), A Luminous History of the Palm (Sublunary Editions, 2020), Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age, tr Felipe Orellana (Zero, 2018), Otros paraísos (Editorial Aparte, 2020), A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018), and Rhombus and Oval (What Books, 2017). She has translated more than thirty books by Latin American authors, including Augusto Monterroso, Daniel Guebel and Winétt de Rokha. She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Asian Studies / Institute of History of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, studying the influence of India and China on Chilean poetry and music. She also is a member of the band Lux Violeta.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I wrote my first book (Rhombus and Oval) in Buenos Aires, under the influence of a certain poetic mixture of narrative, non-fiction and fantastical literature. It is a very Latin American book that happens to be written in English. It "changed my life" in the sense that my identity was already that of a writer, specifically a poet, because I'd published things in magazines, and was an editor and translator of books, and above all, was an obsessive reader (which can make you believe you are the writer of everything you read). But now I had a book to my name. I'm very fond of it but not overly attached. Many people I knew in Argentina thought about the "work" more than specific books, and I think that I always have, too. A book reflects a certain moment in time, and if you keep writing books, you will have a work. There's no need to become anguished over creating a great monumental worldchanging text as some people do, thus blocking themselves from creating. Probably most masterpieces are created by accident, in the sense of emerging from intentional artistic decisions at a moment that could not have been anticipated.

I've never cared too much about genre divisions, and love writing that moves freely between poetry and essay, incorporating visual elements and music. I'm now making songs with poetic lyrics, experimenting with conceptual art, playing with rhythm . . . My most recent book Taal is explicitly musical. "Taal" refers to the rhythmic cycle in Indian music. But it also refers to Gabriela Mistral's book Tala, which plays on the Spanish meaning of the word talar, to cut down a tree, and furthermore is a nod to the Chilean poet's interest in India.

The difference between the first book and now? I'm an older person, with more experiences, happy and otherwise. And I'm in Chile, and don't think of leaving—I consider myself to be a Chilean-Indian diaspora-noneoftheabove poet, in deep engagement with local sounds, speech patterns, folkloric traditions and history.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry is at the heart of everything for me, as a form of personal expression and a way of speaking with communities of poetic existence past and present. An anthology called A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, was formative for me, along with a bilingual edition of Enrique Lihn's La pieza oscura, Jean-Paul Sartre's Les mots, the novellas of Clarice Lispector, and many other books, but also the poetic lyrics of countless singer-songwriters. Quite early on, I discovered both poetry and translation, and the playful possibilities of words in relation to emotion, which remain vital. For me, fiction and non-fiction emerge from the same profoundly lyrical impulse—of course poetry doesn't have to be lyrical, but what I write tends to be.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I usually start from an idea, sometimes narrative, other times imagistic or musical. Concepts like a palm tree, or a passage of music, or the idea of dignity, go about developing secondary, tertiary, polyphonic associations. The initial thought comes quickly and develops at the back of the mind, assembling through notes over months. Which isn't to say that I'm always writing. But even at times of pure being or experimentation, there are ideas that can relax, unfold, develop. I like the moments when speculation pushes the boundaries of reason.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I've worked both ways. As I said, usually I start from an idea, which can be quite broad, with what emerges along the way a surprise. If I gather miscellaneous texts, I try to give them a meaningful sedimentation and narrative flow. Since I write a lot of book reviews and criticism, if I want to turn those into a book, by nature it will be a poetic exercise to give these eclectic texts a unifying label. Usually it's the other way around.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes, I really love public readings and performances! Of poetry and music. There's a theatrical element to it all that is so enjoyable. I'm fascinated by the possibilities of the "performing arts", and the ways that the same text or song can take on different meanings and textures in different places and contexts. I've written pieces in response to a "pie forzado", or prompt. The opposite case has also been true; I've found new ways of understanding existing texts by reading or singing or playing them in front of others.

In the past few years, I have turned more toward music—I am part of a trio that composes songs on the basis of poems, most of them from Latin America and Asia—and am more attentive to this element. But I've always been attracted to the composition of written works for contexts I wouldn't have thought of myself, and to performance poetry. Relatedly, I also really love to collaborate.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The world is full of violence, suffering and a lack of compassion. I don't have an easy answer about what poetry should be or do, or what the current questions are. Poetry is perhaps a special kind of attention that takes the time to lovingly explore aspects of life and culture that escape the daily news cycle, and a means of connecting with other human beings different from oneself, with shared concerns.

For myself, the act of writing, language as a verb, helps me to form thoughts and express emotions that I wouldn't have otherwise, not necessarily about my own life. Paradoxically, I often best understand myself by reading, writing or imagining myself as other selves—getting out of this limited skin. I also enjoy reading others' work to enter into other forms of knowing and feeling, other social worlds. All this is a necessity, something integral to my existence. Acts of imagination and associations happen in poetic writing in very specific ways, using parts of the brain that would not otherwise be activated.

Of course, writing often has preoccupations that connect to worlds beyond the text. I am interested in the power of art to change emotions, the influence of historical colonial processes, and the ways that certain ideas like "dignity" change and transform across contexts. I also enjoy the work of many writers with more specific projects, like Jacinta Kerketta, who shows the inner lives of the Advasi community in Jharkand where she grew up, and the resource extractions inflicted upon this community in the name of progress. The journey, the anecdotes, the pleasure in language, and the connection between inner self and outer landscape remain at the centre of the work. Journalistic writing can often present a good complement to poetry as a space to present more urgent and linear arguments.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think making any kind of art is a vulnerable process where you are showing deep parts of yourself to others, even if you aren't talking directly about your own experiences. I don't have any grand claims about the moral power of writing to improve the world, and the experience of making and experiencing art often happens in solitude. But in poetry communities and art communities more generally, I've found so many lovely creative people and friendships that I really treasure, which give me a sense of hope and joy. Humor, playfulness and just letting your hair down are so important. Creating feeling doesn't have to mean writing saccharine things, but making work that conveys a depth of thought and emotion, entrusting it to others in spaces where creativity and meaningful conversation exist, and in turn receiving others' creations and giving them time.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love working with editors who offer sensitive, thoughtful suggestions. Of course there are butchers out there, and people who limit themselves to copyediting. Those with advice for good structural edits are rare and precious.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer", the Simone Weil quote, often comes into my mind. The idea seems related to fanaa, the Sufi idea of self-annihilation. When things don't work for some reason, it tends to be an issue of dispersion or distraction, a lack of care for something or someone. True attention can require consciously putting other things aside to achieve a certain level of dedication, permitting oneself to be absorbed in what is not the self.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to translation to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Oh, I think it's easy to move between styles. Life, experience and thought work like that—sometimes they exist more in sounds, other times in images or words. Art perhaps accompanies these emotional and cognitive processes, and to mix styles is an appealing way of conveying different modes of understanding.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don't have a routine. I'm always writing, in the sense of taking notes and developing ideas, whether that be at 2pm or 2am. Which also means that I'm also always not-writing. There is no fixed hour to do this or that, even if every day I make something. Academic funding and freelance translation work have given me the opportunity for unbroken blocks of solitude, for which I am very grateful, and the ability to absorb myself deeply in whatever project I am working on.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Inspiration comes from everywhere. I don't believe in that idea of the blank page, because if you are reading, studying, talking to people, and playing with other forms of art the possibilities are endless. I especially love talking with creative friends who are excited about their own discoveries and ideas, and transmit that enthusiasm. Collaborative work is also exciting because ideas emerge that couldn't have come from a person on their own.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The pungent coconut oil my aunt (father's sister) used in her hair has a very particular set of associations for me. Now in Chile, which has been home for over a decade, I have to mention merkén and the scent of blooming jasmines in summer, and the smell of the excellent Negronis prepared by my local barman.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think the obvious answer is music. Especially vocal music by poets of the world's folkloric and rock songwriting traditions, and instrumental music from South Asia and Latin America, along with jazz.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

In Santiago, Chile there is a very strong community of writers, musicians and artists, in which I form part and which always inspires me to keep working and collaborating with others. This is just as important to me as the books I read. I truly believe in the importance of the living tradition, of keeping poetry alive through current interpretation and conversation.

The internet has been important in discovering the work of writers from other places. Nowadays social media is more politically fraught and I've stopped participating so much on twitter and other platforms. I hope there is a way for a dynamic of kindness and curiosity about other people's work to continue to exist internationally, as it does in the city where I live.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to write a kind of inverted biography of Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan), the Portuguese explorer, not talking about him directly but rather about the places he visited, and the communities that received the influence of Portuguese influence in India and South America. He would be a kind of ghost inside the book with the focus turned to the sounds and stories of other less famous people.

I also want to record an album of songs with my own poetic lyrics—until now I have worked with lyrics by other poets such as Gabriela Mistral, Stella Díaz Varín and Pedro Lemebel. It is such a pleasure to find the music in the poetry of others, a pleasure very much analogous for me to the pleasures of literary translation. But I'd like to try out my own poems too and see what happens.

Also, I want to continue publishing more books of poems and novels, and improving my abilities as a tabla player and singer. The poem is, for me, always a "canto".

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Like many of us, I already do practice other occupations. My day jobs are postdoctoral researcher at a university, and literary translator. I also make music. To answer your question—and maybe it will happen—I can imagine myself plunging into the musical life more completely. Writing, but with the rhythms and textures of music. Violeta Parra, Akiko Yano, Flora Purim, Elizabeth Fraser, Jeff Buckley, Victor Jara, Mercedes Sosa, Lata Mangeshkar, Joni Mitchell and so many others are people I admire very much. And their lyrics are poetry. Instrumental music can also speak. I think of people like Anoushka Shankar and Keith Jarrett, or above all, the truly great tabla player maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

As I said, I do other things too. I will say that writing has tended to be the most complete way to give my thoughts and feelings expression. To create a poetic narrative, and really work on the precision of language and structure, helps make sense of so many things, even if the material isn't autobiographical. This is perhaps because I was trained in a verbal and analytical tradition, and lack the tools still to express myself as completely in other arts.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The word "great" rears up like a specter before me. I'll tell you two things I just read and watched, both of which I recommend. The last book was Manto azul, poems by Verónica Zondek based on the history of the Valdivian gold mine Madre de Dios, told from several voices. The last film was a short documentary by Indranil Chakravarty of the Konkani-language writer Damodar Mauzo, which is on YouTube.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on several things. One is a book for Bloomsbury on the basis of my doctoral thesis, about the influence of India on nine Latin American writers. Also, I am finishing up a few books of poetry, including a set of poems that dance around the history of Chinese slave labour in the north of Chile and Perú, and another set of poems texts written in response to music. Some interesting translations are in the works— you'll see another Argentine novel soon . . .  And my group Lux Violeta is working on a new album of music. I could keep going, but now I have to get to work on all this! Thank you for the questions, rob.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;