essays in the face of uncertainties

In response to the self-isolations, my friend, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has instigated a series of 35mm portraits of poets through windows. He stands outside, as his subjects remain safe in their houses. He wishes, as he writes me over email, “to document in physical, material ways the Coronavirus.” He asks: do we get evening or morning light?

Our front window faces west, and the backyard, east. Late March: our yard is still a variety of snow, ice and water, so I suggest the front window, pushing his opportunities into the afternoon.

Today is warm, and the sun is out. Soon, he stands in our driveway, headset attached to his cellphone, speaking to us in real time. Christine puts him on speakerphone, so we can all hear. A half-second delay between watching and hearing him speak. From within our living room, the girls mug at the front window; Stephen requests we lean in for the sake of proper light, and framing.

He catches us all, but within days is forced to abandon the project, given stricter directives around social distancing, and remaining home. We all remain home.

Stephen has been engaged with photography the entire time twenty-plus years that I’ve known him; he prefers the results of film over digital, for the sake of texture, of depth. Through preparation for this project, he told me that he came upon a whole array of photographs he took of us in 2002, during a reading tour we did of Ireland. A photograph of myself, brooding, in front of Yeats’ Tower, Thoor Ballylee, the 15^th century Hiberno-Norman tower house in County Galway, once owned and inhabited by the poet William Butler Yeats. “What shall I do with this absurdity, / O heart, O troubled heart —” Yeats wrote, opening the title poem to The Tower (1923), writing on age and experience and hard-won truths. More recently, Ottawa-born American poet Paul Legault reworked his own translelation of Yeats to compose his own volume, The Tower (2020), overwriting Yeats’ lines to seek his own discoveries. A transelation, as Erín Moure coined it, from her own exploration of creating new work through translating, Pessoa-esqe, within the language. As Legault wrote the first lines of his own title poem: “How will I do being old when I’m old – / having to use this same heart in its place.”

What I recall of that day, driving though Galway, was the amount of time he would take to set up his tripod each time, staring down into the top of his camera to set up each shot. As we travelled across Ireland, multiple stops at ruins, churches and fields where as he set up his camera. He had a whole sequence of photographs from that trip. I did also, deciding to take snapshots with my digital camera of Stephen from behind, as he set up his camera and tripod, although with only Stephen in view. My joke was that it looked from his stance that he wasn’t taking photos, but peeing. My photo-sequence of Stephen Brockwell, seemingly peeing at important sites all over the country.

What I recall of that day: the tears in his eyes as we pulled up to the Tower.

Does peace, in truth, come dropping slow?

 essays in the face of uncertainties

Paul Legault, The Tower

How will I do being old when I’m old –

having to use this same heart in its place.

Tell all my cells to be made of me younger,

Madonna. I won’t budge until time makes me

                do it. God likes getting older

like an animal who escaped from the zoo

only to visit on Sundays with her children.

I never had a tail to chase.

I got bored in Plato’s cave,

which is to say I was young and stupid.

Once I’ve worn the imagined world out

like a cheap wig, conquered heaven

with you as my bride, Imagination,

five it up and finally teach me the hack

that lets you convert abstraction into life:

more of it. Or, fuck, just spill over,

heavy glass, as the fly caught under you flies off – (“The Tower”)

With the publication of Ottawa-born American poet Paul Legault’s latest, The Tower (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), I’m realizing how behind I am on his work, having gone through his second title, The Other Poems (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], but completely missing out on The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (McSweeney’s, 2012), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 (Fence, 2016) and Lunch Poems 2 (Spork, 2018), as well as his co-edited The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat, 2012). Where, exactly, have I been, you might ask? An entirely reasonable question, and one I haven’t quite an answer for. On the back cover of The Tower, it references this book as “A queering of Yeats’s classic poetry book,” with Wayne Koestenbaum writing that “The Tower continues his [Legault’s] project of rubbing the old songs to produce blissful new serums.” On his author website, Legault offers his take on reworking other texts: “Paul is interested in translation as a generative practice for creating original works of writing and art.”

Legault’s The Tower plays with the poems and structures of Irish poet W.B. Yeats’ The Tower (1928), “his first major collection as Nobel Laureate after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923” (Wikipedia), the title poem of which begins: “What shall I do with this absurdity— / O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, / Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog’s tail?” There is a sharpness to Legault’s work, one that is subtle and incredibly precise, composing exploratory poems that reach out in multiple directions, simultaneously with caution and abandon. “I went to school so many times / I can’t count,” he writes, to open “Among School Children,” “though I learned how to / while I was there. There, I said it: / I’m tired of learning in the old ways again.”

It would be interesting to see someone far more familiar with Yeats’ work explore the differences between poems, and the distances, to see how Legault reworks, whether as a translation in his own patter and patterns, or if using Yeats’ work simply as a jumping-off point into his own, individual directions. Through Legault, the opening of Yeats’ words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing. “How will do I being old when I’m old,” Legault declares, “having to use this same heart in its place.” There is something of how Legault’s reworking texts that is reminiscent of Erín Moure’s idea of transelation, composing, as Eirin Moure, her Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) out of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa’s O Guardador de Rebanhos, an idea sans name that Vancouver poet George Bowering also employed, overwriting his local neighbourhood over Rilke’s Duino Elegies as Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986).

Ina 2011 interview posted at HTML Giant, conducted by Sam Ross, Legault spoke to his thoughts on translation, and how such would lead to original work:

Paul Legault: I began writing those English-to-English “translations” of Dickinson when I was in a seminar class focused on her work. There was a tendency to find out what the poem meant biographically, which can lead to a very rigorous sort of engagement –though that rigor is applied to wrestling facts from the lyric (i.e., poem #1436 is about how she wants to have sex with her sister-in-law). What shakes out is the Cliff’s notes–in which meaning becomes like a plane: flat, or, depending on your perspective, potentially infinite. Which is funny. Or can be.

The ED Reader got me more interested in “translation” as a means of writing original work. I teamed up with my co-editor Sharmila Cohen to put together Telephone, which is turning into Telephone Books shortly, and have been in pursuit of experimental translation’s “politics, aesthetics, difficulties, and processes” ever since. So it seeps in.

The Other Poems is less translational than some other projects–like my ‘memory translation’ of Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, or my project of re-piecing together Pound’s Cantos using only Carroll Terrell’s critical Companion to it. I translated Apollinaire using the same kind of talky sonnets as the ones The Other Poems is/are so obsessed with. What does that say? I don’t know. That this leads to this.

More (and more), when referring to “translation,” I think of it in quotation marks. I can’t tell if that’s useful or disorienting; the answer to that kind of either/or question is usually: “both.” There needs to be a new term to categorize the purposefully “rogue” (to use Brandon Brown’s term) translations that set out to make “original” works, rather than “faithful” reproductions. I’ve been floating around the term: ‘distranslation.’ Maybe it works.

There’s a lot more work focused on-or-around translation these days in American poetry–partially because of the obvious technologies that are making it increasingly easy for an English-speaker to browse a Brazilian bookstore online or write to a Turkish publisher; namely: Google Translate. Thanks to said advances, I’ve recently complete a translation of The Other Poems into French and Spanish, though I’m sitting on Los Otras Poemas and Les Autres Poèmes, until I’m bold enough to actually send them to a foreign publisher.

Paul Legault, The Other Poems

NEW ENGLAND IS OLD

After the first first late antiquity,

things are a little –ish.

THE BREAKERS: They are not soldiers.

THE SOLDIERS: You see I cannot see.

EMILY: They were a part of it.

THE SOLDIERS: They were not Emily.

Go through a hole to the nook,

little sister, send all your messages by mice.

Hurrying, there was a green light.

SYMBOL: I am a symbol.

THE LION AT THE LIBRARY: Listen up, Marilyn.

MARILYN: Bronze turns that dark color.

I took the trains out. I just wanted

to see the boats in the snow.

Ottawa-born American poet Paul Legault’s second trade collection, The Other Poems (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2011) is a collection of seventy-five sonnets, bringing something new and refreshing to the form. On the whole, the sonnet is an entirely overused, and yet, under-utilized form, too often little to nothing brought new to the form, with the rare exceptions of works such as Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (Lorenz and Ellen Gude, 1964), or Camille Martin’s Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010). As Marjorie Perloff’s back cover quote on the collection explains: “Each of Paul Legault’s seventy-five taut and dazzling sonnets begins with a cryptic couplet, follows with a four-line dialogue, whose voices (animal, vegetable, mineral, or disembodied like the date) engage in debate, as ardent as it is inconsequential, and then puts four more couplets to work, analyzing what we have just heard or spinning variations on its tense, absurdist drama.” Legault’s poems in this collection are small scenes performed by a variety of voices, centred around a narrator, and including multiple others, in a sequence of surreal stories. My name is Legion, the poems tell us, for we are many.

THE SENSES

Then they made another garden

but differently.

FRAGRANCE: There’s always something in color.

TEXTURE: There are always bird walks.

SOUND: There are turkeys on these grounds

      and José the Beaver

      far off in the forest without thoughts.

AUDIO TOUR GUIDE: There is almost always

an irregular ball

      about two feet high

described on this phone-line.

In the future, or in three months, the plants will chance,

      or else they will be about to have to.

THE FUTURE: Who senses me when I’m not there?

LAVENDER: The bed is knee-high

      an lined with a single wall.

WANT: You want to grow your own food,

annihilating all that’s made,

and live in Paradise alone.

Legault’s poems are a sequence of collage that leave an almost magical residue. The pieces in The Other Poems suspend believe for a moment or two longer than one might think is possible, and manage to weave perfectly a number of threads coming together from multiple directions, crafting oddly-surreal (even dreamily-so) poems that are bulletproof-precise. They might appear strange, and even confusing at first, but once they sink in, it might be impossible to remove them.