new essays on Joanne Page/Bronwen Wallace/Sadiqa de Meijer and Anne Carson,

Curiously, I've been working these essays on poetic form lately, the second of which has now posted, "Short Talks: the Anne Carson Lectures," over at my substack (it had been a paid-only post, but I released it after a month or so; free to sign up for the free posts, at least). There's a prior essay there as well, most likely the first in what might become a series, "Field-notes: a mothertalk," a piece subtitled "on Joanne Page, Bronwen Wallace, Sadiqa de Meijer + my mother," with a further I seem to be working on Don McKay's 1975 collection Long Sault, in case such intrigues, articulating my thoughts on the accumulative long poem. I'm sure I'll post that over to the substack as well, once I complete the thing. Might there be a book in here, somewhere? Where might I head next?

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

Sadiqa de Meijer, In the Field

 

I lost my notebook.

            This was, for a few days that summer, my distracted answer when people asked me how I was.

            It clearly wasn’t a disaster, I wanted to convince myself, but my body seemed to argue; there was a void in my chest, and I couldn’t relax, repeating my searches until they were senseless compulsions.

            Only some of that discomfort had to do with the possibility of exposure—that someone, anyone, might read my private scribblings. Sure, it was unsettling to imagine eye contact with that individual, to be so inwardly naked, but after those seconds of awkwardness, I would have my notebook back. The universe would resume its semblance of order. (“FOUND”)

 

The latest from Kingston poet (and current poet laureate for that city) Sadiqa de Meijer is the collection of essays, In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025), a sharp reminder of just how good her award-winning alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] was. You should pick up both books, really, to get a sense of how detailed, how precise, are her examinations of language and being; how, for her, the two are intertwined. The author of two prior full-length poetry collections—Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Outer Wards (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]—there is such a striking way her first-person prose so quickly allows a reader, with ease and comfort, into not only her own thinking and experience and complexities, but that of the people she encounters, considers, reconsiders and reflects upon. Across nine personal essays, she composes fieldnotes for and through her own experiences, whether searching for a lost notebook, through medical studies, travelling to Amsterdam (the city where she was born), or working as part of a study of life through a particular corner of Southwestern Ontario. As she writes in the essay “In the Field”: “I was working for a professor named Kee. He knew the geology of the city, where there were moraines and buried creeks. He told me that trees hold so many symbiotic bacteria that if their wood and leaves were somehow erased, they would still look like phantoms of themselves.”

 

It is the details that occur through her thinking I’m struck by, offering moments almost as asides that provide the deepest meaning. “I imagine my objections are principled,” she writes of her medical studies, in the essay “Bloodwork,” “rooted in ethics and aesthetics, and then I doubt myself—because the hospital is a collective ruse, a place of faith in the reductive and separate, and I a surrounded by believers. My classmates sound eager to be in the building, mastering its workings, close to doing what doctors do. I begin to wonder if my aversion has other roots.” If reading helps teach us empathy, to understand another’s experience from the inside, I can think of no better example than moving through this particular collection, as de Meijer provides a remarkable example on just how deep, and how detailed, the possibilities.

 

Sadiqa de Meijer, alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language

Months later, an insight arrived. I had grown up in such a language—my Dutch was of its land, while English, where I had learned it, was an invasive species imposed by settlers. My own ancestors had been equally oppressive: in Indonesia, in Manhattan, in Suriname, in the Caribbean, and in South Africa, among other places. Apartheid, the euphemism that means separateness, is perhaps the most internationally recognized Dutch word. Of South Africa’s eleven official languages, Afrikaans—the independent language that formed during colonial occupation, merging Dutch with influences from Khoikhoi, Malaysian, Portuguese, German and French—was at first considered a dialect between owners and slaves. My language was unequivocally guilty, but it also mattered that I’d acquired it on the flat turf of its formation.
            Until then I had attributed the sense of detachment I experienced in English, that sensation of having a tongue infused with lidocaine, to the language’s belated integration in my life. Now I was in doubt; perhaps English felt less real because I was speaking it on the wrong land. Its sounds and constructs had nothing to do with the local earth, and neither did French—it was absurd for two languages to span such an enormous territory, and to sound so similar from the slopes of the Rockies to the coast of New Brunswick. Names and terms had ben placed on this land like a kind of linguistic asphalt; they didn’t have to correlate with what was underneath, they only had to be steamrolled over. (“elders / elsewhere”)

I’ve been slowly moving through Kingston poet Sadiqa de Meijer’s utterly fascinating alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2020), composed as an exploration of how language thinks and swims, through her ongoing experience with moving physically from one language, culture and country into another. In a suite of short essays arranged alphabetically by title, she narrates and explores the shifts between the Dutch language, from her origins in the Netherlands, to English-speaking Canada, working her way through multiple implied and inherent differences, many of which she has only begun to fathom. She writes of the alphabet, the bare bones of the language itself, one against another. As she writes of the openings of that lengthy transition: “In Canada, my clothes were odd, and I had no idea what malls or Cabbage Patch Kids or gimp bracelets were, and when I tried to be funny with my peers the silences were awkward and prolonged. I felt an urgent wish to restore my own significance. I read everything I could—flyers, packaging, signs—and listening to the mumblings of my classmates and teachers. Willing myself to make the same sounds, I strove to regain a sense of fluency, of language as my element. That was all I had in my sights; it didn’t occur to me that this was also the start of a slow and nebulous loss.”

The author of two full-length poetry collections—Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Outer Wards (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]—de Meijer’s biography at the back of the collection offers that she “was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch-Kenyan-Pakistani-Afghani family, and moved to Canada as a child.” There is a lot of geography to unpack in that simple array of words, and a complicated sequence, well before the dislocation of arriving into Canada. The effect of her shift from one cultural space into another reveals itself to be deeply felt, and lifelong. This is in part, no doubt, due to the fact that it was not a journey precipitated as an adult, but one made when she was twelve years old; during such a formative period, felt down to the foundation of how she speaks, thinks and breathes, and interacts with herself and with the world beyond. Particularly curious is how her migration into English allowed her new pathways back into certain of the dialects of her native language  “English was both a dominant and an eccentric language,” she writes, as part of the “verzen / verses” section, “no wonder that it had been adapted and interpreted by various groups to make its own local sense. Even in the culture of three that comprised my brothers and I, we improvised on its strangeness, usually while we played with LEGO in our basement.”

Reading her descriptions of standing at the teacher’s desk during sessions of learning English in her newfound country, it reminds me of witnessing another during my own time as a grade school student; watching a classmate and relatively new arrival from the Netherlands go through similar one-on-one sessions with our grade five, as the surrounding students, myself included, worked on other projects. What becomes fascinating about this particular memoir of arrival and departure is in how she focuses the book not on family or culture or dislocation, all of which is certainly featured, but through the very root of language, and the differences between them. And the shift in perspective offers her, as well, fresh considerations on her home language, and home culture, realizing the light and dark elements of both sides of this new equation. As de Meijer offers in the section “gastarbeider / guest labourer”:

            “Never erase, it doesn’t really work,” my favourite art teacher said to me once, and I’ve learned she was right; the sound of Dutch persists like a faint carbon shadow in my English. It deepens after I’ve spoken to my mother, or when I’m breathlessly eager to recount something, or when I speak of anything that happened “over there.” Very rarely, people guess my linguistic origins—once it was a man who had asked for spare change, and then heard me apologize and wish him good luck.

 

 

 

Sadiqa de Meijer, The Outer Wards

Spoon, spoon

I, too, have a small version

I had one made

in the meticulous workshop

under my navel

They started with a fish,

then frog, then rabbit

and I asked them to stop at human (“On Origins”)

I was pleased to see a second poetry collection by Kingston poet Sadiqa de Meijer, her new The Outer Wards (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2020), a follow-up to her debut, Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. There is a tension in these poems between the sprawling and the precise that I quite like, from shorter poems such as the opening piece, “On Origins,” to larger, more expansive poems, such as “It’s the Inner Harbour neighbourhood / but everyone calls it Skeleton Park,” with the surrounding pieces existing somewhere between, amid and through those stretches of incredibly precise and broadly expansive. Some of those tensions emerge from her movement from Dutch to English, from a first language and culture into a second, allowing the movements between one to the other and back again to be more open, and openly taut, as she wrote of as part of an interview I did with her back in 2014, as she responded:

One thing I’ve noticed is that part of me registers it when English words resemble the Dutch ones – I feel closer to those words, they seem more elemental to me.

[...]

None of what I’ve said has to do with effects on readers – I feel like that’s because my first language, at least when I write, has less to do with conveying something to others than with making the words real to myself.

What I find fascinating is in her attention to small detail, writing poems from a foundation of being home with children, allowing her the ability to make words and ideas more “real to herself,” understanding difference and boundaries, and how she is occasionally misunderstood, and how she, too, has misunderstood, articulated into and through the poems. As part of the poem “It’s the Inner Harbour neighbourhood / but everyone calls it Skeleton Park,” she writes:

Lord, some days there’s so much whiteness, hard

in the stratified walls of old quarries that edge the backyards.

I’m Guatemalan, Native, Arabic, whatever, they insist they’ve met

my sister, but I have no sister. And the ones who say,

that’s so interesting, I’m just boring old nothing, are the most

dangerous people, who think they have no history.

When we meander, slowly, nowhere,

all the places are in my pocket.

The extended poem focuses on an outing with her daughter, but moves into a variety of directions via small moments and small details. There is an awful lot of small and slowness in such a large space, providing an expansiveness of structure into an ongoingness, allowing small point to meet further small points, focused simply on the immediate of the outing, as she writes:

She says she loves me more than fifty-four-a-hundred. I say love

has no measurements, there is enough in the world

for everything. Everything? I didn’t know that, she answers,

and turns quiet. Even concrete? I feel compelled

to sustain the premise with a yes.

How does concrete cry?