Alison Calder, Synaptic

 

CONNECTOMICS

The idea is
to render the brain
transparent enough to read through,
trickles of water washing away thought.

Deletions, insertions, translocations, inversions,
proofreaders’ symbols carve a straight line
to the minotaur. 

In the light of the laboratory,
thought’s skein unravels,
bumpy road smoothed. 

Lucent, pellucid, the brain wavers
like the glass in a display case,
minimum interference between eye and page. 

Like reading through a jellyfish.
The text, however, remains opaque.

Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Alison Calder’s third full-length poetry collection, after Wolf Tree (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2009) and Tiger Park (Coteau Books, 2014), is Synaptic (Regina SK: University of Regina Press, 2022), a curious assemblage of narrative theses whittled and shaped through the lyric. Comprised of two sections of shorter poems (only one piece throughout is longer than a single page, and not by much, while a further poem sits in three short sections)—“Connectomics” and “Other Fires”—it is the longer, opening section that shapes the core of the collection. Synaptic is a collection of poems through which she (according to the back cover blurb) “ruminates on the inner workings of the brain, language, and the state of human curiosity in the age of information,” although the descriptor seems more specific to the first section than the book as a whole. Through the framework of the lyric narrative, Calder works a sequence of studies, and there are elements of Calder’s approach that echo the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of Legris’ latest here], through their shared observation and unfolding of a particular question, idea or thought. “A road, a network, consciousness / is a computer,” Calder writes, to open the poem “SCIENCE,” “a map. / It’s a vehicle on a road, it’s not the road. / It’s a stream. / A neuron’s like a tree. Consciousness / is a load the vehicle’s hauling.” Through the poems of the first section, Calder explores brain function, from the language of genomes and synapses to anti-depressants. “A synapse is two friends talking on the phone.” she writes, to close the same poem, “The skull’s a box of books you move / from house to house to house.” Through the thirty-two poems of the first section, she seeks to articulate a map of her findings on brain activity, writing further points along a lengthy progression of ongoing study, processing data on the very idea of processing data. “Beneath the squares,” she writes, to close the poem “PYCORTEX,” “the seams are full / of hidden fabric. If you ripped apart / the sutures, laid the fragments side by side, / you could assemble the resemblance / of a blanket, see where it might hold a body. / Pulled back to rags, it won’t keep anybody warm.”

Comparatively, the second section (twenty-six poems) is constructed as an assemblage of more self-contained studies on a variety of subjects, including the weather, marriage, the 1970s, turning fifty, eating lobster, various holes in the ground (this does come up more than once), selkies, arguments on form and two poems for Saskatchewan-born American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004), an artist covered recently, and in very different ways, through American poet and editor Lawrence Giffin’s Untitled, 2004 (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Regina poet, fiction writer and critic Michael Trussler’s Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It makes me wonder: is there a resurgence happening of Martin’s work that I should be aware of (and have otherwise missed)? Calder’s paired poems on Martin open the second section, and both pieces share the title “ARGUMENT WITH AGNES MARTIN.” The first poem is subtitled “(Siberia/Saskatoon),” and the second, “(Taos),” both of which offer a perspective upon Martin’s work through the lens of prairie geography. “What you’re facing is where you’re from.” the second poem ends. Or, as the first poem offers, in its final three lines: “Similarity, difference, the same shapes punched out over and over. / Scrape away white: pink, green, cream, thin blue / of powdered milk. The minimal aesthetic. Plain.” At the end of the collection, Calder offers a note on Martin and her work, writing that “Her best-known works are large, luminous, and sometimes almost colourless canvasses marked by lines and grids.” One could easily see how such patterns could line up with elements of prairie geography and landscape, especially elements of Martin’s home-province of Saskatchewan.

There is something interesting in the way Calder looks at Martin’s work through the lens of a prairie landscape that is reminiscent of an earlier poem of hers, “SEXING THE PRAIRIE; or, Why I Am/Not a Prairie Poet,” a piece that originally appeared in Open Letter, and later, in Calder’s first collection; a poem that responded directly, and at length, to Robert Kroetsch, situating her own thinking and writing in relation (and opposition) to elements of his. There is something of Calder’s response that seems a way of her placing and articulating her own thoughts, her own mapping, by seeking out and responding to an already-established reference point. In that earlier poem, she writes how she isn’t a prairie poet by responding directly to Kroetsch, subsequently situating herself in the prairie landscape through responding to the work of Agnes Martin. Through her lyric, she seeks a signpost, and writes her way around it. Or, as she writes to open the poem “AT 50,” offering (along with what could be seen as a sly reference to an earlier collection by Sharon Thesen): “At 50, my body says fuck it, / I’m not following rules anymore. / One foot on the dock, one foot in a canoe, / a tipping point, two halves of a pill capsule broken open. / This is it: the beginning of the long dash.”

Janet Gallant and Sharon Thesen, The Wig-Maker

 

My dad didn’t say a lot
      but he had only wonderful things to say about his grandmother
            his mother and his sister. He never talked about his father.
I never knew anything else about anyone else in his family.
     His sister-in-law told me
            And this was before I told her about the abuse,
“Our priest was not part of that. I will tell you, though,
      Your grandfather was nicknamed ‘the pervert.’
            Your grandmother wouldn’t let the children out of her sight.” 

I would love to talk to Aunt Elizabeth!
      “Can you tell me if my dad went to church? Aunt Elizabeth,
            aren’t you wondering why your Tommy died with no family by his side?”
My father may as well have hung himself.
But she’s ignoring me. Her entire family has shut down,
      won’t contact me. his brothers—Uncle Walter, a bus driver—
            I’ve met once. He’s in denial, a nice enough guy, nothing to say.
Uncle Bud never called me either. He’s dead now. (“tom”)

I’m fascinated by the collaborative lyric memoir-in-poems by Janet Gallant and Sharon Thesen, The Wig-Maker (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021), a harrowing account of childhood physical and sexual abuse, the suicide of a sibling, abandonment, grief and resilience. The poems in The Wig-Maker are told in the voice of the storyteller, Lake Country, British Columbia wig-maker Janet Gallant, as shaped by her neighbour, the poet Sharon Thesen, with the occasional aside by Thesen interspersed throughout. The poems in The Wig-Maker offer a memoir propelled by Thesen’s lyric clarity, writing out the story of Gallant’s life as a biracial child, abandoned early on by her mother, and left with her father and eventual stepmother. The narrative also includes Gallant’s more recent discovery, via DNA, that the man she knew as her father wasn’t her biological father, adding new layers and complications to an already fraught history.

What does it mean when a work is ghost-written, but the writer shaping the words isn’t a ghost? I suppose the closest descriptor might be “collaborator,” as Thesen receives and reshapes Gallant’s stories, the threads of Gallant’s tellings, into lyric form. The poems speak to Gallant’s childhood and sexual abuse by her father, her slow realization and exploration of her biracial identity, the stories of her siblings and their own traumas and eventual deaths, and the onset of her apopecia, which caused her to lose her hair, becoming bald by the time she was forty-six. As she writes in her introduction, “After a couple of frustrating years and a several thousand dollars spent on off-the-rack wigs, I wasn’t satisfied. The fit was never quite right, the hairline didn’t look natural. I didn’t feel like me. So, my journey into the craft of wig-making began.” As one of Thesen’s asides offers:

Janet’s hair, before it fell out, and when it began growing back as we worked on the text, was black. After she received the results of the DNA test, it fell out again. Today, it is growing back in platinum white, the legendary hair-turned-white-overnight of someone who has a bad shock.

There is something reminiscent in this collection of when prairie novelist Rudy Wiebe collaborated with Yvonne Johnson to write out her own story, resulting in the award-winning memoir Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (Vintage Canada, 1999). There are ways in which Thesen’s lyrics point to this process as an examination, documentation and potential exorcism of some of Gallant’s past, needing to say aloud in print what can possibly be set aside. The setting down of these poems might allow certain elements of Gallant’s past to be, finally, relegated to the past, with other elements recorded for posterity, and out of respect for some of those loved ones that she has lost, all of which build The Wig-Maker into a powerful, necessary and difficult collection. As Gallant writes as part of her introduction:

            We are writing this book, due to my lifelong need to tell the story of my brother Billy, dead by suicide before his fourteenth birthday; to tell the story of our sister Penny, dead at the age of forty, ravaged by breast cancer after suffering, her entire adult life, on the streets of Canada with schizophrenia. The story of innocence lost, taken by the one called father, overlooked by the lady of the house. A story of three generations of women (my grandmother, my mother, and my sister Penny) whose lives, and loved ones, were taken by the same mental illness.
            My friend Melissa asked me if music would be woven into this telling. She knows how important music was to me, is to me. I told her I hadn’t considered it at that point. She got me thinking. I look forward to following up with Melissa, to let her know how it worked out. To let her know the music is indeed here. Lyrics of truth, and notes of healing, are here.

 

Sharon Thesen, The Receiver

Vernon, 1954

He worked for the city & early one spring morning

still dark out, he took me with him

to collect the still-burning oil lamps

from the road construction & put them in the back of the

    truck.

Still burning? Or extinguished, I don’t recall

— and the privilege I felt, wordless in the front seat,

sitting still, being good

to deserve this honour, to be woken and taken out

so early with no one around but us

as he gathered the heavy sooty lamps

that guarded during the night the still-soft asphalt

of repaired pot-holes and altered curbs.

B.C. poet and editor Sharon Thesen’s latest poetry title The Receiver (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2017), a collection of lyrics and prose-poems, some of which focus on family and memory, reminiscent, slightly, of George Bowering’s Autobiology (Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, Vancouver Series #7, 1972), working through how stories are told and retold, and shift in both telling and memory, sometimes deliberately, and often harden into those variations, some of which are very far from the facts. Set in five sections – “The Receiver,” “My Education as a Poet,” “Around then,” “Charles, Frances, Ralph, and Me” and “Book of Motz” – the first three sections evolve from a lyric exploration of family histories to more literary matters, akin to the essay-poems of, say, C.D. Wright (a quote by Wright is one of two that opens the collection) or Anne Carson. Thesen visits and revisits, reexamining her own memories and influences, from family to writers, in poems that write of visiting her mother, recollections of her youth, or the poets Shelley and Anna Akhmatova. Not that any of this is a new thread in Thesen’s work; one might even suggest that these are the foundations upon which Thesen’s work exists, but there is something about her view, perhaps, that is bringing new elements to light here. Particularly curious is the inclusion of the poem “The Pangs of Sunday,” a piece that shares a title with her first volume of selected poems, published in 1990 by McClelland and Stewart (a title that is otherwise unseen throughout the selected). Did it take this long for Thesen to complete the poem?

The Pangs of Sunday

You’d go to Banyen Books on Sunday afternoons,

a searcher after meaning. So much meaning, so

little time! Was it to be mental or physical, your

ailment, in the end. In the end the ailment revolved

around love, mental or physical. Across the road

was the health food store, the herbalist, and the pains

and the ills of real estate & car insurance even though

it was a matter of proximity

and luck, how you arrived anywhere with no one

to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car. I

could get my fortune told in the sweet

cafe of Sunday by the woman with the bangle bracelets

and the low voice and the black, tangled hair – who else

to believe? — you only hoped your tip would be enough

to jumpstart the engine of your happy fate idling

while you got settled with your purse, etc,

and turned up the volume on the radio.

Although this isn’t the most interesting in the collection (my preference remains with the longer prose poems over the shorter lyrics), but it furthers the throwback element that Thesen presents in the book as a whole. Really, Thesen’s The Receiver is an intriguing blend of the past and the present, composing poems that work to revisit and reconsider her history, memory and influences, as opposed to simply repeat or re-hash, as she manages perhaps her strongest collection in quite some time, going back to News and Smoke: Selected Poems (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1999), A pair of scissors (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000), or even my personal favourite, the intimate smallness of Aurora (Talonbooks, 1995). An interesting direction to the collection emerges through the last two of the five sections, as the fourth is an essay exploring that game of telephone the book’s title suggests, “Charles, Frances, Ralph, and Me,” that begins:

The recent fracas that followed an audience “question” about how Black Mountain College could call itself progressive when it was patriarchal, racist, and white (following a four-part panel discussion at the Black Mountain College exhibit in Los Angeles), as well as my own very recent visit to the exhibit, had precipitated some memories and feelings about my long association with the late Ralph Maud as co-editor of the two editions of the correspondence between Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff. You might say “patriarchy” was the underlying theme, in both theory and practice, not only of the correspondence but also of Ralph’s and my relationship as we slowly transcribed and published the letters. The bickering, the disputes, the discussions centred mostly on how “crazy” Boldereff was (Ralph) or why she may have, legitimately, felt Olson was exploiting her (me), mirroring uncomfortably Ralph’s and my working arrangement.

While I don’t know about the “recent fracas,” the essay is a curious element to the collection; while it fits thematically, it feels an odd inclusion, in that perhaps the essay should be given more prominence for its exploration of Olson scholarship, and Thesen’s long-standing relationship with and work upon same. And yet, the essay fits perfectly, furthering her interest in reconsidering how and what stories are actually told, working to give Frances Boldereff’s relationship and correspondence with Olson the proper exploration and understanding. The final section, “Book of Motz,” is subtitled “Conversations with Frances Boldereff,” and appear to be exactly what they say they are. In this section of short pieces, Thesen herself becomes the receiver, and allows a credit to Boldereff in the best way, one might say, possible: through her own words. It suggests there is far more work to do on Boldereff, and her relationship to Charles Olson and his work. One might hope this is the push required to get that moving.

The Real Theatres of Pittsburgh

“There was this Irish Catholic guy. I begged him to go to bed with me. His father owned all the real theatres in Pittsburgh. Eva Galleon entertained at their elegant house, a limestone mansion. Real black marble floor. The ritzy dog on the front seat beside the chauffeur. The beautiful library upstairs. His little shrinking ascetic mother.”

George Stanley, North of California St.

It’s pretty shitty

living in a Protestant city

& my heart too bleak for self-pity

I sit in the Cecil

surrounded by a passel

of loudmouth’d assholes

I swill beer

to still my fear

of the coming year

& there are mornings when I wake up

so riddled with psychic breakup

I can hardly hold on to my coffee cup.

I lived here three months

in a house where I never once

heard anyone say please or thanks.

Not the best indoor weather

for getting your head together

but it’s a personal matter. (from “Vancouver in April”)

“[A]ssembled from the contents of four earlier, out-of-print” poetry collections is Vancouver poet George Stanley’s impressive North of California St. (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2014). Subtitled “Selected Poems 1975-1999,” the book is constructed from the bulk of four of his Canadian poetry titles: Opening Day: New and Selected Poems (Oolichan Books, 1983), Temporarily (Gorse-Tatlow, 1985), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995) and At Andy’s (New Star, 2000). For years, George Stanley has been known as one of a selection of arrivals into Canadian literature from the San Francisco Renaissance, as he, Stan Persky and Robin Blaser each headed north into Vancouver from a rich series of circles that included poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Joanne Kyger. It is well known that Stanley was a student of Jack Spicer, and it was through Spicer himself that Stanley’s first poetry collection, the chapbook The Love Root (San Francisco CA: White Rabbit, 1958), was published.

It seems clear that North of California St. works to articulate a period of Stanley’s work where his poetry really began to cohere, changed through his arrival north of the border and beginning to interact seriously with Canadian poetry and poets, including George Bowering, bpNichol, Fred Wah and Barry McKinnon. It is as though this is the first writing of Stanley’s to properly be situated in Canada; even as his poetic gaze occasionally shifted back to the city and country of his birth, it became more and more through the filter of Canadian influence. It is from this perspective that he begins to adapt his worldview, as he writes to open the poem “The Berlin Wall”: “Why, now that it’s breached, broken, does it cause / such consternation in me? // CBC brings me / the cries of happy youth, the singing, people / climbing up on the new meaningless Wall, / drinking champagne —[.]” Having been involved in poetry events via Warren Tallman in Vancouver for some time, Stanley moved first to Vancouver 1971, and the five hundred miles north in 1976 to Terrace, returning only to Vancouver some twenty further years later.

December. Coloured lights sketch

houses of family. Arms control descends

like a gift of Titans. Like little pre-Christian men

imagined thor, or Russian serfs

a good Tsar. Up where satellites crawl,

Star Wars lasers, power’d by earth’s rivers, may streak.

Today benevolence speaks, sublunary commanders

& we’ve never been so far from the stars,

that were our friends. (“Terrace ‘87”)

Stanley’s work has always seemed comfortable in that space between the past and the present, and between geographies, even as he articulates his immediate present, including his discomfort of being in the air or travelling on the Sky Bus, between the cities of San Francisco, Vancouver, Kitsilano and Terrace. In her lengthy introduction to the collection, poet and critic Sharon Thesen describes Stanley’s “Aboutism,” writing that “Since his move back to Vancouver in 1993 to take a job at Capilano College (later University), Stanley has more than half seriously promulgated the poetics of ‘Aboutism’, his rebuttal to the excesses of the ‘language-centred’ excesses of the poetic avant garde […] which concerns itself with its unfolding context: ideas, thoughts, locales, occasions, persons, and words.” She continues:

            Aboutism and transportation are natural companions, one enabling the other throughout North of California St. Stanley’s first book is entitled Pony Express Riders; his next-to-last, Vancouver: A Poem, was written while riding the bus between North Vancouver and his home in Kitsilano, a journey that involves crossing Burrard Inlet on the Sea Bus. To get to and from Terrace, along with “CBC brass” and timber executives, Stanley would fly nervously on small planes, some of them bush planes. The “Mountains & Air” lyric sequence is an Aboutist text from the point of view of someone encountering a terra incognita. Stanley’s airplane poems are almost always about mortality and fatality. Flight is a subject that creates opportunities for fear of the loss of “plain reality,” of losing touch with the earth, which Stanley likens to “the truth.” The sense of loss, inspired by flight, of the world, the person, the real, and the familiar, is not a backward-glancing nostalgia for a “golden” past, which we know, or are told we know, is a fiction; but rather derives from a sensed absence or emptiness in the present. In an essay about the late James Liddy, an Irish contemporary of Stanley’s who taught poetry in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Stanley notes that Liddy’s poems (much like his own, I would say) “open outward into the world, thus allowing the incarnate (opposite of virtual) object to be subject.” As in Stanley’s own work in this volume, “the real refuses to submit to the schema, the length of time in the line. Images come faster than they can be accommodated; the charge is to grasp the moment in its flight.”

As Thesen describes in her introduction, “Not so much a career retrospective as a retrospective reading of these four books,” the current volume sets aside earlier works more in keeping with an earlier apprenticeship, including not just that first title, but his Tete Rouge / Pony Express Riders (White Rabbit Press, 1963), Flowers (White Rabbit Press, 1965), Beyond Love (San Francisco: Open Space, Dariel Press, 1968), You (Poems 1957 - 67) (New Star Books, 1974), The stick: Poems, 1969-73 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974) and Joy Is the Mother of All Virtue (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1977), as well as a variety of single-poem broadsides, including The Rescue (San Francisco Arts Festival, 1964). The word “apprenticeship” might be apt, but inadvertently suggests a dismissal of an enormous amount of activity, far more than what the current volume acknowledges. Stanley himself articulates the difference between that much earlier work and some of the work presented in this new volume in his“12 or 20 questions” interview, posted October 25, 2011 at Dooney’s Café:

My first chapbook (The Love Root, White Rabbit 1958) was ephemeral. Just a few pages of mostly pretentious verse – i don’t even have a copy of it any more. It was the second chapbook (Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders, White Rabbit 1963) and the third (Flowers, White Rabbit 1965) that immediately gave me a readership in San Francisco and beyond, and were a mark of my recognition as a poet by the older poets (Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan), as well as by Joe Dunn and Graham Mackintosh, the principals in White Rabbit Press.

My most recent work (“After Desire” [The Capilano Review  3.14] ) is intensely personal. This marks a shift from much of the poetry I had been writing over the previous three decades, where my aim was to understand the world — in particular, how capitalism works, first in Terrace BC (“Gentle Northern Summer”), where being so new to the community I could see it more objectively, with less distortion than familiarity would have brought. Later I wrote poems (“San Francisco’s Gone”) to understand the history of the city and of my family, especially my parents, who were both born there.

North of California St., then, might argue for as much as a difference in approach as a difference in perspective. In her introduction, Thesen argues for a lack of larger attention throughout Canadian literature for Stanley’s work, something that seems to have eluded him, despite the length, breadth and bulk of his publishing which, frustratingly, can even be argued as an offshoot of the fact that Stanley lives in the western part of Canada. In spring 2011, Vancouver’s The Capilano Review produced “The George Stanley Issue” [see my review of such here], which featured critical and creative appreciations by a list of Canadian and American writers alike, including Michael Barnholden, Ken Belford, George Bowering, Rub Budde, Steve Collis, Jen Currin, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Reg Johanson, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, Barry McKinnon, Jenny Penberthy, Stan Persky, Meredith Quartermain, Sharon Thesen and Michael Turner, as well as an interview with Stanley, and a small selection of previously-unpublished poems. Publications that have been produced since the period North of California St. covers include the chapbook Seniors (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006), and trade collections Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) and After Desire (New Star, 2013), as well as the more than two hundred pages of A Tall Serious Girl: Selected Poems1957-2000 (Jamestown RI: Qua, 2003), edited by Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin. This collection, too, was created out of a frustration for Stanley’s lack of attention, as the editors of that American selected open their introduction:

This book has emerged partly from a certain frustration experienced by its editors. The Canada—U.S. border, though long and notoriously undefended, is real. When George Stanley (then age thirty-seven, but so youthful-looking that he was often mistaken for a draft dodger) crossed it in 1971, he all but disappeared from American literary surveillance. Though he maintained contact with his friends in northern California, and though more than a few Americans collected his limited-edition books and photocopied manuscripts, Stanley’s work has been, in effect, excluded from the canon of “vanguard” American poetry, and from the odd process by which the poems of a small percentage of poets become accessible in the wider world of classrooms and far-flung literary scenes. Though Stanley’s recent volumes, issued by Vancouver’s excellent New Star Books, are distributed south of the aforementioned border, too often, in our discussions with American poets young and old, we found mention of Stanley’s work met with near-total ignorance. Stanley had been inexplicably omitted from Donald M. Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), and thus lacked the glamour of that association.