Daily offerings: a note on “Songs for little sleep,”

Lyn Hejinian described to me her work in progress, The Border Comedy, as being instigated by the notion of a collaboration in which one sends one line to someone else and the other person adds to it; yet in The Border Comedy she writes one line, then allows time to pass and comes back to it. She couldn't get a line sufficiently unfamiliar, so began to work on all fifteen books of The Border Comedy (it is intended to be modeled on the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphosis) at the same time, perhaps only returning to one spot in the work a couple of weeks after it was written and only looking at a few lines on the computer at once (in order not to ‘remember’ the background). “In order to keep writing fresh the memory of it has to fade. Unfamiliar, it is ‘of the moment.’”

            In language horizontal and vertical time can occur at the same moment. Hejinian says that the unfamiliarity of the writing is a prompt; it prompts the future.

Leslie Scalapino, “The Radical Nature of Experience [on Philip Whalen, Lyn Heijinian, Susan Howe, and Leslie Scalapino],” How Phenomena Appear to Unfold

The sequence of poems that make up “Songs for little sleep,” feel different in tone from much of what I’d written previously. Different, but part of a logical progression of poetry manuscripts over the previous eighteen months, from “Miss Canada” (closing out the “wild horses” quintet) to “If suppose this is a fragment” and “The underside of the line,” the last pieces of which were completed just before the beginning of this new work. Composed between July 5^th and September 1^st, 2011, “Songs for little sleep,” is a series of quick texts composed in moments once taken up by certain other activities, and coincides entirely with the weeks I shared Christine McNair’s tiny apartment in Old Ottawa East before we finally moved into a shared space more appropriate to our newly-combined requirements. During this period, house-sitting replaced television and travel replaced house-sits. What would I do without my nocturnal hours of television? There was the way her apartment was so different than mine, and other (positive) disruptions, shifting a daily routine: the displacements of co-habitation that writing occupied. For this particular manuscript, I attempted to directly utilize and engage the distractions; poems were composed quickly, one per sitting, using collaged words or phrases skimmed, misread, lifted, carved, twisted and/or mashed-up with other fragments, and inserted into the fray. The musical cadence of the line continues but more a sweep, a wave or even flood. Many of the triggers for particular poems come from a longer work, from which a quoted fragment appears at the beginning of each piece, often with additional fragments from (where applicable) the dedicated, slipping quick on lines broken, shattered, and re-formed into new shapes, as twisted as possible. In various pieces, tenses and genders deliberately don’t meet up, and meanings alter. Skimmed and mis-readings were essential. Accidents and mis-communications were encouraged, if not downright celebrated.

Our dear friend, the late Robert Kroetsch once asked, How do you make love in a new country?

In the mid-1980s, Vancouver writer George Bowering crafted a collection of what he subtitled “late night poems,” his Delayed Mercy & other poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986). Supposedly composed in his home office, at the end of his long day of teaching, the poems in his collection were composed from his Kerrisdale point-on-a-grid. I don’t mean to suggest that “Songs for little sleep,” is exclusively a “late night poems,” but one created out of stolen moments – early morning and later night – that circle other projects in an environment slightly foreign to my writing day: various reviews, essays, a creative non-fiction manuscript and one or more fictions. These poems were composed directly on the laptop, as opposed to sketched out longhand, as so much of my writing has always been. Notebooks fill my study, two-and-a-half decades worth. Unlike so much that came before, these poems were quickly formed during periods once caught up with summer repeats, instead television-less in a small apartment in Ottawa’s Old Ottawa East, a visit to Toronto’s Old Mill, a housesit in Ottawa’s Lindenlea, and her mother’s cabin in the Laurentian Hills. Shattered routine began to reform, congeal into other shapes. My days and shifted nights. Books were pulled near-random from foreign bookshelves for the sake of the unfamiliar, as Scalapino writes of Heijinian. I rejoiced in the differences. What occurs when the familiar and the unfamiliar continually meet?

rob mclennan

Ottawa ON
October 2012

[photo credit: Lary Bremner]

On Barcelona: "American Hybrid," from "Songs for little sleep,"

A new poem, "American Hybrid," from the manuscript "Songs for little sleep," is now online on Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona.

Something about Old Mill I just can't put my finger on (poem)

I've a poem (dedicated to my almost-mother-in-law) now up in the Newark Review, from the "Songs for little sleep," manuscript.

Two new poems and a write-up on The Offending Adam

Two poems from "Songs for little sleep," are now online at The Offending Adam, posted with a little write-up by Ryan Winet. Thanks, TOA and Ryan!

On a June 16th blog post, rob mclennan praises the recent work of Nicole Markotić as an “investigation into the sentence.” What is true of Markotić’s work is equally true of mclennan’s poems below. But TOA readers should not assume that mclennan’s investigations into the sentence begin and end with a full-stop: when I say that mclennan investigates, I use the verb with all the baggage from detective films. He turns the clause, the word, even punctuation upside down and inside out.

Like any great investigator, mclennan notices the uncanny in every detail. His poem for Pearl Pirie begins as a kind of exercise. Phrases shift, reverse, stand on their heads. But to call this poem an exercise would take away from its lyrical power, manifested in the evocative and haunting power of the first section’s final sentence: “We are watching the moon we were.” A poetic “happening” or “scene” would perhaps better describe this sort of investigation. For we readers are in the same position as mclennan’s “we,” witnessing the subtle shifts and reversals of a world slowly revealing itself—not for any final clue, not for a final revelation, but for a moment that reveals the profundity of the unexpected.

What little resemblance this would have to Amy's wedding,

for Amy Dennis and Andy Cook,

I've lost my way on

more than one occasion.

-- Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

1.

A sublime, frame. Premeditates. Sibilance, and. Displaced into entirely.

Meditations, into fact. From a bone-dry tree. Haphazard, through the earth. Overwhelmed, a doubtless pleasure. Plant-wrapped chairs, bouquets of pavement, walk. Hope springs eternal, Welsh. Thin, barracuda rage.

Applause of light. Atlantic, wanders. Coastlines, wither. A window, thinking about itself. Does anyone. To bed, with a ring. Step backwards, dance. Reflexive, of. This. A certain golden band. The blondest wish. She eyes, we carpool. Squandered water, a square. Perfectly, different. Escape, of true complexity.

Torn apart, by crinoline. Fisherman's light, the family. Enjoy, variety. Confetti, tinkers. Children, beckon. A simple thing, distorted. Conversations blossom. Show of hands.

We don't know how an apartment works. The food was glorious, again.

2.

What darting glance, a crease. Complies, a flower. From the yard. I wish for people, standing. Redwood. Slipped, into the burly ground. The English countryside, a patch of planets. Formidable, a myth. Walls, were closing. The end of the movie.

Burlington. Old music, longing marvels. A silver pin, a bridge. Sublime.

I open heartbeat, read. Domestic space of writing, hearth. A blood-stone. Salt-thick, an orange sweater. Method, burning. Blowing smoke. Undid, tanned hands. A context, isolated. Expert means. Outside, a single, bubbled froth. Champagne, these incandescent bursts. She turns, an atmosphere of pearl.

The wedding afternoon, so slowly. Delicate, to balance. A tonal, underlined. We drive, between.

Heaven's, bronze. Fool's quarters. The shape of, basins. Cadence, trains of thought. They coast, a cool spray. To even me, who'd seen.

Topology, a wonder. Tune slowly to taste.

two poems from "Songs for little sleep,"

now up at German online journal, Dear Sir,

Excerpts: nonetheless, these archives, (poem)

for Cameron Anstee,

did align: gyroscope, stereoscope, mime:

May the day find some othering

thing that we'll settle on later;

a stag on the doorstep

Cole Swensen, greensward

1.

The scene, one noticed. Seed, between. Texture, to a shoreline. No heroics.

Gives tongue to, groundwork. Infer, inform. Light, the better parts reserve.

I am feeling very warm, right now. Strolling, calmly in twos. Paper, stutters, pages.

2.

Default, to greens. Alliance. Much remains the same. Poise, through.

Quickens, pulse. Collect, pull in. Manuscript, a rift of. Constellation. As writing, as.

Preview, licked. Not worthy of remark. Is, paper-thin. Adrift. The view, behind.

Ahead, also. Perfect, mornings. The heart begins, to shadow. Bring, false seasons. Stutter.

Presence: the materials. An epiphany, known also. Touch.

3.

Catalogue, a sustained glide. This, congress. This garden, of. A rhythm, trees.

Dusty buildings, must. An archive, filed. Burnt, pursuant. Chaste.

The archive narrates, silence.