Four poems for Kevin Killian

(1952-2019)

1.

It is 9:28am on a Thursday, the morning before solstice. Light

is whistling past my throat, a breath

commensurate to torn paper, ghosts.

I drew an eagle, naked; drew saltwater bath; I drew

your sullen red sun, the one

that would not wither. Earlier today,

our preschooler drew

a poop; because, as she said,

she likes to draw poop. This is for you,

she added, her two eyes

square against mine.

2.

Accounts vary, as they should. What is this half-truth:

Bay Area tenement windows,

a poet’s theatre,

an avatar, perhaps. Gutter boys and rainbows, hard-

checks, crosses; the terrestrial mechanics

of religion. Tomorrow night, I find out

what some of the poets from Toronto are doing

these days. I know

you would have loved that: in spite of everything,

a noise in the head. For now,

I look up this angled street contorted,

slippery. A rain, sets.

3.

As newspapers contend: an accidental princess

is not the same

as royal assent. Boaty McBoatface, who reveals new depths

to rising oceans.

An email, around the sale of your archives: “A boon

for two aging bohemians

that our papers have brought us more money

then we’ve ever made in all

our careers put together.” I am low fancy,

squared. What we lose, we lose. Your

unexpected death. Too soon. We lose our way.

4.

This email might come to you

as a surprise. An innocence, or lack thereof,

is never to be trifled with. Utterly constructed,

mirrors and cameras mere templates for love poems

that have yet

to be written. We learn our names

from our mouths. Tell me, something. Anything.

The news that, for some, bone spurs sprout like horns

at the back of the skull, resulting, possibly,

from the repeated use of hand-held devices: cellphones,

blackberries. Hardwired,

altered. The results are in.

Jessica Laser, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Fazana

When my woman says hello

She says what can I get you.

I had no time to peruse the menu.

I was lost in thought and English

Came last, after German, French,

And Dante with no mirror page.

I decided then that to eat

Would be fine, but to decide the dish

Translation. Croatia lost to Brazil.

I went to my room to make sure

Of everything, as I often needed.

There you were absurdly, suddenly

A parrot on my knee. Your plume

Fired in the background.

To see you

So upset me

I would have learned a new language

If it meant in English to disconnect my knee.

Between two other, similar versions

Not in the same translation

I found in myself the lyric I looked for.

I found it with its moral intact.

A poet must heat to song in the dark.

Lest reckoned the poet he died to see boil.

Chicago poet Jessica Laser’s full-length poetry debut is Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Seattle WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019), a title that includes but a single sentence on the back cover as copy: “There are so many ways to think of us that I have thought them all.” Composed as book-length character study, Laser utilizes twists of language, literary and historical references and some damned sharp lines to create a complex and multi-faceted exploration of character and story. She begins her collection with a narrative poem that introduces “Sergie Kuzmich,” an older writer going through a divorce (and a multitude of affairs, it would seem) who meets the much younger, emerging writer/narrator and begins a relationship. The book then opens up into what constructs itself as a study through the lyric, but one that explores both subject and unnamed narrator, exploring, as Laser suggests, her subject from all sides. “When I complete a family / We are never better,” the voice of Kuzmich responds, further on in the first section, in the poem “Sensual Delight in Virtue,” continuing: “never / Than when our enemies love us / Which is to say when we fail. / But Sergei Kuzmich from all sides / There is no treason to describe.” Laser tells a story, and tells it slant, in a way reminiscent, even, of the work of Letter Machine Editions co-editor/co-publisher Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see my review of one of his books here], even as she ends the second section, the lyric suite/sequence “Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience,” with:

We are what we have and memoires

Keep us from comfort.

They are what we know.

You are what we know and I

I am the thing that knows you.

People apply

Their many logics.

They can’t all be right

And are each wrong

Two truths comprise our

O truths

Comprise our failures

And remember us.

Laser moves through her subject (or subjects, really) and through her own reading, including references to numerous authors and works, something picked up in a review of the book by Allison Casey, over at Barrelhouse, writing: “Jessica Laser’s debut book Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides wields a terrible blade of knowledge—one most of us can only wield via Google. Even the title boasts a wide-cast net of experience, referencing a passage from War and Peace, and the name of an obscure Russian soldier. I know this thanks to Google, the 80 pages of Tolstoy I got through last summer, and a helpful epigraph at the beginning of the book.” Later on in her review, she adds that “Laser brings everyone from Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Eliot into the fray, and ironically, it’s in a move like Eliot (or maybe more like Anne Carson) that Laser risks losing her reader among the weeds in all her influences and allusions. At what point are they more for her than for the poems?”

Throughout the book, Laser moves from reference to collage, and her final poem/section, “Losss,” is made up entirely of quoted lines/stanzas (one hundred and seventy-one of them, in fact), footnoted and properly sourced, including lines from Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Leo Tolstoy, Vaslav Nijinsky, W.S. Merwin, the books of Genesis and Exodus, Alice Munro, T.S. Eliot and multiple others. It is curious how Laser moves through the collection, from sourced material to her own, writing out an exploration of character which includes explorations of the self, the self in relation to others and the self in relation to God, such as in the second section, where she writes: “When I saw the man, I / Lived unbearably. I had no vision / Of myself as a mystic, / No audience with god.” In the end, this might be a book about the finding ground, or finding place, utilizing the unnamed narrator as a means-to-an-exploration, writing a poem-essay on “Sergei Kuzmich” that has nothing to do with him at all. And yet, as the song goes, writing Kuzmich in a way that the character would move through this book, and think these poems are all about him (wouldn’t he?).

I locked those habits in a drawer

Where I was told they’d be

What is the difference

Between now and forgetting

And if I infer from the drawer

Will my inference be in it

I look at reason in the dark

It seems to me to flicker

Not the flame and not the wick

It is the motion to and fro

It could be both though (“Tractatus”)

Guy Birchard, Hecatomb

Hecatomb sixty-six

drove impertinently blowing latitude

Nemesis munificently vouchsafed

boondock grids no-rooster-tail slow

admiring he her profile she horizon

till he goosed the accelerator guying

pronghorn in the way to mortifying flight

witnessed it clear bobwire on three stressed

legs one broke fore a’dangle faster ‘n hell how

magisterial adept stept panickt in badger sett

expulsion paradisal days demonic

alien hardship of the plains rapturous

pacific city tenure attaining purgatory

mnemonic her profile joy and absolution

After going through Guy Birchard’s Only Seemly (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], I was curious to go through some of his other work, and he was kind enough to send along a copy of Hecatomb (Brooklyn NY: Pressed Wafer, 2017), a collection of one hundred poems, numbered in reverse order. The “hecatomb” is said to come from Ancient Greece or Rome, and refers to a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen (“heca” = one hundred), suggesting that Hecatomb is composed as a sequence of losses or sacrifices, but one that moves through a sequence of tales from his own history and life, sacrifices as both to atone for, and those he had to work through, to get to where he has ended up.

Hecatomb three

Sacrifice is hard to know how

to make. Quiet defeats me

though I keep it. I rave. Nothing

so unseemly as an aging guy’s

anger, what once was his

glory and chance.

What becomes interesting is, in part, the stories that the poems suggest, infer and tell, however indirectly, for a poet who seems to put all into the work, and less so into biography, as the biography at the back of the collection includes: “After gleaning the poems themselves, what’s left of Birchard’s biography might better remain the preserve of honest privacy. Anne Heeney and he remain an item after forty-some years, which we mention as salute to her tenacious artistry. Senior’s Home address: Small Provincial Capital of Dreadful Night. A lay poet.” As with Only Seemly, as well, the poems in Hetacomb are equally evasive, slipping easily between direct memoir and abstract, writing poems that explore less a straight line than the points along it, allowing the reader to complete those connections. Given the nature of some of these stories, the poems feel less like losses or sacrifices, per se, than simply lessons he’s learned (or finally learned) over the years, despite the mantra of “Hecatomb thirty-six,” that includes:

Motive, theme: sine qua non. Only then dare start,

Falter, start over. Anticipating no conclusion. A hundred amends.

More. Deletion. Dilation. Heeding the sumptuary. In the end,

Doubt. Repeat. Ignoring exegetical itch. Exhaust the doubts.

Specious challenge, diction; structure, bona fide. (Or v. v.)

Such the frailty of the laity. Poetry is simply a taste and a practice.

Bespoke speech that stays spoke. No expatiation. Ecstatic.

“Consolation and exultation over imbecility, vanity, cupidity.”

What first caught my eye in this collection was “Hecatomb ninety-one,” a poem that speaks to his attachment to Ottawa literary history, including the former Pestelozzi College on Rideau Street and Commoners’ Press, both of which were run as communal and community enterprises [see my interview here with Neil Flowers on the anthology Northern Comfort, which was published by Commoners’ during the same period]. There are some fascinating stories and connections throughout this collection, from his Ottawa days (a reference to the Britannia Yacht Club) to travelling around New York, Bismark and Saskatchewan, as well as Vancouver stories, each of which suggest far much more. Given there is remarkably little information I can gather on him or his work online, but for entries upon the existence of his books, elements of his biography do exist as a thread through his poems, somehow concurrently less and more than other poets.

Hecatomb ninety-one

Back-when, Cam printed me “First

Sight”

at Commoners’ down at Pestalozzi

basement. (Juvenilia,

granted.)

Display of frisky eagerness and artless

ineptitude in boyish abandon.

(Risky

maneuver, for novice littérateur, true,

cack-handed, at that.)

Buoyant enough to mail a copy

to the still still-exiled resident of 8 Duke St, St. James’s,

baleful author of “Naked

Lust”

(notoriously retitled Lunch by hopped-up cap. T typist).

Who decently returned holograph p.c. (prized)

with thanks for “First

Sighs,”

and also advised,

Disguise as typical scene…

12 or 20 (second series) questions with James Hawes

James Hawes lives and writes in Montreal with a beautiful, understanding wife and two wonderful sons. His work has appeared in various publications. His first chapbook Bus Metro Walk (Monk Press) was published in 2018. His first full-length book of poetry Breakfast With A Heron will be published by Toronto’s Mansfield Press in the spring of 2019. He studied literature and creative writing at Concordia University.

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

Well as I write this my first book is in the process of being published, but I will say that it has made me more confident as a writer. Throughout my writing life I have always been in awe of so many of the writers I admire that I felt I could never measure up. That feeling hasn’t gone away (nor should it), but I write despite this because people I respect have said good things about some of the things I’ve written, so that’s enough. Having a publisher say “I want to publish your book” just ups the ante.

When I look at some of my earlier poems I get twinges of nostalgia for who I was back then, but I also want to grab that person by the shoulders and shout “Stop it! This is terrible!” But it’s from then, so it’s important as it led me to where I am now. But yeah most of it is pretty godawful, at least to me.

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

I wrote a poem when I was 8 (I think) on the last page of a grade 3 science project on penguins,  a feeble attempt at bonus marks. My mom thought it was the greatest thing I ever did, she just loved it so much. For about 48 hours I was an adorable genius, she bought me a Captain Whizzo t-shirt as a reward. I think that writing poetry has always been a search for that kind of approval. For better, or worse.

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?

Some projects come quickly, as do some poems. Here and there you get these sparks of inspiration and a poem manifests itself almost fully formed. I love those, but as I write more— and get a bit older— the space between those moments gets longer and longer. Once you realize that then anything worthwhile has to come from hard work and vigilance to dig for poetry, rather than letting it wash over you. While this is harder, it also tends to lead to better writing. As my friend Peter Van Toorn likes to quote Dr Johnson: “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

Sometimes longer poems are scrapped, but a small fragment is mined out of it and gains a life of its own. Sometimes fragments are cobbled together to make something bigger. There are no rules, no patterns, which makes it surprising, which keeps me interested.

4 - Where does a poem 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?

A poem usually begins with a single line, or an idea, usually derived from something I’ve seen, or heard. I always try have a notebook handy, so I will either jot it down, or if the timing is right I’ll try to expand on it then and there. From there I just try and squeeze out what I can from it, trying not to edit myself as I go. Then I’ll leave it alone for a while and go back to it and either expand on it, or boil it down. From there it either becomes its own thing, or if I think I can build on it I do. When I was being a bit more careful about what I eat, I started writing a bunch of poems about food— so I guess life dictates the scope— but I do find that in most of the things I write there are threads that can be linked together to make a larger piece, or a series. I wouldn’t want to force those commonalities, I think it’s more fun to let them happen and discover them. 

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

I love doing readings, but to be honest I have not had to opportunity to do that many. Hopefully with the book that will change. The first time I read in public was for Mansfield’s Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. I was scared shitless because here I was reading in a bar with guys like Stuart Ross and Jim Smith who read so beautifully and are such interesting poets. They were both so generous in their support and created an atmosphere that was free and accepting that it let me off the hook and I ended up having a blast and doing what turned out to be good readings. Alcohol helps as well, and there always seems to be wine & beer at those things.

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?

As I’m writing I try not to be conscious of any theoretical concerns. I think the only questions I’m trying to answer are really the only questions that I believe are worth answering. Who are we? What do we want? Where are we going? The good thing about these is that they are eternal questions— pretty much unresolvable. The context changes with the times, so the work has to change with it, art has to constantly reinvent itself. It’s always the same questions, but technology seems to be moving us farther away from them, I think the role of any artist is to attempt to bring us back to those questions any way they can. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This is no great revelation, but I feel we are suffering from a profound lack of empathy these days. At the end of the day I believe that most of our problems stem from this. I can’t think of a more important role for the writer than to chip away at the chronic indifference that has saturated modern culture. When we read something, or watch a good film, we are asked to put ourselves in the shoes of the writer, or characters. If the writer can do this and engage the reader/viewer then I see that as a small victory in the battle for humanity’s soul. Not to be overly dramatic.

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

Absolutely essential. I have been fortunate to have my work evaluated by editors of tremendous insight and generosity. My writing would not be anywhere near where it is without them. If you can leave your ego at the door, working with an editor can be very rewarding and can help you examine your work with a fresh perspective. I just want my writing to be better, if someone else can help me do that, then let’s do it. It also makes writing, which is usually very isolating for me, a more collaborative experience, which is healthy I think.

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

Henry Miller once said that it is imperative that one should accept failure, doubt, frustration & misery completely and see it through. That is the only real path to enlightenment, like Blake’s notion of achieving heaven through hell. When we get to the very end of ourselves— whatever the context— that’s when we find out who we really are, that’s where the good stuff resides.

10 - 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 have no routine, but not for lack of trying. I have tried several; getting up early to write for an hour before getting ready for work, writing after dinner, just before bed etc. Pointless. My life is full, which gives me more material, but I have to claw & scrape for time to write. I am lucky that I have a supportive wife who is always willing to help me make time. I have 2 sons and my family comes before anything else. As long as the desire to write is there, which it always seems to be, I manage to find a way to get it out.

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

I find certain authors can really get my juices flowing— Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Robert Creeley, Andrea Cohen, Nelson Ball, Ron Padgett, Mark Strand, Stuart Ross, Peter van Toorn and a bunch of others I’m forgetting. I used to paint watercolours & charcoal pastels as well as a way to jump-start my brain, I found that to be very helpful. In the end, to me, there is no better source of inspiration than nature, you can’t go wrong getting out of your head and tapping into the world around you.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of something roasting in the oven. Again, food. It’s a problem.

13 - 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 am a huge movie buff. I have a collection of about 1100 films, so outside of nature I would say movies would have to be my biggest influence. Great filmmakers like Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Robert Bresson, David Lynch, Wong-Kar Wai, Krystoph Keilsowski— their ability to communicate the most intimate and complex human emotions/interactions through image is endlessly fascinating to me. Certain albums, like Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Don’t Tell a Soul by The Replacements, and others that seem to share some of my sensibilities, I can listen to them obsessively for a period of time and find them very influential.

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

I have certain books that I return to every so often. Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, Burrough’s Naked Lunch, Leonard Cohen’s The Spice-Box of Earth— those are foundational books that changed what I thought a writer could do. Other more recent work like Andrea Cohen’s Furs Not Mine, How to be Perfect by Ron Padgett, Stuart Ross’s Buying Cigarette’s for the Dog, all marvelous books I find myself drawn to at various times, for various reasons. There are many others I won’t list here… the fact that I can draw on all these wonderful books, and there are still so many to be discovered makes me feel very rich.

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

I would love to write and shoot a film. Just a live-action short, documentary or whatever. Something I wrote, shot and edited myself. I taught myself how to edit video on my computer and I find the whole process immensely rewarding. I’m kind of glad I don’t do that for a living, because it would become and obsession and I wouldn’t want to do anything else, there would be no balance, and balance is important.

16 - 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?

I have a corporate job right now, so I’m not entirely comfortable thinking of myself as a “writer”. I would love to be able to support myself and my family as a writer, that’s the dream I guess, but I’m nowhere near that. If money was no object then I would be a painter, a filmmaker. David Lynch, I’d like to be David Lynch.  

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

I’ve always admired writers. My uncle Chris is a writer in the UK, he was always broke, my family always worried about him and I thought he was the coolest guy around. I have done a lot of other things, and still make my living at the railroad (after 24 years). HR Percy once wrote that people decide to be writers at a young age, but they can be significantly older when they emerge as such, life has a habit of getting in the way. Well here I am at 48 getting my first book published, though I don’t feel life ever got in the way. I made choices, I have absolutely no regrets, I have been insanely fortunate. But I always tried to keep the mindset of a writer, even when I was busy doing other things.

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

Last great book was Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, I’m a great admirer of his, if I could write novels like him I would do so with a full heart. Last great film was The Burmese Harp by Kon Ichikawa, wonderful. It is purely coincidence that they both happen to be Japanese. Or maybe not, a lot of great stuff comes from Japan.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I have the germ of an idea that I think could make an interesting novel, or possibly a collection of short stories, so I’m seeing where that goes. I have enough poems on the burner to start putting together a second book, but I’m leaving them for a little while so I can return to them with fresh eyes some time in the future.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;