(another) very short story;

Most of the houses on Orchard Avenue are similar in age to my wife, in a neighbourhood the age of her parents. Half a block north, you can see the original farmhouse, set between in-fills. This was most likely the first house to emerge from this former assemblage of fields, now unidentifiable as anything but contemporary suburban sprawl: a street named for what it once held. And forty years on, from the exodus of apples, stray tree roots still infect the backyard pastiche of new in-ground pools. They enact their revenge.

(for Christian McPherson,

 

happy christmas/holidays/seasonal things,

Matt Rader, Visual Inspection

From 2015-2017, I conducted a research-creation project at the University of British Columbia Okanagan called Visual Inspection. “Research-creation” is the term the Canadian academy uses to describe academic research projects with artistic outcomes. Though dressed up as academic inquiry, Visual Inspection was always, first and foremost, an art project conducted by artists.

            Originally, the project asked a basic question: If the page is a field of visual composition in contemporary poetry—and it is such a field—how can we as poets make this field available to non-visual learners in a manner that is consistent with our own individual aesthetic preferences? What would we make?

            At first this seemed like a translation problem: How to account for the white space and typographic experiments in a poetic composition through audio or haptic renditions? Think recordings of poems read aloud, braille, or even poems printed in 3D according to a particular algorithm. With this wrinkle: How to also appeal to the poet as a poet, to be consistent with the poet’s compositional practice, with the pleasure and realization of that practice? (“Introduction”)

After four poetry titles and a collection of short stories comes British Columbia writer Matt Rader’s Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), a curious book-length prose work of theory and lyric, academic study and first-person ease. Visual Inspection is a blend of theory, poetry and memoir composed in short, self-contained and accumulative prose-sections, reminiscent of recent works I’ve seen by writers such as Sarah Manguso [see my review of her latest here], Elisa Gabbert [see my review of such here] and Stephen Collis [see my review of such here], presenting a sense of openness to both content and form, and attempting to wrap one’s head and one’s thought around the unknown in the only way he knows: through writing. As he opens his introduction, Radar speaks to and through illness, ability and access from the core perspective of his own myriad and life-long health issues into the structure of a triptych of projects between himself, Jordan Scott and Carmen Papalia:

Under the Hampton New Scholars Award, the primary grant funding Visual Inspection, I named two formal collaborators: poet Jordan Scott and social practice artist Carmen Papalia. Both Scott, who has a significant stutter, and Papalia, who is legally blind, had, through close attention, used their bodies as sites of artistic composition.

            In one such composition, Scott designed poems to challenge his ability to say them out loud thus creating a collaboration between the text and his body in which his body became a vehicle for endless variations of the poems. In one of Papalia’s works, he has a small marching band follow him through a city playing directional cues as he performs everyday tasks like buying a burrito.

            And this too is axiomatic but bears repeating nonetheless: There is no body from which all other bodies might be assessed for deviation. Only the body of our imagination, of culture. Similarly, there is no normal poetry, syntax, grammar or typography. There are only the formative categories cultures practice at any given moment in history.

I’m very taken with the openness and ongoingness of Rader’s meditative prose, something I might not have expected, given my (admittedly limited) awareness of his poetry, more of a first-person lyric narrative than something this expansive, and, dare I say, experimental. Rader’s explorations move through access and even include the limitations of such an idea as access, from the notion that there is no standard, singular body from which derivation is compared, to the difficulty of someone with mobility issues being able to participate in Papalia’s blind walking tour. While existing as a stand-alone, Rader’s Visual Inspection is deeply interlinked to the other two projects in this triptych, exploring ideas around each of the three projects and how they operated, and the interplay between them, as even what is seen is changed through being seen at all.

What we see as light and colour is the expression of several relationships: photons from the sun with the reflective surfaces of our environments, with the rods and cones of our eyes, with the neuropathways in our brain.

I read about these relationships in a book on the discoveries of cognitive science and their implications for philosophical traditions.

The book was written by a famous cognitive scientist from the United States and a philosopher with whom I once spoke when I was in graduate school ten years earlier. We were standing before our respective urinals, legs braced in that way that betrays a particular concentration. I mentioned John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. He nodded.

Another word for this kind of phenomenon is coincidence. From coincidence might come something new: colour for example, or this anecdote. Brought together, the elements do what? Collaborate?

Talking Poetics : an occasional (new) series

I recently thought it would be interesting to start a new series on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog (alongside the lengthy series of essays posted in the "On Writing" series, which remains ongoing), especially poets talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. I began my solicitation with a series of questions: How does a poem get started? Do you begin with a loose structure, a phrase or a word, or the kernel of an idea? Are you prompted by the work of other poets, or, say, something you read in a newspaper? Do you start at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or work from a scattering of notebook entries? Do you utilize notebooks, and how does that help? How are line-breaks (or the choice to ignore them) chosen? Etc.

And so far, a small array of poets have responded, with the first six in the series already online, and a further two scheduled. Why not have a look?

#1 : Sanita Fejzić

#2 : Amish Trivedi

#3 : Amanda Earl

#4 : Gil McElroy

#5 : Sonia Saikaley

#6 : Rusty Priske

forthcoming: Pearl Pirie and Dale Tracy etc

Hugh Thomas, MAZE

Romanian Poem

            for Maria Erskine

This is one of my early poems,

my poems written in Romanian.

I write it in Romanian

because I am happy.

I write it for you.

I write it as one Romanian to another.

Montreal poet and mathematician Hugh Thomas has been publishing long enough that one might be forgiven for not realizing that the newly-published MAZE (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2019), a collection of “Intentional mistranslations that meander through the maze of language,” is actually his first full-length trade poetry title. Why did this take so long to happen? For anyone following Thomas’ work, including multiple chapbooks through above/ground press, Book*hug, shreeking violet press, Double Negative and Paper Kite Press (among others), it would appear that MAZE has been compiled and collaged from the length and breadth of his publishing history, with some poems more recent, but others going back over decade or more.

Moving from mistranslations to the rare straight translation to translations from languages he doesn’t understand (nor look up), the poems in MAZE, as the title suggests, articulate a navigation through language and languages, deliberately allowing for misunderstanding, and the opening up the possibility for what might otherwise be impossible. “The Lord is my sherbert,” he writes, to open “Twenty-three Plus Seven”: “I shall not want.” Thomas’ poems, many of which are short, and quite condensed, employ strains of surrealism and humour akin to the works of poets such as Stuart Ross, Alice Burdick and Gary Barwin, but with a more overt collision of elaborate and absurd improvisation, one that closes in on both language poetry and the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear. “Enough time sent me knights on horseback with chocolate-covered strawberries,” he writes, in the poem “Unsigned City,” a mistranslation of a fragment of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili: “and I was overwhelmed by a fear of intimacy. In this city you must wash your hands before eating, persuaded by the bells from the mountains, selling a new day and its fruits. A strange rover knows many fine things and follows his premonitions to the most capricious sales.” While Thomas certainly isn’t the first poet to work with mistranslation-as-translation—poets over the years have included bpNichol, Ross, jwcurry, Barwin and multiple others—his work is striking in part due to how much of his output is based upon this deliberate sequence of misreadings and misunderstandings. In her essay “‘The Boundless Chaos of Living Speech’: On Homophonic Translation,” an essay posted online at Numéro Cinq in October 2012, alongside a poem by Hugh Thomas, Sarah Bernstein writes:

Faced with the always already note-imperfect “translation,” poets like Hugh Thomas explore and experiment with forms of “naïve translation.” Thomas, poet and professor of Mathematics at the University of New Brunswick, says that homophonic translation “fits into a spectrum of naïve translation… when you sit down with a text in a language you don’t really know, and try to produce a ‘translation’ of it.” In other words, the phonetic features of the original work are more or less preserved. There will inevitably be some words “whose translations might be clear,” says Thomas, “and then guesses guided by false cognates, parts of words, random thoughts, and also sounds.” Homophonic translation, or macaronic writing, is often associated with Oulipo writers like François le Lionnais, who wrapped up one of his manifestoes with a translation of Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” became “Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l’hiver.” It’s a useful writing exercise for students learning to navigate metre and meaning, and it yields clever results in contests, such as the ones created and published for contests in Numero Cinq Magazine’s early years.

While MAZE might be his first solo full-length work, Thomas was also one of the authors of the book-length Franzlations (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2011), a three-poet collaboration that played with translation and mistranslation, moving in an entirely different direction from the current volume. Subtitled “[the imaginary Kafka parables],” Franzlations  was  composed alongside Craig Conley and Gary Barwin, and “takes the parables and aphorisms of Kafka as a starting point and steps a few places to the left in order to reinvent them.” While Franzlations focused on the work of (obviously) Franz Kafka, MAZE is composed from a mix of works, languages and styles, and is more interesting for the variety, composing poems from works by Adam Zagajewski, Harry Martinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Anne Tardos, Sappho, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Erín Moure and Georg Trakl, and from languages including Swedish, French, German, Irish, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Nynorsk and Italian. Even more entertaining, the sequence “He Said” are translations of eight poems “back into English of translations into Nynorsk by Dag Straumsvåg” of poems by Canadian poet Stuart Ross, taking the element of translation even further. As part of this odd and semi-familiar sequence, Thomas’ shifts the title of Ross’ “Road Trip, Southern Ontario, 1999,” for example, into “Ontario Vacation Pictures, Sorry.” Through the delightful gaze of Hugh Thomas, the poem now opens:

We climbed higher and higher

until we met a lake whose water was tilted.

That’s where the world starts. (There’s a plaque.)

Both of us and the lake climbed higher and higher

until we met another lake.

My father and I

exchanged eyesight.

A so-called breeze tousled

the lake’s thin grey hair.

 this review originally appeared in Vallum 16:2