Sarah Venart, I Am The Big Heart

 

Albert County Breeder

It was years before I could walk back
to that doorway, figuratively hold

the post of your fallen porch
with its thousand green Mason jars

staring out towards the weathered barn.
On each window your dust

held the shapes of the cobwebs. Here
is your father coming out the kicked door.

Inside I’ve seen the hard-packed dirt
on your kitchen floor, ketchup caked

to the spoons, the bucket in the corner,
a.k.a. the winter toilet.

Outside we have more in common: bus shelter
for the wait at the end of the lane, broken-looking

crab apples, blue spruce, red pines,
tar shingles on the coop,

and the wild eyes in the animal
we brought to breed with your animal.

Montreal poet Sarah Venart’s second full-length poetry collection is I Am The Big Heart (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020), an exploration of empathy and moments small and large, writing a lyric of time and of heart. A follow-up to her full-length debut, Woodshedding (Brick Books, 2007), as well as her chapbook Neither Apple Nor Pear, Weder Apfel Noch Birne (Toronto ON: Junction Books, 2003), the poems in I Am The Big Heart are organized into five sections of poems—“The Big Heart,” “Still Full of Arrows,” “Flowers for All Occasions,” “The Heiress” and “Joy in the Cloisters.” These are poems of dark heartbreak, pulling at the threads to examine how it emerged, is constructed, or even how it all falls apart. “When they leave me with your body,” she writes, as part of “You Can’t Take It with You,” “I put my head / on the dark room of your chest.” As the poem “The Chauffeur” begins: “I look up and it’s time to go. All ambulance. I fetch / one daughter at daycare, the other at kindergarten, // though I’m too early. So I see the heartbreak— / class lights out, the children, even mine, // small heads laid out on desks waiting / for their signal of dismissal. Even so, we are let go.”

Part of what makes her notion of the “confessional mode” so compelling is the density and the slant of her narratives. Her lines wrap themselves around her subject with incredible precision, but never to obscure, even when she isn’t writing in a direct, straight line. Venart focuses on the minutiae, writing of domestic labour that predominantly falls on women; there is a coiled tension in her lyrics, which are quite different than the narrative stretches and comparatively-open sprawl of New York poet Rachel Zucker’s similar lyrics on mothering and domestic tensions. She writes on longing, desire and desperation; hard-won hope and the determinations of daily living. Venart writes on the largess of emotion, including how big an early crush on a neighbour boy feels in the chest. “Somewhere around fifteen,” she writes, as part of “I Believe You Still Have My Key,” “wit closed me // safely as a dress seam. Or fear. Same thing.” She also writes a suggestion of underlying, hidden violence and memory, such as the opening of “Against Confession,” that offers: “My daughter won’t remember me asking the dog to sit, and how— / plunk, in the scratched bit of garden between barnyard / and doorway—she obeyed instead. Her memory winds in other ways, / magnificently obscuring facts. When my sister visits, she says I’m the same / because I don’t remember what she swears she witnessed— / someone doing something to me in a bathroom long ago.” As she responds as part of a recent interview posted at the AllLitUp blog:

I wrote this for people who’ve maybe put aside something that is personally meaningful to do the mostly silent work of caring for others. This is of course meaningful as well, but it is not always easy to put aside what you want to do to be of service to others. My mother did this kind of silent service her entire life. I only really understood how much she put aside after I’d lost her. All women do this—to some degree in isolation—these commitments of enormous love. I hope readers feel less alone reading the book. 

Someone asked me, “Aren’t you worried about how your family will react to your poems?” And the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughters to not know the real me. And I love my children to hell and back, I’d die for them, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had moments when I’ve resented having lost something because of them. I want them to know I’m a human being. And that’s okay for others to know. If you write confessional poetry, if you love it, like I do, you have to be prepared to show this messiness. There is shame associated with confessional writing; some critics dismiss it as too broken or unstable or fragile—I think of Lowell’s line about watching “for love-cars” in “Skunk Hour,” that instability of not being able to look away from what we should not admit an interest in, that’s exactly what I don’t resist. I love what is incongruous and wrong. I don’t resist the poetics of what happens off camera, in the less Instagram-able moments. I make it my home. Anyone who wants to join me, I’m happy to be your den mother.

 

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with M. Travis Lane

M. Travis Lane has published eighteen books of poetry and essays, and has won numerous awards and prizes, among them the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts in 2017. She was short-listed for the Governor Award in 2015. Educated at Vassar and Cornell she and her family came to New Brunswick in 1960 and became Canadian citizens in 1973. She is an Honorary Research Associate with the English department at the University of New Brunswick.

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

My first book did not change my life. It came out in 1969. In those days I was not 86, and the world was not burning down. Every day has its difference, every year.

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

I like writing poetry more than I like writing prose.    

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?

Slow. Lots of revision.

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?

I have written long poems that knew they were going to be long, and short poems that did not plan to be parts of anything else. Poems begin differently: a phrase, a rhythm, an image, a situation— I have to see where they go as I write.

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

I like readings. 

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?

The concerns or questions are in the poem, not behind it. Why should a poem be an answer?    

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?

The writer's "role" depends on the writer and varies according to circumstances. My own job is to do as well as I can whatever I'm up to.

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

The outside editor is a unique person; some have been very helpful and some have not grasped what  my poems were doing. Tastes and intentions vary.

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

Phyllis Gotlieb told me I didn't have to load every rift with ore.

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?

No routine.  Feed and pill and medicate the cat. Get dressed. Cook breakfast. Whatever.

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

When stalled, I do something else.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What is "home"?

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?

Books come from life— the whole of it.

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

Anything influences. Everything influences.

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

During covid, at 86, with bad arthritis and a weak heart, I'm not sure what I could do that I would like to do but have not yet done.

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 PhD in English literature and would have taught contemporary poetry.

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

Genes? The Creator?              

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

Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.  I prefer opera to film. Have no favorites.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Small poems of various sorts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Christopher Patton, Dumuzi

 

AT LEAF

A son of my
first mind, was
a leaf, wind on
raw skin, fist
of one thirst
upthrust.
                Roars
snowmelt where
hemlocks over-
hanging shiver
motherlove.    
                    Sur-
round of what
no one had
made, made
of what no
surround
had.

Canadian poet Christopher Patton’s latest title is Dumuzi (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2020), a a poetry collection that follows his poetry debut, Ox (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2007), as well as his Medieval translations Curious Masonry (Gaspereau Press, 2011) and Unlikeness Is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book (Gaspereau Press, 2018). Having established himself as having an interest in exploring and reworking older source texts, Patton’s Dumuzi appears a blend of those two earlier threads of his publishing history, composing a translation inasmuch as Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? can be seen as a translation of The Odyssey; both rework from the bones of their original sources, and through the creation of a new and original work, uncover previously unseen meaning and depth from such ancient texts. Dumuzi tears apart and reworks old Sumerian myths into an assemblage of lyric fragments and sketches, as he explains as part of his essay “THE GOD DUMUZI AND THE POLICE FORCE INSIDE”: “I see now that my pleasure in pattern for its own sake, there on the signal-noise threshold, was an approach to translation. I was working with the Sumerian myths of Inanna and Dumuzi. Their stories are liturgically redundant, enough so to alter your time-sense, when you’re inside them. And a persistent theme of the poems is the agon, if you like, of form and formlessless.” Dumuzi reworks an ancient tale through the building-blocks of language itself, opening with a short suite of establishing poems to set the foundation of his narrative before the narrative fractures and fractals out in multiple directions. It is as though Patton works translation, mistranslation and misheard translation, utilizing the loose structure of the ancient Sumerian stories and utilizing his play from those ancient bones. As he writes in his “NOTES ON IT,” at the end of the collection:

Out of Sumer, Dumuzi, fertility god, crushed king. His other, Inanna, she of increase, went down to their underworld for fun + profit; why for real though is very hard to tell. On her way up + out, guided by hyperathletic postal demons called galla, and told one’s got to take her place, divine rule of bloodless metamorphosis they sez, who’s her eye land on but her arrogant lovely benighted D. Take this one sez + game afoot. Flees. Caught. Ta’en in chains. His butter churn’s broke + an empty windy sheepfold & vulva; both have place in the formless field of his shining care. Later the woman find his body unmoving outside citygates. Gethtinanna, his sister & my book’s hero, sez I will take his place, ½ a year underearth, + so she does.

“finds / him at Uruk under an old apple tree ex / pounding wildflowers,” he writes, in “QUEEN OF SKY EARTH + UNDEREARTH,” “one on Salt Spring I loved over all the others / a king no a gala—I am / not kidding!” In a collection that structures itself from the baseline of the fragment, Dumuzi utilizes song and scraps, document and sketches, myth and the building blocks of story expansive enough to become a new kind of telling, one that seeks the half-spoken and half-hidden, and the smallest grain of salt along the skin. As part of the poem “OMNIA QUAE SUNT, LUMINA SUNT,” he writes:

You never see fog at a distance said. You’re in it—no
distance. You’re outside it—not fog. To say the fog climbs
the hills is to speak from somewhere you cannot stand. 

A thought of fog is beautiful because it has the structure
of empathy. A fog actual is beautiful because we see
unseeing in it. 

Change pens and the image of nature changes.