Kyra Simone, Palace of Rubble

 

COUNTY FAIR

He hopes to fly a giant helium balloon a record twenty-five miles into the earth’s atmosphere and parachute down. This is a moment worthy of fanfare. Six teenagers stand with their heads spinning. A farmer throws down his pillow. A quarry worker lets his shoulders go weak. A communist boss kneels down in the street and begs the man in the balloon to stop. The crowd calls out to him with weary arms. ‘Fly off to new realms,’ they cry. This is what life has been like. Mothers make kites out of junk-mail leaflets searching for missing people. They fly them over houses that have fallen off the market. A lemon drops from the sky into the hands of the assistant who counts new shapes. she works for the chief. She is busy in his saddle. As he thrusts her the usual afternoon earthquake, tops spin, lakes threaten to flood, postmen ring doorbells with overwhelming force. Hunters drop their shotguns and explode with dreams of mounting their wives on walls. ‘This is no Sunday in the park,’ thinks the assistant. She spent her school years studying maps of the chief’s insides, and how, as he approaches nuclear disarmament, she finds herself quietly lost, unequipped for the weapons of Europe. After twenty-five years of extraordinary bad news about childhood obesity, the balloon inflates and floats away, leaving the gondola with the man inside on the ground. In Moscow, when this sort of thing happens, it is not unusual for a man to throw his face in a barrel. Today, a bit breezy. Tonight, clear, light winds. Tomorrow, plentiful sunshine.

I’m enjoying the assembled forty-nine self-contained short fictions of Brooklyn, New York-based writer and editor Kyra Simone’s full-length debut, Palace of Rubble (UK: Tenement Press, 2022). Cited as a collection of short stories, each comprised of a single, occasionally extended paragraph, the description almost seems an oversimplification: these assembled bursts of prose, layering and collaging phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, towards something far deeper. As the back cover offers: “Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Suddam Hussein’s demolished palaces printed on the cover of a newspaper Simone found discarded on a café table during the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Palace of Rubble has since evolved into an accumulation of texts invoked by a historical moment spanning the eras of Bush, Obama, Trump, and into the present day.” Composed of exacting lines, she writes of a sequence of destructions, consequences and disconnections, even through the book’s design, that provides an impression of installation: a tangibility that text isn’t always allowed. She writes of losses and destruction, including those that have become cyclical, even ongoing. As the story “OBITUARY FOR MRS. H.” reads, towards the end: “Remembering her youth is like standing before a crowd of G.I.s, of which there will be no survivors. The screen is blank. The bed is empty. The planet turns. It moves invisibly, fuelled by the cries of women slipping into obscurity.”

Simultaneously dark and light, Simone’s incredibly agile fictions (interspersed with photographs by John Divola that add resonance to the book’s tone) are constructed via a concrete assortment of words, thoughts and ideas that flow, pivot and connect into each other, somehow managing to create a kind of occasional ethereality through direct means; she offers sentences that remain both separate and weave together to form an entirely new and different shape. “His death is announced Tuesday,” she writes, to open the story “STILL LIFE WITH PARROT,” “the same day he is buried in the village, the day of the great race. A day for bicycles to speed past maps of the universe sagging on walls, held up by women still trapped in Romanticism, searching other planets for signs of a second bloom. Dogs have long proved useful in detecting explosives, or to find bodies left by crime or disaster, but rarely do they find the men that are the most missed.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Luke Hathaway

Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book The Affirmations is published by Biblioasis. Both book and audio book (full of music; a co-creation with his friend the scholar/singer Daniel Cabena) are available here: http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/the-affirmations/

1 - How did your first book change your life?

One calls and calls and calls, & eventually ... somebody comes (or, somebodies come).

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

It’s the work of a different poet. death/rebirth: no idle metaphor.

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

Poetry is my first love: breath, the heartbeat …

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?

I don’t know any more. Everything I’ve written in the past few years has taken me by surprise.

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?

There have been books that are projects, but The Affirmations was a miscellany — until it wasn’t.

Some of its poems — many of them, actually — began in music, in the desire to find new words for an old tune (the older words for which often become a point of departure — and sometimes a point of return — for the new ones).

Many, many of them (the poems) began in conversation — with a desire to say something that couldn’t be said in any other way.

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

I love to read or speak poetry aloud, my own, or other people’s: any work I love, that is written for the ear. Increasingly I sing, too — see melody as another element of poetry, which one may prescribe or score in various ways, if one sees fit. (Though I am also deeply beguiled by the unstudied, incremental variations in pitch/rhythm/emphasis that inhere in the speaking voice, and that are also part of any reader’s/speaker’s interpretation, as they speak the words in a particular moment, with particular momentums, all reflecting/embodying the contingencies of a particular time and place, a particular audience ….)

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?

No theoretical concerns. The only real question I’m trying to answer, in any given moment, is, how is this poem supposed to sound? As for “the current questions”: yikes. I think there’s no one answer.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think writers have a role in trying to keep the bullshit out of language; or, in trying to purge the language of the bullshit, once the bullshit has gotten in.

Beyond that ... writers are listeners, or should be; instruments through which the motion of meaning in the universe can register itself in the particular medium which is language. It has to all keep moving, though; if meaning stays written down, it gets dead. We have to read it, re-speak it, if it’s going to keep on living in the world.

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

Every editorial experience I’ve had has been vastly different. I can’t generalize.

I am an editor myself, and have great respect for what editors can do, the amount of time and care they can lavish on the personal expression of another: it’s really humbling.

But writers need to know how to stand their ground.

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

Resign yourself to the road; there’s no arriving. (That’s Steven Heighton, from a letter to me when I was about sixteen and he was an avuncular 32.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to libretto)? What do you see as the appeal?

Oh I love crossing boundaries! You know, with consent. It’s marvellous. Stepping across a threshold. Everything looks different on the other side. (And over here, in the libretto-world — there’s company!)

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Wake, shower, coffee, prayer, then I pack lunches for my kids (I am, at this point, a single parent), then I begin the loooooooong and sometimes painful process of getting my kids out of bed, then I make them breakfast, then I say ‘put on your shoes / do you have your backpack / where’s your water bottle’ about fifty times, then we walk to their school (the walk is great: we talk to one another), then I walk to work. (I teach English, at Saint Mary’s University.) On days when I am writing, I do none of this. I moon and june and sleep late and go for long long long walks to and by the ocean, and write letters and listen to fifteenth century Burgundian songs again and again and again and again, and look things up in dictionaries.... For the obvious financial and practical reasons, such days do not happen very often. But when they do, it’s bliss.

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

I wait it out. Accept the possibility I may never write again. Long experience has taught me it cannot be forced.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of a person I love. The smell of a highway in the rain.

14 - 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?

Oh yeah. All of the above.

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

All of my friends and correspondents, with whom I’m perpetually in conversation, and including these days my close colleagues at Saint Mary’s (Alexander MacLeod, Raymond Sewell, Gugu Hlongwane …) — I’m so lucky to work with them.

And, then, the various stars in my literary constellation, to which I keep returning; by which I’ve set my bearings in the past .... I think of individual poems here more than poets, but a quick glance at the sky reveals George Herbert, Richard Outram, Peter Sanger, Steven Heighton, Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden, John Donne, William Shakespeare, also the anonymous psalmists ... These are my old familiars. But/and they are not more important to me than the oral traditions to which I’m heir, via the beauties of teaching and of conversation. These interpenetrate with the written traditions in ways to which I’m increasingly alive.

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

Take the ferry to Tancook Island.

17 - 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’d love to be a dancer. The word made flesh.

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

Necessity.

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

The Bible. Ms Marvel (does a TV show count???).

20 - What are you currently working on?

A folk opera (with Benton Roark), an audio-visual album (with the art collective thirtyminutes), a queer cantata and other things with Daniel Cabena (we call our quixotic ensemble ANIMA), the opera Eurydice Fragments (with re:naissance opera) … &/plus always trying to be a better parent / child / friend / lover / colleague / teacher / citizen / community member ... & c. & c. & c.

Oh yes, and I am trying to learn how to sing (better), for a role in A Poor Passion — a retelling of Bach’s Johannes-Passion as a kind of transition story. This is terrifying, & exciting.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Cecily Nicholson, Harrowings

 

for a rattling mind and cooped-up body
ecliptic this apparent path

            the best time to plant
from cultivated and ponded poetics

four clefs incline
in mutual will-o’-the-wisps
            and noise tremors 

lift 19” TVs and manual typewriters
soil and irrigation, the infrastructure rows (“a voice that will clamour: correspondences 1-4”)

The latest from Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and the Governor General’s Award-winning Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Harrowings (Talonbooks, 2022), an expansive lyric structure of fragments around agriculture, sustainability, legacy and responsibility. Centred around the physical act of planting, Harrowings writes on agriculture and ethical sustainability, placement and displacement, offering, as the back cover writes: “[…] pulses of memoir from the poet’s childhood growing up on a farm, as well as from more recent pandemic experiences volunteering for a local agricultural enterprise led by people who were formerly incarcerated. Considering movements organizing for food security and related, resurgent practices, HARROWINGS also contends with ‘the farm’ as a tract of colonial advance.”

The collection is set in three lyric sections—“carver (a hand in relief),” “well black on the neither side, it will rain” and the four-part “a voice that will clamour”—as Nicholson works an accumulation of short bursts, moving from moment to moment as a singular, ongoing examination. “behind the barn, across the treeline and a ditch / distinguishing property // out cornrows along thin strips of habitat,” she writes, as part of the opening section. A page further, she offers: “I can feel my place in extraction / hear how to centre / how hard to decentre [.]” Nicholson manages the lightest touch of lyric across the line, across the canvas of the open sequence, writing such weight through an evocative language, and such lovely music across a poetry of both document and witness. “the lake over stern draws,” she writes, amid her “correspondences,” “agitation welds // worth what power concedes // for four nights with shore as the lake leaves and returns / speaking of sturgeon // to witness ospreys / the dry mouth of the streambed, physical confines for future water [.]” Invoking and quoting writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and even Robert Kroetsch (“But how do you grow a poet?”), Nicholson writes through and around the rippling effects of displacement, class, incarceration, and the legacies around the history of Black people in “western Canada” (as specifically drawn from Douglass' work). As the first of her quartet of “correspondences” includes:

narrative deep ruts the DNA sweeps
into the quickening dusk

an essential community outside

inside multiculturalism the big mouths,
bellies, and bottom lines celebrate with food

seasonal presente 

all strength to traverse the dark rural roads

There is something of the attentive ecological urgency to her lyrics, akin to Lorine Niedecker, perhaps, or to more recent self-described eco-poets, seeking to ground her language in the earth, attending to a consideration of healing both individuals and their surrounding communities, as well as ecological systems themselves, through the ability to plant, sustain and harvest.