Jessi MacEachern, A Number of Stunning Attacks

 

Gender is a good friend

 

 

A hurt self on wooden surface
An immediate forgetting

  

 

A decaying kaleidoscope
Encouraging the smoke

 

  

                        I’ve forgotten about morning,

 

 

Benjamin attests there can be nothing more pleasant
Than to lie on a sofa and read

 

 

Benjamin is something remote from us (“A Miniature Gender”)

Montreal poet Jessi MacEachern’s full-length debut is A Number of Stunning Attacks (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2021). The lyrics of A Number of Stunning Attacks accumulate into a book-length suite around orientation and self-examination, lyric intimacy and presence, and the workings of the body and gender. “For our feminine organs,” she writes, as part of the third section, “there will be no meaningful study / the heart may think it knows better //// & grow quiet [.]” Composed as a sextet of serial poems—“The Moat Around Her Home,” “Stagger and Sing,” “Notes on Moving,” “A Miniature Gender,” “A Number of Stunning Attacks” and “Orwomen”—A Number of Stunning Attacks is constructed via short, accumulative bursts, quick lyric sketches that layer, stretch and weave. Hers is a lyric across an incredibly wide canvas. “Without her human limbs she was unable to carry / something other than herself,” she writes, as part of the third section, “Is real / the day is like his straying [.]”

Our feminine organs discerned it
fireflies beat from the knot of his tie

 

A spiral of lightning-quick whispers flamed
the cheeks of the hushed boy-child

  

 

Like a knife he stood in memory
an unshaven lip the transformative flash

 

 

We grew quiet

 

 

Her body spreads indefinitely beneath the belt
her lacquered white coat askew

 

  

She must look to move or be moved
the senses know that absence blots people out (“Notes on Moving”)

Talking Poetics : an occasional series

Anyone paying attention already knows that I’m always starting up some ridiculous scheme or another (see also: On writing, the Tuesday poem, National Poetry Month, 12 or 20 (second series) questions, my (small press) writing day, many gendered mothers, G U E S T [a journal of guest editors], Touch the Donkey, Forty Proper Tales, Six Questions, the ottawa small press book fair : 2020 home edition or anything I’ve been cooking up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, or even above/ground press, which turns twenty-eight years old in July), but near the end of summer 2019, I started another new series of essays ("Talking Poetics") on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog, soliciting poets to see if they might be interested in talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. I asked questions such as: How does a poem get started? Has that changed over time? 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? Etcetera. Maybe even focusing on recent threads in your work, or even a recent (and/or recently published) poem? Are there other writers at the back of your head as you work? I had originally considered the project to be one exclusive to Ottawa-area writers, but of course, the project took on a life of it's own, and progressed a bit further than that.

I like hearing how different writers consider structuring poems, and the decision-making processes that go into poems starting, continuing and going further. So far the series has included thirty-four short pieces: Sanita Fejzić, Amish Trivedi, Amanda Earl, Gil McElroy, Sonia Saikaley, Rusty Priske, Pearl Pirie, Dale Tracy, Barâa Arar, Jean Van Loon, Sarah Kabamba, Lydia Unsworth, Michael Blouin, Mary Kasimor, Eric Baus, Kate Siklosi, RM Vaughan, émilie kneifel, ryan fitzpatrick, Ashley-Elisabeth Best, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Jami Macarty, Conyer Clayton, Misha Solomon, Derek Beaulieu, Genevieve Kaplan, Jeff Alessandrelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Chris Banks, Valerie Coulton, Stephen Collis, Rose Maloukis, Johannes Göransson, Juliet Cook, Michael Edwards, Nathanael O'Reilly, Courtney Bates-Hardy, Claudia Coutu Radmore and Michael Lithgow, with a further piece forthcoming by Jack Jung. What else might happen?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alysia Sawchyn

Alysia Sawchyn is a Features Editor for The Rumpus and currently lives in Northern Virginia. She splits her time between teaching professional writing and admin work. Her first book, A Fish Growing Lungs, was published by Burrow Press in June 2020.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I am waiting to see! I think it's too early to tell. I have a suspicion, but I'm not ready to share the secret yet. I can say that publishing a book is so much different than publishing an essay. It was the same thing with writing; I had this notion that since I'd written an essay before I could just multiply that effort times X number of essays I wanted to include in my collection. I was very mistaken.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It's funny—I wrote poetry when I was a kid. I grew up in a house full of books and there was some project at school where every student submitted a poem and someone picked "the best of" and published it into this tiny blue book. It had real binding and everything. I feel like I should go dig that up now. It was something about lemons and a garden. So I've been thematically consistent my whole life.

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?
Everything is so slow. I think I spend a lot of time stewing. There are weeks and months where the work is happening but it's all in the back of my head, and then I'll come to the page and it'll all dump out. And then sometimes it's like pulling out fingernails—one sentence at a time. And then there's all the time I spend between drafts, just getting some perspective. It's a mix! But it's always slow.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?
Very much the latter. I work at things and then eventually realize that they sort of stick together.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like the idea of readings. That is, I'm absolutely thrilled that my work gets to interact with other humans and I think that readings are an important part of a writing community, but I definitely go into a bit of a fugue state. I'm not entirely sure where the nerves come from. I've been teaching for years now, and I don't feel that way when I teach.
 
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?
With Fish, the larger questions and concerns were about pathologizing behavior, particularly in women and women of color. I don't know if I try to answer questions with my writing though. Someone once said it was a matter of "asking better questions," and I like that idea very much. For my current book project—I'm not fully able to articulate the questions yet. I'm circling it, still, but it's shadowy.

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?
Oof. I don't know. All I can think about right now is literary Twitter, and that is not the answer I want to be giving.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love editors. I haven't worked with a bad one yet, and my support for them is unequivocal. (Can you tell I work as an editor?)

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's okay. I dabble in both poetry and fiction—I've written and published in both—but honestly my heart lies in cnf. I think genre allows us different ways to tell the truth, and essay is the one that I can speak to most naturally.

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?
I do not have a routine. I'll sometimes get into a groove, especially during summer or winter break, but it's otherwise very random. My Best Brain time is late morning (like 930-1130am) and then late night (1130-230), which as someone who isn't paid to write regularly, is very frustrating.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. There are some essays that I go back to again and again. The two I've returned to most recently are "Bathing" by Kathryn Winograd and "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Anne Beard.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I don't know what it's called, but I know it when I smell it. It's a particular blend of sawdust and . . . something, sweet, maybe? Sometimes when I get into an old car and the heater gets turned on for the first time in many months it reminds me the open-air markets in Ukraine.  

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?
Absolutely. All of the above. There was a lot of music in Fish and my current project pulls from a lot of art installations and nature. I honestly want to do some kind of art-immersion for a month—a residency where I'm a giant sponge.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The list is very long. People have been so kind to me for reasons I don't understand. To avoid dipping into the feelings too much, I'll name instead about a book I read recently that just chewed up my heart: In The Dream House.

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

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?
A lawyer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have no idea. I'd always been an artsy kid, and I wanted to document life. Somehow this seemed more marketable than engraving or painting, which are the creative endeavors I would like to get better at.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I read so much this summer, but I'm just going to list the most recent book I read, which will alleviate me of the anxiety of choosing a favorite. I finished Deaf Republic last weekend, and it was spectacular. I honestly don't know if I could name the last great film I watched. This summer and fall have been very much a "comfort" movie seasons.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am slogging away at Book 2. That's seriously the title of the word document, but the working title is I Have This Thing for Flowers. I also have one big essay that I've been revising for years that I'm chipping away at, too.

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

Carrie Olivia Adams, Be the thing of memory

When a material, namely miserable, muffled-up. In November, I sent it to my harm. I was often astonished and could not understand why, corrected or destroyed, I used to be delighted. Sometimes, a request or a gram would be sent to substitute. My whole became instance, frequent repetitions of the same wooden point. Sometimes, my remarks explain my clumsy afterwards. (“Daughter of a Tree Farm”)

Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams’s latest, Be the thing of memory (Flagstaff AZ/Las Vegas NV: Tolsun Books, 2021), is composed as a book of responses: the first section, “Daughter of a Tree Farm” is “Drawn from erasures of the Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy (1922)”; the second section, “The Pain Reliever,” is “Based upon the writings of Sarah Hackett Stevenson and Alice Magaw, ‘The Mother of Anesthesia,’ and days spent amid the collections of the International Museum of Surgical Science”; the third section, “R-SPIN: A Collaboration for Music & Dance” is subtitled “(The Revised Speech Perception in Noise Test)”; and the fourth and final section, “Proficiency Badges” is “Inspired by the Girl Scout Handbook: Immediate Program (1947).” Following her poetry books Intervening Absence (Ahsahta Press 2009) [see my review of such here], Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and DVD, Ahsahta 2013) [see my review of such here] and Operating Theater (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], Be the thing of memory is constructed as a quartet of lyric suites, three of which are built as suites of prose poems, that write of movement and the body; a lyric of listening and response that even opens into elements of ekphrasis or translation. It is a book of research, something she discusses as part of a recent interview over at poetry mini interviews: “I have a notebook in my mind where I record words and phrases that roll around my thoughts and trip me up in dreams. And I have a notebook on my desk and numerous Google docs of half starts, half middles, half ends. But, in the end, I think I approach a poem similar to how a novelist might approach a story—with research. I am constantly drawn to found text, the work of the archivist, the archaeologist, and the translator.  I get curious about a subject or an idea—medicine, architecture, choreography, cave dwellers, girl scouts—and then I let myself go down the rabbit hole collecting scraps of language, facts, and points of view along the way. And then there’s a vibration or a slow burning fire, and I know the connection has been made between this other world of ideas and my own syntax. Then, I know, it’s beginning.” As she writes as part of the final section:

All paths lead to the body. It is a handbook, which is not to say that it is the only reference, reverent we know. We take instruction lightly. We light pilot lights in other’s stoves. I am not a girl you can construct from marginalia or from ghosts that find in your sleep. I burned the books. Tore out their pages and threw them in random dumpsters in the city. Pockets full of lockets emptied one by one. I donated them, gave them up, gave them over. Words can’t give a blind man sight.

In Be the thing of memory, Adams utilizes the bare bones of research as her means with which to propel outward, writing her lyric explorations through multiple contradictions. Her lyric suites are akin to field reports, composed after a return from gathering information, attempting to wrestle the knowledge gained into a readable shape. It suggests her work simultaneously process and project based, aiming both for how she gets there, and what she has discovered. Field Commander Adams, just where might you venture next? We look forward to your next report. As she writes as part of the first section:

When children can no longer devote sympathy, owing to their growing up. One mind is always engaged or found with labor in order to be. Later on the trees acquired winter. Sent and took and did not go out. The weight of never shedding. We anticipated a cure if it comes willingly. We were unable to carry out nature. Those impressions, fresh, often made me see his life previous, the principal sadness I had to recognize.

We planted trees. We cleared the pond. Gathered different, undisturbed faith. Gradually the steps further and further withdrawing over the hills, beyond the fencerow. I was too weak. I was often driven, but saw no way. I would never go back.

The difference, between us, not because I remained the same, unable to unalter, but taken from the midst, rarely clouded, and the broken. It was this, which woke me open, opened to an outsider, a stranger.