As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.
Showing posts with label Anne Carson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Carson. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Friday, May 15, 2020
essays in the face of uncertainties
One
of the final poems in CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (2009) reads:
Frank is a
young boy
asleep in
ancient
Tibet
what you
thought was
your life is
really his
dream
he may
wake at any
moment
There
was something in Neil Gaiman’s expansive The Sandman that spoke in similar
directions: the city, and the dream of the city. What might happen to us if our
city wakes? Anne Carson once wrote an entire essay on sleep, presented to The League
of Canadian Poets as a lecture during their 2004 Annual General Meeting, held that
year at a hotel in downtown Montreal. “This lecture will last fifty-eight
minutes,” she told us, according to my notes from the time. There were dozens of
poets from across Canada around large, circular tables in a Montreal hotel’s banquet
hall, held close as Anne Carson spoke to us on sleep. Would to have remained awake
through the entire lecture have been compliment or insult? To have drifted away?
Later collected in her Decreation (2005) as “EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE
(A Praise of Sleep),” Carson wrote:
The dream of the green
living room was my first experience of such strangeness and I find it as
uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or
dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can recall, I explained the
dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping.
Carson
suggests that rooms, that houses, might be able to sleep. Her title also suggests
that you can always leave the way you came in. Remember that.
Gaiman’s
lead character in The Sandman is Morpheus, Dream-Lord of the Endless, so
it would be an understatement to say that sleep is an important element of the
series. Dreams might be a different reality than the waking world, but that doesn’t
make them less real. One of the most striking moments appears early on in the
series, as those in the waking world, asleep due to the ‘sleeping sickness,’ are
freed from their bonds. Some had been asleep for days, or even weeks, and
others, for decades. They were asleep, and as suddenly, they were not. Awake at
the flick of a switch, as they say. “And then she woke up.”
It
begins to feel as though we’ve been in the house long enough that individual days
no longer exist. The edges of each morning shimmers, as each evening falls in
on itself. The children have always been. We have always been. We have always
been here.
Days
alternate snow squalls and sun, each one overtaking the other.
Newly-announced
guidelines by the City of Ottawa recommend that, while myself and the girls
might be able to go out for walks, Christine is considered high risk, and can’t
even do that. I suggest she walk a marathon’s worth in our backyard, or inside
our bedroom. She cares not for either suggestion. We remain in the house, even
as April begins to shift melted snow into soft ground, the boundaries of grass
and of lawn and of yard.
After
lunch, Christine heads to the bedroom for a conference call, and our young
ladies are packed with boots and coats and set loose in the backyard. Once outside,
coats are abandoned, and Rose returns repeatedly to fill a container with
water, to wash the caked dirt off their plastic water-table. She climbs their metal
play-structure, surveying the yard. Aoife, too small to climb, hangs from the bars.
I retreat to my desk and return to Julie Carr’s Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines
(2010), a book I found quite remarkable when I first opened it, and still do: “To
write in order to leave, for good, the day [.]” If we can leave today, somehow,
might a new day begin?
I
remember slipping Carson an envelope of poetry chapbooks on the day of the
lecture: did I dream that as well?
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Ongoing notes: early October, 2019: du Plessis + Waldrop
Don’t forget the ottawa small press fair turns twenty-five years old next month! You
should totally come out for that. What else is happening? I'm at IFOA later this month, participating both as part of a small press fair and on a panel on small press, which is pretty cool. I had a book or two
out this year (here and here), don’t forget. I mean: you knew all of this
already, right? And did you see that 2020 subscriptions to above/ground press’ TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR OF PRODUCTION are now available?
Wolfville NS/Montreal
QC: I’m
extremely impressed with Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis’ chapbook unfurl: Four Essays (Wolfville NS:
Gaspereau Press, 2019), an assemblage of some of the sharpest and engaging
critical work I’ve read in some time. Her language and detail are swift,
electric and utterly delightful, and some of the sharpest, smartest prose I’ve
seen. As the small collection opens:
Unfurl, for me, is the shape
of a leaf managing itself into growth. It’s the gesture of a front uncurling
itself, standing upright, broad-shouldered and confident. It’s a leaf from a
book, a page inscribing poetry that is organic and energetic and lends itself
to my mind.
Un-furl is a negation with a generative
definition. The word’s semantic growth is so strong that its prefix denoting
absence is satiated, incorporated, and reinvigorated into verdure.
Unfurl is a collection of
four review essays, each on a different recent poetry title by a Canadian
writer—Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and an overview of a couple of titles by Anne Carson, a short essay
that begins:
Anne Carson never completes a book. Currently,
I am surrounded by her books. Plainwater
is on my lap. Red Doc> lies open
beside me and Decreation peeks out
from underneath it. It crosses my mind that I need an extra perpendicular desk
to lay out Eros the Bittersweet, my
printout of “The Gender of Sound,” the multiple inserts of Float. And yet, Anne Carson never completes a book.
Sometimes
I feel I spend my whole life rewriting
the same
page.
As
she writes, again, in her opening pages: “I am attuned to heed work on
language, ars poetics, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetics. I seek
out female embodiment of intelligence through sensuality, racial integration
into geographies of mind and space. Yet each essay also stands alone. I am not
flattening these poets through similarity. Rather, it’s a curious, beauteous
phenomenon to see the reading of four poets’ work channeled so clearly through
a mind, a set of concerns, an ecstatic moment of being animated to write. There
is endless strength in considering how poems go together, enter into dialogue
with one another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one
another as they draw on an archive of an individual’s reading practice become
writing. My reading mind à my writing mind, unfurl.” I can only hope that these
essays are a teaser for an eventual full-length collection.
Minneapolis MN: New from American poet Rosmarie Waldrop comes the stunning chapbook Rehearsing the Symptoms (Minneapolis MN: Rain Taxi, 2019), a short
assemblage of poems – “Wanting,” “Thinking,” “Doubting,” “Knowing,” “Doing,”
“Coupling,” “Escaping Analogy,” “Meaning,” “Translating,” “Loving Words” and
“Aging” – that sit at the heart of what Waldrop’s work has been doing for more
than five decades: utilizing the poem as a space for sharp thinking on being,
writing and literature. Given the amount of work she has published over the
past fifty or so years (something evidenced through Rosmarie and Keith
Waldrop’s recent Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner,
with an introduction by Aaron Kunin that Wave Books produced earlier this year
[see my review of such here]), I find it stunning just how breathtaking and
relevant her work continues to be, writing evocatively around specifics and
abstracts, language and being, and the impossibly concrete, as in this excerpt
of the poem “Loving Words”:
I’ve filled my house with many different
things. As if to create an ecology to encourage diversity of experience. The
way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species are said also to
have a greater number of languages.
Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of
page and perspective cavalière.
Turned my back on the window in favor of definitive articles on perception. Of
introversion and subcutaneous shivers.
Saturday, June 01, 2019
Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
VERSO
10.4
One could not easily separate oneself from the
“we” constructed and being constructed by the spectacle and its narrations or
reiterations. And perhaps one ought not to be able to so clearly distinguish
onself from that “we.” The grim list of the clerk begins. We believed in
nothing, the black-and-white American movies buried themselves in our chests,
liquid, glacial, acidic as love. the poet admits culpability. This is not
enough for the clerk. Don’t let yourself off, the clerk says, I have enough to
deal with on the wharf, thick weather, appears to be, easterly outside. The
clerk knows that admitting guilt is a cop-out, it’s like wanting to be noble
without giving anything up, it is drawing attention to yourself as if you are
in a soap opera. If the poet doesn’t do more, the clerk will be inundated by
bundles of sheets tightly fastened with gnats and wire.
Currently on the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlist, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
(Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2018) is a sequence of prose-poem
commentaries on life, literature and history. Composed as bursts of lyric prose,
these pieces combine the lyric essay with storytelling, as her “Versos” suggest
a collection that writes on the “reverse side” of history, those tales that
fall away from the forefront. “In June,” she writes, to open “VERSO 5,” “I
realized I had already abandoned nation long before I knew myself, the author
says. That attachment always seemed like a temporary book in the shoulder
blade.” There is something of The Blue
Clerk that feels a sibling to Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), through their shared sequence of
short prose bursts, both of which explore a variety of subjects, as well as
philosophy and theory, and the nature of how stories get told. Beyond that,
Brand’s poems also exist as a narrative thread, composing a novel through lyric
fragment, and the story of the story itself, told, between the author, and the
author’s creation, the clerk. As “VERSO 5.1” ends:
So
what? You feel featherless, the clerk says. Didn’t you always; weren’t you just
an outrider? You tried to fit in, to your own demise though, you rode shotgun
to your own distaster, she says. You’re right. No need for violent metaphor,
the author cautions. Again, let me draw your attention to the tracing paper.
In
“The Voice Asking,” a conversation with Souvankham Thammavongsa in the
collection What the Poets Are Doing:Canadian Poets in Conversation, ed. Rob Taylor (Gibsons BC: Nightwood
Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here], Brand responds to one of
Thammavongsa’s queries: “I notice now how I read. The pleasures are different. Now
I read for structure, so the shape of the work is what gives me pleasure. Or the
insight it accumulates. I am interested in the architecture of the work: what
it borrows from, what it leaves unchanged from the past, how it breaks embedded
narrative or not, how lazy or agile the poet. A dear friend poet asked me, a
long time ago, ‘D, does the world need that line?’ And it took me aback and
then made me laugh and then made me measure each line of poetry I wrote against
this question. Such a simple question and such a difficult one—bracing and
settling.” Brand’s power, throughout this book, emerges from the blend of
genres, and the slipperiness of lyric essay, memoir, novel and prose poem,
engaging with history and theory, the intimate and the purely theoretical. This
collection is up for the Griffin Poetry Prize, but could just have easily be
shortlisted for the Giller Prize (perhaps it still could), allowing the
fluidity of genre to exist equally (I am reminded of Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, for example, originally
published as “poetry” and reprinted as “novel,” once the movie adaptation
appeared). She grounds her book through character and the small moment, but
anchors it, just as much, through an exploration of large ideas, such as in the
second section, as she begins:
STIPULE
Elegy, the philosopher
Gilles Deleuze remarked, is one of the
principal sources of poetry. It is the great complaint … the complaint is
“what’s happening to me overwhelms me.” Not (simply) that I am in pain but what
has taken away my power of action overwhelms me. And why do I see these things
why do I know these things why must I endure seeing and knowing.
There
is something really graceful and lovely in the way Brand’s sentences unfold,
wrapping the lyric in and around itself, as “VERSO 27” begins: “The baby next
door was in full voice last night. I didn’t want to put him in that last verso.
It would have injured him.”
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