Open Letter (Fourteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2012): Gail Scott, Sentences on the Wall

In the text which opens this collection, Renee Gladman raises the problem of writing about Gail Scott’s writing, the problem of making Scott’s sentences into objects of literary study. It is difficult, her text suggests, to say something about these sentences – and to do so using sentences. Gladman finds her utterances becoming impossibly layered as soon as she makes an attempt. The problem is not so much Scott’s sentences as the English sentence which, in Gladman’s experience, does not lend itself to thinking. Gladman’s solution is to narrate for us the process of drawing specific sentences from Scott’s novels on the walls of her living space, of turning them into “a geometry instead of a verbal consequence.” In her terms, she keeps on saying and drawing until eventually she has “made a complex observation and a picture-feeling.” I am reminded, here, of Guido Furci’s sense that although cinema is relevant to Scott’s work, “parallels with painting speaks more eloquently.” Gladman’s text is as much about her process of writing as about Scott’s sentences. It has the effect of critically reframing as collectively-authored, sentences usually taken to be individually-authored. What is more, by writing Scott’s sentences on the wall – as in a museum, an alley, a washroom or a project room – Gladman’s text turns them into public statements, with the potential to stand as counter-discourse.

             A special issue of Open Letter devoted to a specific writer works a little like Gladman’s text, citing and reframing that writer’s work, and foregrounding its conceptual purchase. The contributors to this issue – the majority of whom are themselves writers – responded to the call for texts with poems and essays. Their essays are not so much ‘about’ Scott’s writing as instances of how to read Scott and, especially, how to read alongside her. The poems engage in a kind of co-authorship, whereby fragments from Scott’s prose, an image or a phrase, become the occasion for more writing. Not surprisingly, the poems dispense with quotation marks. As Scott puts it in an interview with Corey Frost in the late 1990s, “we’re all quoting each other all the time anyway” (66). In the terms of Robert Glück, from a discussion of Kathy Acker’s practice of citation, “[a]ppropriation puts into question the place of the writer – in fact, it turns the writer into a reader” (“Long Note on New Narrative” 32). Appropriating Scott’s writing for new projects – social, textual and linguistic – the texts collected here turn writers into readers and critics into poets. Like Gladman’s sentences on the wall, they emphasize the collective and public status of writing. (Lianne Moyes, “Introduction”)

Guest-edited by Lianne Moyes in collaboration with Bronwyn Haslam comes the new issue of the critical journal Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2012), produced as “Sentences on the Wall,” an issue on the work of Montreal writer Gail Scott. Moyes is also the editor of Gail Scott: Essays on Her Works (Guernica Editions, 2002), and its interesting to see how her interest in Scott’s writing continues after such a project, furthering her own work with another. Given the fact that the same editor oversaw both projects, does this issue become a re-examination of her consideration of Scott after the first volume, a continuation or an update? One of the highlights of the issue has to be former Montreal writer Corey Frost’s exploration of Scott’s punctuation, “Punc’d: Towards a Poetics of Punctuation in the Novels of Gail Scott,” or the collaborative “Temporality, Genealogy, Secrecy: Gail Scott and the Obituary of Genre” by Angela Carr and KateEichhorn. A particular favourite was Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain’s “How Fiction Works: Gail Scott’s Heroine and The Obituary,” not just for how she speaks of Scott’s fiction, but on the mechanics of fiction, providing insight into her own writing, and in the possibilities of writing:

How does fiction work? What is the work or knowledge-making or deconstructing analysis that fiction can do? Harry Mathews reminds us that the fiction writer is not “’saying something’ to the reader”; rather, the writer must “do no more than supply the reader with the materials and … the space to create an experience” (7). Indeed he emphasizes that “of the writer and reader, the reader is the only creator” (7). The writer and reader are collaborators, and to establish a place for this, the writer must choose “as the innermost substance of” the writing, “a terrain unfamiliar” to both writer and reader (6). Furthermore, he argues “the unfamiliar matter the writer chooses in nothing else than his [or her] own story” (7). Of course this is not the familiar “publicity” story we tell about ourselves in casual conversation. Rather it is the story or stories of what has made us what we are. We find this story, he says, in our personal histories, in our bodies, and in our consciousness, by which he means, not merely awareness of things but “what you think and feel with.” Consciousness, he says does “not contain or withhold meaning; and consciousness itself has no meaning at all”; it is “the power to create meaning” (8-10). “What we long to know in our speculations about the stars,” he says, “surpasses merely something: We long to know everything. And in fact that consciousness is capable of exactly that: of knowing not only anything but everything” (10).

As Moyes wrote in her introduction, part of the appeal of such an issue is not only the range of essays on Scott’s works, but the tributes included as well, with poems from Fred Wah (from “Music at the Heart of Thinking”) and Camille Roy, as well as a short essay/tribute, “My Two Cents” (an earlier version of which appeared in How2 1.2), by Robert Glück that opens with the sentence, “Every aesthetics is an aesthetics of class.” He continues, writing:

In thinking about a poetics of class that knows itself, it’s instructive to look at the history of feminist poetics. In the first place (if you could call the sixties and early seventies the first place), an innovative feminist poetics seems to be disallowed. If you were going to make a feminist poem recognizable to feminists or to the avant-garde, feminism was content. Formally innovative poems founded on radical politics took their cues from Marxist and socialist critiques which did not include sexuality, gender, or, somehow, glass.

As Camille Roy writes of her “2 Miracle Plays,” “These poems are tributes to Gail Scott. They incorporate specific ideas from a talk ‘The Sutured Subject’ that she gave at the University of San Francisco in November 2009, as well as some lines taken from her latest novel, The Obituary. In her talk she explored the relation of history to the sentence, where history (and the dead) are encrypted in our language and the sentence itself becomes a kind of crypt for what has disappeared. The first ‘Miracle Play’ explores this relation, and uses the English future tense (“I will…”) with its expression of will for the future to highlight what Gail noted in her talk, that French lacks such a will for the future.” I reproduce the first of Roy’s “2 Miracle Plays” here:

The Sentence As Sentence

On the afternoon we are murdered

our story will become malodorous.

We will arrive at prison’s gate wan & hesitant

to show: no guilty conscience.

Stripped of false unities

& without will for the future

we’ll hold to the blaze of our wrong idea.

Its sullen rejoinder & refusal to admit defeat!

The light of custom will be our bodies.

Call this play: as density,

encrypted & insensible.

Until a new sentence rises: in layers, tender as cake.

Creatures as words: so much alive.

Whinnying in the slammer.

Despite her work and lengthy career as a writer, thinker and innovator, Gail Scott remains much admired and followed by other literary writers, but critically underrepresented. One can only hope that such a critical tribute and exploration could do worse than bring a new group of readers to her difficult and innovative ongoing work.

The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley

The closest equivalent I can think to Toronto poet Kyle Buckley’s first poetry collection, The Laundromat Essay (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) is to some of the experiments in online hyperlink poetry, a 1990s form that, for the most part, didn’t really go anywhere, one word or a phrase moving off into another direction, another poem (think, too, of those “choose your own adventure” novels you used to read as a kid). In this piece, the first thing you notice is the structure, and the second is the worry that it’s all a trick with no substance, before seeing the poem for its leagues of depth, for what it is. This is a poem that turns back on itself, with the poem on page thirty-nine reading:

The suit was hanging a little high up on my wall, but I needed something to wear, so I got a small ladder out to get it down. The ladder was around because of the work I was doing around my apartment, while my clothes were all at the laundromat because I’d just gotten home from a trip and had nothing left to wear and the laundromat owner wouldn’t let me back into his laundromat to get them because he said it was too late, they were closed. But he had his own reasons for not letting me back in.

In bold, the word “work” leads a line to the previous page, the left side where your eye might have slipped first, and finding:

I thought you and I should understand the life of furniture better than we did, so I brought some wooden beams down from the ceiling, which I could use to build a table. I started to tell you that we preferred rain in the house to mineral water.

Not that this is mere trick, but works instead as an added layer to the main thread. Buckley’s first collection is a poetry that references the merging with criticism, blurring the boundaries between, and a poem with a narrator and structures of story-telling. Through new elements, the original can only deepen in purpose and structure, like the blurring between poetry, fiction and performance that occurred in parts of Montreal of the 1990s (in the works of Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Anne Stone and Dana Bath, for example), or the ongoing blurrings between creative writing and critical or cultural thinking (including David McGimpsey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Nathalie Stephens, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Aaron Peck, Erin Mouré and Anne Carson). On the surface, without all the asides, this is a straightforward (somewhat) narrative of a story-teller telling us a particular story of his experiences in and around his neighbourhood laundromat. Is it as simple as this? What is the purpose to all these asides?

What is the purpose of poetry written using “essay” in the title? Buckley starts the poem with a quote by Steve McCaffery, already leading us in a particular direction, quoting his line “The disappointment of poetry.” The first page of Buckley’s text writes:

I know the owner of the laundromat but can’t remember his name, which could be for many reasons. He is closing up the laundromat as I get there.

Possibly the reason for forgetting his name cannot be sought to any special feature of the name itself, but is explained when I remember the subject we were discussing before I was trying to convince him to let me into the laundromat, which I am late getting to. The laundromat owner was asking me about the whereabouts of his son, Hoopy, whom I am familiar with a little but don’t feel comfortable discussing with the laundromat owner since it isn’t my business. If I try to think of the name of the laundromat owner, this new train of thought, I’m sure, would disturb its predecessor, since I am now interested in trying to get the laundromat owner to let me past him into the laundromat, which is now closed. I can no longer regard the fact that I forget the name of the laundromat owner as mere chance.

Is this a poetry that has somehow renounced itself? I already know that Vancouver fiction writer Aaron Peck has renounced poetry (and Toronto writer Brian Fawcett did too, before him, and then managed to write more on his renouncing than he wrote actual poems). In The Laundromat Essay, prose-poems fit inside other prose poems; there is the main text and a series of small offshoots, each section a series of hubs, central points along a linear line. Where is this essay going? A retail domestic poem, is this any laundromat we already know about? Is this the coin laundry on College Street in Toronto, just beside Cafe Diplomatico, former hangout of Victor Coleman and the late Daniel Jones, as well as various generations of film crews?

Is this an essay, a poem, or a novel? Or does the question even begin to matter? As the poem deepens, so too, does the story, and the structures within. Is this a poem, a fiction, an essay? On different pages, different sections, my answer would shift, and by the end, I would say all of the above. Does the question still matter? Either way, it’s a damned interesting book.

Corey Frost

This is in no way a review of Corey Frost’s second book of fiction, The Worthwhile Flux. I was sitting in my local pub last night, a Sunday, reading his remarkable book of stories. I was in the mood for a drink, and in the mood for some reading, so grabbed it off my shelf. You have to admire any book of stories that includes the line, “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” Or what about the line, “I broke my leg in two places so the doctor told me to stop going to those places.” There are parts of this book that make me laugh out loud, and other parts that make me wish there was more, so I could continue reading. Here is a section from the story “Summer Plum (Winter Version)” that begins:

I was about seven years old, and it was summer. Our rabbits had miraculously survived another winter. I gave them some carrots to munch on, and then I went back inside. My mother was making squares for fellowship group at the church. On the table there was an open bag of shredded coconut, which I had never seen before. What’s this? I asked. It’s coconut, she said. Can I have some? Yes, she said, but it won’t make you fly. Apparently when she was a kid her older sister had convinced her that if you ate enough coconut you would be able to fly, but it hadn’t worked. She had eaten so much she got sick, and then she got her head stuck in a milkcan. Her skepticism didn’t deter me from trying, though, so I took the bag out on the front steps and started eating it. I can’t believe how lucky I am, I thought to myself. Soon I’ll be flying.

Corey Frost used to live in Montreal but then he moved to New York, but he claims he goes back and forth. For a while, he was touring, but you probably didn’t see him. Do you remember when he used to be a creative writing student at Concordia University? Do you remember when he and Colin Christie used to publish items as Ga Press? Do you remember when he and Anne Stone used to take turns doing the layout for Matrix?

Right after they called last call and gave me another drink, being the only one left in the pub, they shut everything down. They turned lights off, and locked the doors. I was still reading the book. I don’t know why they even gave me the other drink. I couldn’t stop reading. I don’t know why I had to pay for that other drink, if I couldn’t sit there and enjoy it, reading Frost’s remarkable stories. The last time I saw Corey Frost he bought me the drink he owed me from the time before, when he forgot to pay for that other one. Is there a connection?