Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory

 

The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resist assimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way, poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’ (Charles Bernstein)”)

I’m intrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s words as a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, in fact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror to themselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “how can we be true to the way the brain works?”

Katelnikoff’s process has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays over the past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic is not removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a way into the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the 1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessis places the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places the criticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly into the criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, for example—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critique through repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a whole other level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with the permission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In each essays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first section are direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences are spliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s a fascinating process, and a fascinating read.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stop looking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipher in its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

The more I write, the more meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountain rising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)

Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking

 

1

Don’t think thinking without heart no such separation
within the acting body takes a step without all of it the self
propelled into doing the thing (for example, the horse) and
on the earth as well picking up the whole circuit feet first feel
the waves tidal and even outside to moon and sun it’s OK
to notate only one of those things without knowing fixed
anyway some heart sits in the arms of

Having appeared as a thread through his work, including through multiple full-length poetry titles, is Vancouver poet Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), a new volume collecting the one hundred and seventy numbered poems in this sequence-to-date for the first time. The first ten poems in the sequence, as Wah’s notes acknowledge, were “written for and published in an issue of Open Letter (5.7 [Spring 1984]) on notation,” a project originally prompted by bpNichol and Frank Davey (there are at least three Open Letter issues “on notation”). The original handful of poems might have been prompted by an idea on notation, but the poems quickly evolved into a sequence of responses, whether composed as individual pieces or short groupings of pieces, to music, visual art, theory and poetry. The first sixty-nine pieces later appeared as Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), with a subsequent thirty-five appearing as part of Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, 1992). Subsequent pieces collected in the volume originally emerged through numerous literary journals, festschrifts, anthologies and further of his trade titles, existing as a thread across the length and breadth of his work since, encompassing nearly forty years of composition. There is something fascinating about a poetry title composed across four decades, especially one that emerges out of a particular thread excised from the rest of his work. How does this one thread exist in relation to other pieces he’s worked on, across that same period? Perhaps at some point down the road, a similar volume might compile Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days,” another sequence of poems focusing equally on “response” as well as an attention to form, language and breath. To pull out and compile a single thread, what is the portrait that might emerge? As Wah writes to introduce those original pieces in Open Letter:

THE FOLLOWING ‘DRUNK’ WRITINGS ARE NOTES FOR TALK. IN THE explication of these estranged pieces lies possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty is literal and intentional. I’m wary of any attempt to make it easy. ‘language [the true practice of thought]’ Kristeva says or Jack writing yesterday with reminders all through his letter, mind stumbling over itself not recognizing stuff ‘till later,

That last part of your letter makes me remember Wittgenstein’s saying ‘don’t think, look.’ And if the ‘dogmatic order’ is only in the para-text of perception, then … the syntax of thinking in its (linguistic) periodicity is always going to elide that bump or ‘nipple’ Juan de la Cosa’s eyes included (but you’d have this already from Henry Lee and Benjamin L.).

And then the gates open to the ‘double,’ the binary. Emic. Dialogic.

In many ways, Wah’s “Music at the Heart of Thinking” is built in a manner opposite to a project such as Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s impossibly-large and ongoing “Love in a Dry Land”: where Cooley’s is a single project nearly thirty years in the making, with threads excerpted for book publication, Wah’s appears as a single, occasional and ongoing thread. His is a sequence of occasionals sprung from a shared impulse of improvisation and response; a project that adds poems as they are needed, potentially for as long as he requires them. The idea of “drunk writings” he mentions in his original introduction, is something he referred to in that first trade volume as “drunken tai chi,” the idea of a master craftsman deliberately compromised, forcing themselves to work more intuitively, and allowing the unconscious to take over. In the note at the back of the current collection, he continues that particular thread, writing that “The ‘MHTs’ became, for me, a niche for a compositional attention I wanted to explore in particular ways. I had been attracted to the prose poem through my attempts at the utanikki, the poetic journal. Within the prose poem I was interested in upsetting the tyranny of the sentence as a unit of composition. The resistance to closure and syntactic predictability implicit in contesting the sentence is a dynamic also shared with the long poem.” As his opening note to the current volume, “One makes (the) difference,” begins:

To say: “I don’t understand what this means,” is, at least, to recognize that “this” means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast.

The “Music at the Heart of Thinking” poems, a project that emerged out of Wah’s attention to improvisation and response [something we discussed as part of an interview I conducted with Wah for Jacket2], appears to be the thread of his work where he more overtly explores the possibilities of improvisation alongside ekphrastic movement, allowing the poems a looseness, and trusting them to land as they should. Set together for the first time, the ebb and flow of the series is interesting, as the poems expand and contract, reach out and retreat; from compact prose poems to sentence-stanzas, exploring both the breath-line and the poetic sentence. “The plateau of the poem,” he writes, to open “127,” “pulling a story from a fire / smouldering under foot / on a periphery of words / as things while sentenced [.]” The series also evolves from more general explorations to specific responses, whether to specific people, artworks or thinking, such as “Music at the Heart of Thinking Eighty-Something,” after Christine Stewart, that includes: “Where to go to get the word rubble now or as you say fair / producing sky weather may eventually.” Wah’s has always been a poetic simultaneously engaged with breath and quick thought, language and deep meditation on being, identity and theory, and Music at the Heart of Thinking provides an ongoing example of just how powerful a master can be, even as he allows himself the quick line, the quick sketch; allowing himself to relax, and let go.

90

On the weekend I got into anger talk about landscape and the hunger of narrative to eat answer or time but space works for me because place got to be more spiritual at least last felt now this water/genetic I suspect passions like anger suprafixed to simply dwells I mean contained as we speak of it believe me I’d like to find a new word-track for feeling but language and moment work out simply as simultaneous occurrences so I don’t think you should blame words for time-lapse tropism e.g. ethics is probably something that surrounds you like your house it’s where you live

 

Sean Braune, Dendrite Balconies

neither a smile’s similitude, nor the kraken’s

coarse sand sister—no one weathers her

textured watch, glass-filled dresses,

degenerate folds, a song of glyphs,

her density is a ballad,

a ball, a pallor of hands

schlick feinsand turns sapphires to ash, to

feral knots bled gold with chaos

inspired limpets descend through the black,

through the happenstance of atoms.

three eyes today hiss jagged knowledge

in distemper, disrepair.

unload the shadows,

denude the crystals.

heresiarch bellows. (“Chiasmus Planet”)

Toronto writer and filmmaker Sean Braune describes his full-length debut, Dendrite Balconies (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2019) as an exercise in working through, as he writes in his afterword, “on how a writer might interact with the overwhelming amount of text in the world.” Referencing his discovery and exploration of the work of Hannah Weiner, he writes:

Through this storm of language I find myself compelled to trace a path, and in the tracing of this path there is a reading that leads to a new writing—a writing that very much reflects the cityscape, or the global, interconnected world from which this writing emerges.

I’m fascinated by his description of writing as “tracing a path,” and his description suggests his poems as a mode of exploration and thinking, akin to works by Anne Carson, Phil Hall or Dionne Brand, but through a gaze that includes an exploration of language, setting his work closer to that of works by Erín Moure or Christopher Dewdney (who provided a blurb for the back cover). “words feel, / words meander, / words glacial know words / in word dilation,” he writes, in the fifth section of the section/sequence “Water Dreams.” Set in nine sequence-sections—“Faciality,” “Chiasmus Planet,” “The Unmixed Skin Void,” “Water Dreams,” “A Corpus Emptiness,” “Vitalogistics,” “An Organ Dancer,” “A Wet Room Geogrpahy” and “Face Ache”—as well as an afterword, “Vibrational Harvest,” Braune’s Dendrite Balconies explores how writing reacts to writing, how language relates to being, how thinking shapes perception, and how perception shapes how one relates to and exists in the world.

Writing out his book-length sequence of sequences, each extended poem in Dendrite Balconies exists as both lyric accumulation and linear thread. As Braune responded as part of a 2018 interview at Touch the Donkey, he wrote that the current collection, then still a work-in-progress, “is a collection that explores the frenzy of contemporary reading practices (as discussed earlier), as well as the inevitability of death alongside the ways that language can be understood as an infection.” He also spoke of actively resisting composing “a poetry that fully embraces meaning.” He continues: “I think that poetry should always push against the meaningful structures of language in order to add some ‘disquiet’ or ‘disorientation’ to traditional practices of writing and reading. For me, poetry is an activity that is produced by reading.” For Braune, his balconies sit as an extension of another’s building, deliberately seeking to further what had come before, seeking to absorb as much as possible and push at the limits of language and meaning, yet in a way that still actively explores those same meanings. I am curious if there is any kind of lineage or linkage between this work and Fred Wah’s own, given his sequence, “This Dendrite Map / Mother/Father Haibun,” from his Governor General’s Award-winning collection Waiting for Saskatchewan (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1985), the first poem of which, “Father/Mother Haibun #1,” included: “such  particles  caught  in  the  twig-jam  holding  the / water back impedimenta and this dendrite map I’m finally on now for / no reason but time [.]” After a small handful of chapbooks (three of which appeared through above/ground press), I am eager to see where Braune will go next with his work, and just how he might apply some of the lessons learned through the process of this debut collection. To end his afterword, “Vibrational Harvest,” he writes:

            It is an attempt to create, in a nonlinear fashion, poetry out of the hurricane of words that I am exposed to. It is also, to a certain extent, a desperate attempt to find meaning in this bluster, especially in a twenty-first century western culture that appears to be heading, rather rapidly, towards its own demise by way of climate change and the resulting dwindling resources, all while the volume of text continues to swell.         

            For this reason, Dendrite Balconies may appear to have experimental qualities, but I think of it as a desperate attempt to reaffirm a lyric impulse in poetry. A poetry that both seeks to differentiate itself from and also still be a part of the vast sea of text which produced it—the libraries, cityscapes, and the texts that have inspired it. A glass of water poured into the sea, perhaps, but a sea made up of many such glasses of water. A glass taken from the sea and now returned to it.