Tanya Holtland, Requisite

 

Three winters ago I was commissioned to write a libretto addressing the emerging topic of spiritual ecology. Although at the time I hadn’t heard the term before, it felt fitting, evocative, and wholly necessarily. It is a call for us to look deeper at what is happening to our world, for a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis.
[…]
            As I read in preparation to write the libretto, I grew aware of how much more I needed to see. How long in the awakening are those of us born into western culture and industry, even amid the clear and collateral harms of late capitalism. Crucial to my understanding has been a namesake text, Spiritual Ecology, a collection of essays edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that speaks of our enduring relationship to the earth in parallel to our unprecedented dilemma of ecological collapse. The tribal and spiritual leaders, activists, and ecologists behind these essays evidence our profound disconnect from the earth, the roots of this disconnect, and the ways we may begin to heal. Writing and exploring these works gave me an entrance, a way to understand what I have intuitively known for some time, and as we move toward a more connected existence, it dawns continually upon the conscious mind: We are not separate. Healing what is severed between the earth and us begins with a willingness to look. If we feel small in the mystery of things, then looking is our most significant step. The long poems that follow, the first of what is based on the original libretto text, are a reflection of that continued looking. (“Preface”)

Los Angeles poet Tanya Holtland’s stunning full-length poetry debut is Requisite (England: Platypus Press, 2020), a lyric suite constructed as a quartet on, as she writes in her preface, “spiritual ecology,” and the ways in which we are interconnected to the physical and natural world. There is a meditative precision to Holtland’s lyrics, finely-honed with the ease of a quick sketch, but one that also knows how to pull apart the minutae of an idea, to stretch it across an expansive canvas. There are elements of Holtland’s ability to accumulate poems into sections and sections into a full-length whole that provide comparisons to the work of her partner, the poet Hailey Higdon. In Holtland’s 2019 essay for “my (small press) writing day,” she hinted at such a cross-influence between the two, a pair of writers occupying similar physical and emotional space: “To say that we influence each other as writers is understated only by what we influence in the larger field of each other’s lives.” Whereas I’ve long understood Higdon’s poems to exist in groupings that slowly reveal their interconnectedness (such as through the publication of her 2019 debut full-length collection Hard Some [see my review of such here]), Holtland’s work through this collection, as well, exists as a detailed suite of individual poems that, together, pattern to reveal their larger coherence.

Requisite is structured into four extended lyric suites—“Fated,” “Inner River,” “Other Names for the Future” and “The Story”—the first of which, adapted from an earlier existence as a libretto, is also broken up into the quartets of “MOMVEMENTS,” “INTERLUDES,” “TRANSITIONS” and “CODA.” As part of the first section of the first section reads:

An archipelago is a place to practice

sending out and coming back in
and so is a country under siege

This place
                                    of leaping the distance
                                    between                       boundary
                                    between                       each                 other
 

the less visible
made whole

 
                                    made clear. (“Fated”)

Holtland’s ecopoetic exists in start contrast to many other examples I’ve seen in the same vein: there is a reverence, but her lyric exists simultaneously at the level of the sequence, the fragment, the word. Even the smallest unit contains the whole in a way that is reminiscent of, say, Fanny Howe or Sylvia Legris. Her poems fragment and fractal, and accumulate in a singular direction. “If the impulse to expand comes to fight a hard rain,” she writes, as part of “Fated,” “remember // the curve of the earth / comes to meet you, / to the smallest / portion of the soul.” 

There is such a wonderful, careful complexity to Holtland’s lyric meditations, setting pause against pause. She holds, she halts, she slowly pieces together. For Holtland, place is not simply being or landscape but an all-encompassing entity of which we are an important part, and even moreso, given the incredible amount of damage we have inflicted upon it. Holtland holds her distances against ours, and our distances against the ether. As the section-sequence “The Story,” opens:

From down here
every day shines

no matter the weight
of constant distance,

of not knowing personally the mountain
travelling with you against entropy.

Holy is the purest
comedy

and were I able, I would hedge
all of this sorrow

on joy:             make it so
there is             no place you can’t be kind.

 

 

Anna Gurton-Wachter, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory

I am standing in the river and, absent any structural changes, I will still be standing in the river. Absent any structural changes, I am examining an inky pen I found in the river. This was how I first gained access to Gertrude Stein’s deathbed. Pull the curtain back and Gertrude Stein’s deathbed is there. “Deathbeds are a leisure product,” the voice from above calls out. The voice from above is a rescue pattern, the sincerely possessed dovetail center. I forgot that I had started weeping just for the compensatory elation. When did I get to be outside of being a woman? The woman without qualities. Around the deathbed are many objects and beside each object a moment of private translation. Communications are like whiskers jutting out sideways from the mouth, and we are drinking wine and talking about being born. (“Mother of All”)

I’ve been eager to see Brooklyn poet, editor and publisher (being that she is half of the chapbook publisher DoubleCross Press, alongside MC Hyland) Anna Gurton-Wachter’s full-length debut, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), for a while now, even well before it was announced. Gurton-Wachter’s work is some of the most striking I’ve seen in an emerging poet in quite some time, and I feel enormously fortunate to have been able to produce her chapbook Mother of All (2018) through above/ground press, a sequence since included in this full-length collection. Her work is thoughtful, complex and absolutely stunning. One could say that Utopia Pipe Dream Memory is constructed less out of poems than out of poem-sections, extending one thought into another thought from the sentence outward, with eight poem-sections in total: “Poem from Hypothesis,” “Mother of All,” “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory I,” “Maya Deren Lives Forever / in the Speedboat at Night,” “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory II,” “A Development Proposal / for the Center of the Earth,” “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory III” and “Rebirth Scenario, / or Instances of the Corpse / Flower Pose, A Study Group.” Her poems revel in the sentence and short paragraph; in collage, a myriad of extended queries and commentaries, and the careful sidestep of a skillfully-executed digression. She works at the level, it would seem, of absorbing, questioning and repurposing, composing Utopia Pipe Dream Memory as a book-length study of feminist thinking, referencing, cribbing and writing around Bernadette Mayer, Sina Queyras, Jacqueline Frost, Carla Harryman, Laura Riding, Peggy Ahwesh and multiple others, as she writes to open the poem-section “Utopia Pipe Dream Memory I”:

This being an accont of our reckoning under the weight of a true fact that there are states only known through their being abandoned. There is no being without the generosity of limits. Bernadette Mayer is combing my hair. The world is a navel again. This being an account of shelter’s turning point. I do not have the language but the violence of personhood, she said as she unknotted me. Had I known then how to see the field of unknotting figuration, I might have also seen the unknotting evening dipping into the unknotted and knowable eardrum, tuning in and out collapsed, combed through, the distance from each instrument bodily begun.

In a review I posted last year of Seattle poet Hailey Higdon’s first full-length collection, Hard Some (Brooklyn NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) [see my review of such here], I suggested a similarity between the compositional structures of the two poets, but I might have been off in suggesting their shared purposes, ie their book-length constructions out of chapbook-length sections. Higdon’s work gives the sense that the assemblage of full-length book out of chapbook-length sections is a bit arbitrary; she might be working on a project far larger than what might be contained in a single volume. Gurton-Wachter’s work, on the other hand, gives the sense that her work, while ongoing, was focused very much on the book as her unit of composition, which, secondarily, was constructed out of chapbook-length prose poem sequences (I might just be splitting hairs, here, so to speak). Or perhaps Gurton-Wachter, instead, works towards more of a continued, perpetually evolving and continuous ongoingness, from project to project, of which Utopia Pipe Dream Memory is simply a single, completed step upon the way. I am also quite fascinated in how she utilizes material from other sources, from reading and thinking to poetry and film to participating in a reading group. As she writes as part of her notes at the back of the collection:

Mother of All was written when the news was circling of the United States dropping the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan in April of 2017. The Mother of Us All is also the title of a libretto written by Gertrude Stein. During the writing of this book, the discussion to make women bury their aborted fetuses was discussed and in some cases implemented. Cecil the lion was killed. The corpse flower bloomed. I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. I read many books about vision and material culture. I took a workshop with Julian Brolanski called “Visions and Visionary Poetics” and Poet’s House. I am appreciative of the feedback I received from Julian and the rest of the workshop participants.

The Interludes contain a mixture of remixed words and short phrases culled from three main sources: 1) Bernadette Mayer speaking at the Canada Gallery about her exhibition Memory 2) Notes from discussion taken during The Bernadette Mayer Feminist Reading Group at The Poetry Project in NYC, in which we read and discussed Mayer’s work, particularly Utopia and Memory 3) Various interviews with Maryanne Amacher in which she describes her sound installations and her experiences visiting La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s project Dream House.

There is such an ease to her complexity, one that sparks and sparkles across sentences and pages, linking one disparate thing against another. She does seem to delight in connecting what might otherwise not have been possible, or obvious, and the results are incredible. Recently, over at the Poetry Society of America website, Gurton-Wachter wrote on the opening poem of this new collection, as part of their “In Their Own Words” series, writing:

This is the first poem, or proem, in my first book Utopia Pipe Dream Memory. It encapsulates many of the themes that appear throughout the book: imagined intimacies, invocations, conversations with the world of material objects, hallucinations and visions, animal worlds colliding, the carving out and claiming of space. Like much of the rest of the book it also functions as an homage to my influences, the artists who have shaped my understanding of these themes.

This poem, dedicated to the filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, was written while thinking through an experience I had as an actor in Ahwesh’s film The Ape of Nature. For this project each actor was hypnotized before being filmed—a nod to, and meditation on, Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, which followed the same procedure. On the first day of filming the hypnotist arrived and began working with the other actors on a scene that I was not in. I was to be just an observer, and I sat nearby with a notebook of lined paper in my hands, curious what this unusual specialist would do to hypnotize my fellow actors. As I listened, I found I had started swaying my body back and forth, rubbing the notebook pages and smiling joyously. It was as though I could feel in the blank page, the unwritten words, the entire concept of possibility, of before. I’m a bit suggestible generally but I was also in an environment that Ahwesh had created where I felt that her vision for the narrative of the film remained open as we moved through making it, and that is a really joyful thing to experience. I like thinking about all of the variables that go into making a work of art happen. Sometimes the motions we go through look recognizable, integratable into regular life like measuring things or handling construction tools, but what we are building is play and unreality. There is also a relationship between the hypnotized person, drooling and blissed out, and the creative mind that needs to shut off judgement and editorial tasks until later.

So for me, this poem returns me to the site of openness, a feeling that is older than the material world could be. Yet it returns often to an idea of architecture, of structure, of what would it mean to let animals take over part of your house? To acquiesce to them rather than view them as pests to be gotten rid of? To relinquish traditional attitudes towards property and authorship?

The poem also introduces the reader to a few stylistic moves I do throughout the book, namely piling together a group of nouns to see what hybrid forms I can devise and how much weight they can hold. Utopia Pipe Dream Memory. Origin Earth Admixture. Earthquake Shatterer Poetics King. My sister remarked recently that we are all clinging to nouns, to the stable material thing-ness of them, in times when it is harder to understand how anyone makes anything, says anything, when so much pushes us towards not speaking. As the nouns pile up they become slippery. This thing-ness of language that is so attractive can also shift and make visible the gesture of reaching for words in the face of the unutterable.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Cavuto, Sikkema, Tate, Nielsen, Higdon + Salah

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-second issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-first issue: Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon and Trish Salah.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-second issue features new writing by: Julia Drescher, Biswamit Dwibedy, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Roxanna Bennett, Conyer Clayton and Emily Izsak.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-one issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Hailey Higdon, Hard Some

two women walk into a town

good                  we tried for neighborly

in the shadow of a repeated national harm, shit-show

destroyed towns, big and small people

violence used in relation to purity

some in a boat and others wondering how long

it will take to sink the middle, which is terrible (“A Wild Permanence”)

Not long ago, I reviewed Seattle poet Hailey Higdon’s recent Dancing Girl Press chapbook, A Wild Permanence (2018) [see my review here], not realizing it was also included in her immediately-following first full-length collection, Hard Some (Brooklyn NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Hard Some is constructed out of four sections of extended lyric sequences—“A Wild Permanence,” “Breaker,” “Children” and “Yes & What Happens” (which also appeared as a chapbook via the Dusie Kollektiv). Higdon has never been a poet in any particular rush, moving with a meditative precision through accumulative fragments, and many of her sequences-to-date have collected themselves, it would seem, as chapbook-length single poem-units, including The Palinode Project: Book One (What To Us (Press), 2008), How to Grow Almost Everything (Agnes Fox, 2011), [PACKING] (Bloof Books, 2013) The State In Which (above/ground press, 2013), Yes & What Happens (Dusie Kollektiv, 2015) and Rural (Drop Leaf Press, 2017). To see four of her chapbook-length sequences collected into a full-length collection is a curious opportunity, as is the interplay between the poems, allowing for both new and sustain elements to shine through.

Certainly there have been a number of poets over the years who have moved from chapbook-length to book-length forms, with their full-length debuts giving the sense of a handful of chapbooks brought together to form a collection (there are many examples, but debut collections by Kevin Connolly and Sarah Pinder first come to mind). Higdon’s collection provides something else, instead, suggesting a sustained interest in the fragment and repetition, even while accumulating a strong narrative through-line. The opening section, “A Wild Permanence,” repeats the simple mantra of “two women walk into a town,” something reminiscent, from this Canadian’s ear, at least, of the late John Newlove’s “Ride Off Any Horizon,” with their repeated points-of-return crafted as through-line. For Higdon, this is a mantra constructed for jumping off, repeatedly, into the further possibilities of lyric, meditation and story. For Higdon, hers is a story of, as Cedar Sigo’s back cover blurb articulates, “the depth of a queer dailiness,” one that writes of “two women” engaged with the simple act of entering a town that appears to resist their presence, heightening a level of anxiety for both the narrator and the townspeople: “we are here, permanent & wild with / that community of moving target, that community / that says you are better off real imaginary and far away [.]” There is an openness to this sequence, but one that treads lightly, but ever forward, even as she writes: “all the love of loving a new place / but told to count their blessings / that living is consent to dying after [.]” And then, the last section providing a further resistance, one both understated and unflinching, incorporating a line by Leonard Cohen, from “Chelsea Hotel #2”:

no matter

they will

domesticate me after I die

the ratio of men to you                        and well and

and those were the reasons, and that was new york

One might say that Hard Some, on the whole, is a book of sustained resistance, as much as it is about a sustained and thoughtful presence. And, if the first poem/section opened with a single line as a mantra, “two women walk into a town,” the second section, “Breaker,” opens with a line offering a resistance in a different direction: “Fuck the lake.” The poem moves quickly to write on love and its difficulties, asking “how many times do we try something new / and before it feels comfortable              retaliate.”

things we take turns enjoying

never quite experiencing together

you are too close to the information you carry

but you carry it because there is comfort

in co-experience

conditioning habituation

keeping the things that expect reiteration

In Higdon’s hands, everything connects to everything else, and the interplay here is magical, existing as a series and sequence of lights revealing the multiple threads throughout the whole. Each of the four sequences, not simply the first, close with a line quoted from another source, and the subsequent three poem-sections each include a line from, in order of appearance: Patty Griffin, Blood Orange and Neil Young. Given how these four sections connect, I’m now curious about her published chapbooks that weren’t included in this particular collection: how might they fit in, if at all? Would they expand what is going on here, or are they part of some other kind of ongoing structure? Or might they exist as neither or both? There are elements of the concerns throughout this collection, as well, that harken back to her 2014 “On Writing” essay at the ottawa poetry newsletter, “Hiding Places,” that includes: “It feels like everyone I know is doing something in New York. Fuck New York. I’ve never liked it there.” Further on in the short essay, she writes of sitting at the edge of a lake and accidentally breaking her glasses. Does everything actually connect?

some children take their authority from death

some run

what do you care

about pipes and seven thirty

it’s always 7:30

tell me something good

everyone is your mother (“Children”)

The final section, included as a chapbook as part of my curation of dusie kollektiv #8, “Yes & What Happens,” is a sequence that somehow wraps the entire collection together, solidifying how everything is connected, somehow, to everything else. A micro-review of the chapbook, published not long after it appeared, in Yellow Field (reprinted at Galatea Resurrects) by Paige Melin, catches many of Higdon’s concerns that would come to exist throughout this full-length collection:

“I believe we come back” – back home, back to ourselves, to each other, back to our solitude, back to rivers and seas and cities, “back when we were / without compression.” Hailey Higdon’s yes & what happens constantly draws us back, asking us to re-examine ourselves, our relations, and our intimate spaces in the process. In its dream-like merging of cityscpaes and riverbends, of lonely drug stores and shared dinners, yes & what happens questions boundaries, acknowledging their presence only to surge through them. These fluid, dreamy transitions bring the disparate into proximity – “trees across trampolines” – and in doing so urge readers to re-examine our own boundaries, to consider “the colonization of our cognitive processes,” the imposition of borders. And what happens, Higdon asks – what happens when we come back, when we say yes to dissolution and merging, when we permit ourselves “[t]o believe in process, in moment to moment, to let / to be as queer as you are without boundaries?” yes & what happens is itself a dream of amalgamation and connection, “a dream of melting into other people” – and its words will linger long after you’ve dreamt it.

The poems in this collection speak of negotiating interpersonal relationships, personal space and inner silence, attempting to navigate thoughtfully through all the chaos without and within, as deliberately and carefully as possible. The poems want to believe, and hold fierce to an optimism and openness, despite whatever might emerge in response. How does one end such an open-ended collage of so many threads? How else, but for an acknowledgment of how far you’ve come so far, both as narrator and reader:

thank you for waiting, incurring the damages

which were going to hape, I’ve been told

everything was always going to happen, and

away from you and near you are the same thing, and

it was Sunday, and I did laundry, and you were all there

all my changes, all my changes were there

Ongoing notes: mid-December 2018

[our wee one, not feeling well]

I’ve only been attempting to sketch out some further non-book fair related chapbook reviews for a few months now (why am I so behind on everything?), so here we go, finally:

Somewhere across the border: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of American poet Hailey Higdon (including producing a chapbook of hers, and even including her work in the recent above/ground press 25th anniversary broadside project), so seeing a new title of hers from dancing girl press, a press I very much admire, is simply glorious: A Wild Performance (2018). Higdon’s work, from the small handful of chapbook-length titles I’ve seen to date (Ihave yet to see a copy of her debut full-length collection) explores the extended lyric sequence through fragment and the small moment:

two women walk into a town, foundational

to the existence of the town as interesting

they thought            we need the witness

of neighbors                we don’t know

who are neighbors, who

are just friends             here is not a place for inside behavior

but outside doesn’t seem

much better

As the acknowledgments offer, “This poem was created during a residency at Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts” and could be exactly as straightforward as it suggests, opening with “Two women walk into a town.” I like the sketched-out quality of this, the quick take and the sudden turns, and the deceptive simplicities that contain such great multitudes. Higdon is easily one of my favourite (or should I say: favorite) American poets working right now, and more readers should be paying attention to her work.

everywhere I go

they are waiting           as an American I want to talk about myself

go in and out of getting prayer, suggesting light

exposure          about myself I spoiled with competition

a country so green we all wanted it

then to have that particular experience of being talked

out of the conversation

Toronto ON: Given I am so behind on everything, it should come as no surprise that I’m occasionally discovering titles on my desk I didn’t realize I had, including Michael Harman’s chapbook Brittlestars (2017) from the combined Michael Boughn/Victor Coleman publishing venture shuffaloff / Eternal Network. Given there isn’t any author biography included with the work, and Google searches (sorry, Bing, no one uses you) seem less than helpful, so one is left with but the text to determine anything (which some might argue is the only way to really approach a work). Who is Michael Harman? Does it matter? Not really, in a certain way, but I sure would like to know. Brittlestars is a playful, precise and mature work, made up of three extended sequences—“Part 1: Bathysphere,” “Part 2: Heart” and “Part 3: Houseplants”—composed very much in the vein of “language poetry,” allowing sound and rhythm to bounce around with an incredible precision, writing out an extended poem that is meant to be heard as much as read. But I ask, again: who is Michael Harman? As the poem begins:

1 (Dandayamana-dhanurasana)

designate space

to access cerebral cortex

voice a nudging marbles

down a notebook spine

remember Potter’s patronus?

a purple reddish

starfish det-

aches offshoot morphemes

with nocked legs

in taut bows,

body now distal

as arms, arrows,

tug skin seams

a world dubbed

then re-dubbed

a “knot in motion,”

ecosystem

our tutelary practice

notebook swaths/swans

circulate organs

and lungs’ breath churns

October coloured vortex

as angels entice            all        capacities

their wildest range

so you can really sit

(where Julien says

the pocket’s time-feel

is at its fattest