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”)

George Bowering, Soft Zipper

 

            Soft Zipper, a fragmented anti-memoir which organizes a lifetime of vignettes and recollections around a resolutely objective, rather than subjective point of view, borrows a structure, and subtitles—Objects, Food, Rooms—from American modernist Gertrude Stein’s 1914 volume Tender Buttons. What Stein discovered in writing her prose poems (also while on holiday, but in Spain), was that space is a synthetic perception. We compose it retrospectively with glimpses, borrowings, visual and musical rhymes and puns, and the staccato movement of our attention. In Tender Buttons the domestic detritus assembled by early Cubists in their still life collages finds its way across into her prose poems, and becomes there a plastic field of syntactic experiment, “the rhythm of the visible world” as she later explained. Where Stein’s ear is playfully abstract, or at least abstracting, George’s sound sense is vernacular, keyed to the plain pleasures of familiar speech. William Carlos Williams, rather than Eric Satie, would be a sonic predecessor. Prose is a domestic production her. His spaces too are often fabricated and flesh out in accordance with the homely pleasure of touch. (Lisa Robertson, “Introduction: Button Kosmos”)

With more than one hundred trade books to his name, there isn’t much ground Vancouver writer George Bowering hasn’t already tread, so I’d been curious to read through the short prose recollections of his Soft Zipper (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021). Soft Zipper works through, as Lisa Robertson explains in her introduction, a structural echo from Gertrude Stein, but one that could also be an echo of, say, the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe’s own 1961 artwork, “Drawer full of stuff.” Bowering writes underneath individual subject-titles in three sections, from “TWO BOWLS” and “THE BONE” to “PICKY EATERS” and “WAITING ROOM.” There are elements, also, of his Autobiology (Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1972), composing similar memoir recollections through short blocks of prose, although without the structure of objects, food or rooms. It reminds, also, of Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen, who composed her debut novel, In the Language of Love (1994), in one hundred chapters, each of which was titled and prompted by one of the one hundred words in the Standard Word Association Test. bpNichol began his novella, Still, which won the 3-day novel writing competition for 1983, by describing the objects in the room around him. For Nichol and Schoemperlen, these processes were used as jumping-off points for fiction. For Bowering, it is a curious way to produce a memoir, and an intriguing way to prompt memory, allowing that narrative leap from a word or a phrase to spark where that section might go. And, given the fifty years between compositions, it does exist as an interesting counterpoint to the pieces in Autobiology [reprinted as part of this recent selected]: how he writes his recollections of growing up in the Okanagan. Bowering is, of course, famous for having employed numerous writing strategies, or “baffles,” throughout the length and breadth of his work; structures determined before the first word is written, as a way of allowing the work to be a collaboration of sorts, between where his attention strays and the direction the writing itself suggests. As he writes to open the piece “OBJECTS,” one of the first in the collection: “Charles Olson announced that it might be a good plan to regard oneself as an object among objects, and in that way have a chance to share the secrets that objects know. To me that suggests not holding oneself as subject with the material about one and in one’s poetry as objects, subject to one’s gaze. Not to see something, compare it with something, and describe the independence out of it. Make the external internal and the internal external? Why? Why not let things do their own doings, not yours?”

KEATS’S ROOM

            Since I don’t remember when, or rather since thirty-eight years ago my writing room has had two big pictures on the wall, Charles Olson the subject of one, Percy Bysshe Shelley of the other. They are two big writer figures for me, and seem to have no association with one another, but consider this: it was in Shelley’s early long poem Queen Mab that I encountered the term “human universe,” which is the title of one of Olson’s most famous essays. I just now re-noticed that the Olson photo, which I acquired about forty-eight years ago, has a poem on one corner, and is a publication by Samuel and Ann Charters. Olson is seen standing with the Atlantic Ocean behind him, almost the same ocean in which Shelley drowned with a book by John Keats in his pocket. The portrait of Shelley bears a line from his early “Song” (1821) “Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of delight.” I bought it one day in 1980, when I went to visit the room in which John Keats died. I suppose most people visit this room when they first come to Rome. It is next to the Spanish Steps, after all. If you haven’t been there, look for it at Keats Shelley Memorial House, Piazza di Spagna, 26. You should not look to see any of Keats’s personal effects where he perished of the dread consumption made worse by monstrously stupid medical treatment. The Italian authorities, acting according to standard fear of plague, burned the poet’s clothing and furniture, tore up the flooring, removed the windows, scraped the wallpaper away, and replaced everything. You may visit this room, but not the things this room was made of.

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.