Lily Wang, Saturn Peach

 

THIS POEM

Two different textures meet, one entering the other: a fluff drifting into jagged wood. A girl walks into the darkened wood and steps out a—still—a girl, wolfish. She is not young. She is young. It does not matter. One reality crosses with another, hashes, she is pressed against the crisscross she is: unshaped: lopped: repackaged or—broken out of? She is a girl. She is a boy. It does not matter. She is who she says she is she is lost, she is dripping, drilling, taking forms: tossing it. Humming stretch the night in two. On, and on more: she is writing this poem.

The debut full-length poetry title by Toronto poet, editor and publisher Lily Wang, founding editor of Half a Grapefruit Magazine, is Saturn Peach (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2020), following on the heels of her chapbook debut, Everyone In Your Dream is You (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2018). Set in five sections—“RE:,” “UNSOLICITED PORTRAITS,” “ARCADE,” “BLUE OLIVES” and “CONCERT”—the first-person narratives in Saturn Peach are composed with a curious looseness paired with energy and confidence, as Wang composes first person meditative portraits of small moments that move through experience, including mis-adventuring with friends, translations of self, summers and crying, and pop culture references from the previous century: Mickey Mouse Club in the 1930s, and the films Goodfellas and Kill Bill: Volume 1. Wang utilizes these almost as a means to an end, writing through stories and references to unfold and reveal moments of meditative silence, revelation or observation, such as the poem “ALL THE THINGS YOU HAVE ARE REAL,” a poem interrupted by a sudden downpour, that ends: “I heard a splash then it just came down. / All at once like an upturned bucket. // After I say this I go back upstairs, / where it is warm.”

These are poems of tone, and texture, one that works through an internal space so vast in can touch upon anything and everything that might be possible “We’re cool?” she writes, at the end of the poem “KIDS”: “Yeah we’re cool. Good I was worried you were mad at / me. No we’re cool. Cool.” In an interview conducted by David Ly for PRISM International, posted November 26, 2020, Wang speaks of the collection:

Here I am discussing poems I wrote starting at age eighteen. It takes years for a book to come out. Every day I leave myself behind. I had to ask myself what I consider as “growth,” “maturity,” and what is “good writing”? (The past always has something to offer.) My “style” adapts to the different ways I re:present. When my style evolves it is repetition but repetition with difference (I am an earnest liar). Maybe control for me is always part shame. Shame itself is always part hope.

I wrote most of the poems in Saturn Peach while I was reading Auerbach (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature). I wanted my writing to be personal, and embarrassing (in the way only personal poems can be), and still open (open to hope, which no one alone can create). Auerbach blows my mind. When I first heard the idea that everyone in your dream was you, that also blew my mind.

Margo LaPierre reviews my Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil) for PRISM International

Thanks very much to Ottawa poet Margo LaPierre for reviewing my Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) over at PRISM International! You can always order a copy from me if you are so inclined, by the way; shoot me at email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com / send $20 and I'll mail one within Canada / send $23 and I'll mail one to the US ; or you can order via the publisher direct (obviously). See LaPierre's review here. As she writes:

Life Sentence,
rob mclennan
Spuyten Duyvil, 2019

Review by Margo LaPierre 

Life Sentence, (the unusual punctuation is deliberate, you’ll see) is a poetry collection that begins quietly, with much purpose, and picks up speed as it goes along like a river wending its way through springtime. rob mclennan commences the book with a dedication to his father, which opens to a spare, image-rich account of his father ill with cancer: locked in his body, in silence, in hospital. Metaphors of the self as a flowing thing abound. We know that flows can weaken, dry up, or be disrupted:

Hand, white hand of rain. Biopsy, cures. Have yet to centre. What was not, derailed. Amend, deleted. Current. Disputed streams. Railing, spillway, creek. A sated, broadband. Record, disposition.

Life-flow, as it etches forward, can also accumulate, become torrential. We witness this in the trajectory of the collection. mclennan records his father’s illness, memories of his late mother, and his own experience of finding love and its progressions: becoming a husband, becoming a father:

Situational: two-fold. Become as we become, parents and unparented. A continuation, sequenced. My daughter, a small plastic duck. In earth rotation, heavens. Will to overcome.

mclennan’s language is deliberate, and thanks to his clever and controlled use of punctuation, the poems tell readers exactly how they would like to be read. Short sentences are structured in a way that suggests balance, an equivalence between asymmetric elements. Some words that you’d otherwise wing past gain new meaning. The result is an underlying sense of composure. As I read these poems, I had the sense of sitting surfside, listening to waves come in and out—the rhythm had that same sense of inhalation/exhalation, both evoking the basic function of the body and also the tidal nature of the planet itself. Wave in, wave out. Breath in, breath out. Connections between the body and natural terrain are drawn more explicitly throughout the book, but this structural parity creates a potent atmosphere that would have been near impossible to achieve through word choice alone. How does mclennan do this? Through distinctive use of punctuation, particularly the comma. For example:

Colon, semi-colon. Stop. Just stop. A sentence, shortened. This long sentence, long. Perilous, condensed. Where you have gone. The river’s slowness, lake. The slowness of these phrases. A most satisfying taste.

What do signs, maps, signals, latitudes, and in some cases, currents all have in common? They are signifiers, they refer to natural phenomena, natural terrain. Such is the case with language, and I get the sense that mclennan sees language as a physical representation of the body—one that is parallel; that never quite touches the body, reality, or experience, but runs alongside it, mapping it out. In the collection’s final notes, mclennan writes that he’s long been taken with bpNichol’s idea of a “poem as long as a life.” mclennan states that he prioritizes the process over narrative, but that nonetheless the contents of his poems are taken from moments in his own life. What we get is a textural account of an era of his life. Confessional poetry, this is not. It’s as though the language of mclennan’s life is as important as the life lived, and once again, there’s that one-to-one ratio that distinguishes this work. My favourite moments of the book were in the understated accounts of new love—the heightened, loving details work well under mclennan’s close-up, granular focus. 

          Speak, a river. Deepening. Construct a voice. What is a dream.   Salacious, taste. Ceramic. Porcelain, she reaching. 
          Claims. Baggage, format. Clear-eyed. Ovulatrix. Standard, in compulsion. 
                    Registry, conflates. We have been married, days. We list the age, require metric. Parlour, as an outburst. Stillness, leisure. Serious cakes. This plunge.

Life Sentence, is at once joyful, measured, contemplative, engaged. Readers living in Ottawa will enjoy the Bank Street poems (especially since the recent health crisis has restricted us from leisurely wandering down busy city streets). Cat-lovers like myself will enjoy the appearance of a polydactyl kitty. With this book, mclennan traces the fullness of a life, while rejoicing and grieving the blows and treasures of being given life, and also giving it. 

Chris Banks, Midlife Action Figure

New World

A ship arrives in the middle of a downtown city

intersection. Although there is no port, people

depart the wooden ship with family belongings

stuffed into suitcases, saying, “So this is the New

World. Who knew it would take this long to arrive?”
Men and women walk past them on sidewalks,

staring into phones, cursing some inner lack.

The newly disembarked hold hands, begin to sing

a hymn forbidden in the land of their ancestry.

All around them, skyscrapers reflect clouds, loom

above them to move along, or he will ticket them

for an unlawful assembly. Where are your permits?

Children hide in the long skirts of young mothers

caressing their golden hair. Was this the land they left

the old country to find? Their leaders urge caution.

Maybe they should reboard the ship for the night?

but the captain has pulled up the gangplank. The ship

is sailing away without them. Evening draws its veil

as a kettle of people tightens around the newcomers.

They begin to chant. Assimilate! Assimilate!

I’m fascinated by the poems in Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks’ fourth full-length poetry collection, Midlife Action Figure (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2019), a book that follows his Bonfires (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions/Junction Books, 2003), Winter Cranes (ECW Press, 2011) and The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory (ECW Press, 2017). The poems are densely thick and incredibly rich, akin, somewhat, to a lyric molasses in which a reader is caught up in an unexpected lyric flow. Perhaps molasses isn’t the right word, but the comparison suggests a thickness, and a poetry in which one can’t easily pull away from. Set in three numbered sections, his poems are big poems (although each averaging a page in length) wrestling with big ideas and big questions, including, as he writes in “Big Questions”: “Twenty years on, why keep / making art?”

As the title suggests, the collection explores that nebulous idea of “midlife,” although one that isn’t necessarily one fraught with anxiety or even resignation (although both are present, as threads, through), but more as a curiosity around and exploration of mortality. Consider, also, that (according to an interview Rob Taylor conducted with Banks for PRISM International, posted October 12, 2017) the original title for the manuscript was “The Book Of The Dead For Dummies.” In numerous poems, he offers a variety of specific questions and statements on writing and poetics, something he has done in previous works, opening the poem as much as a poetic as a sequence of expositions, from “Most days / writing a poem is like watching a pot waiting / to be filled.” and “This is an honest / poem, and even it is on the grift.” from “Honesty,” or “Someone’s handwritten / notes in the margins: Love this one! Huzzah!” from “Reading So-and-So’s Selected Poems in a Used Bookstore,” to “I wish I could tell / you I am the only one in this poem” from “Kintsugi.” Banks’ poems are a kind of lyric collage, each poem set as an accumulation of queries, statements and observations on writing, pop culture, family, society, the human disconnects that media and the internet furthers, the crisis of climate change, mortality and just about everything. Banks offers his thoughts and observations from the intimate to the spiritual to the quietly mundane, all of which wraps itself around the question of survival, and how we might navigate and exist in the world as responsible and healthy humans. How did we get here, and where are we going? How is it even possible to exist during these times? His poems offer an optimism, but one that has been battered around for some time, and one that begins to question itself. “Beauty rewrites its own code.” he writes, to open the poem “Simulation”: “The authentic / is another souvenir most people throw away.”

Crusade

No one wants the good china. Meet me

at the safe house. Pry up a few floorboards

and you are sure to find an old beer bottle.

Who wants my head on a platter? Pencil in

time for friends and enemies. The billet-doux

was lost in the move. Life is not packed

in Styrofoam. I’ll take a riot over the ho-hum.

Devastation over racketball. I will sign

your petition if you will sign mine. Change

should not require forms. My resentments

come in transcripts. Joy in hot pink neon.

Do you want the egg-salad or the gospel?

Own up to your hurts. My style is foreign

so the heart suffers. Obligations possess me

until I feel like a rolled-up tube of glue.

How did I get stuck in this meat locker?

At least, I have Dante and Beyoncé to keep

me company. Careers are scams. I am waiting

for the next great crusade. Let it be sharing

our inner lives. Tapestries of secrets. The

past declassified, and still parts omitted.

Who needs to be a prisoner of blue skies?

Ante up on hope, and I will double down

on happiness. Fly your banners. I give you

my assurance of a promised march over lands

full of payday loans, corporate retreats. Let me

put my armour on. This takes several years.

Aja Moore, hotwheel

Robert Duncan had something to say about psychosis but I have no one to text it to. If I have no one to text things to are they interesting? If the things I find interesting are really uninteresting, then what am I? Robert Duncan said you’re psychotic once everything in your life acquires meaning. Actually, he said, at that point you’re merely “seen as” psychotic, but I’m done pretending that the way we’re seen has no bearing on the way we are.

I want to text you about illness and poetry, neither of which I could live without, and which have now been inarguably linked by Duncan. But I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so I’ll speak for myself: the poet is the person for whom everything has meaning. It is either the poetry or the illness that imbues everything with meaning, I can’t tell anymore. (“I WANT TO TEXT YOU ABOUT ROBERT DUNCAN”)

I like the combined ease and urgency of Vancouver poet and editor Aja Moore’s debut poetry collection, hotwheel (Montreal QC: Metatron Press, 2018), a book of examination, theory and first-person exploration, from violence, grief, conjecture, harm and self-harm to an experimental framework that attempts to hold as much as possible. In the poem “UNEMPLOYABLE,” she writes what might either be a statement of poetics, or simply a deliberate red herring: “Aja / on the page is always on the page / for someone else.” She continues: “Even when / it doesn’t seem like it. Especially / so in that case. I want her to stop / pretending not to care but I also / want to stop caring.” In an interview conducted by Esther Chen and posted December 13, 2018 on the PRISM International website, Moore speaks to some of her process:

I don’t remember when I first started writing poetry, but I recently found some poems from elementary school I’d completely forgotten about. It wasn’t until maybe last summer that I felt like anything remotely valuable might come out of me.

What do you think caused that switch?

I think what changed my work was that I started to learn how to write with/from the body instead of against/despite it.

The poems in hotwheel manage a restless energy and a precision in a language comfortable in both academic theory and the shortform of texting. Moore’s poems are a flurry of movement, breathless rushes and short takes, combined to achieve a collection of smart and sharp poems. Moore writes on Sharon Olds, Rilke, Robert Duncan and Dodie Bellamy as well as exhaustion, violence, family and technology in a myriad of structures, from the extended, accumulating fragment, the straightforward lyric, the short sketch and the density of prose poems.

There is an openness to her poems, one that comes with a particular kind of fearlessness, allowing an edge, and almost a nervousness to exist underneath each piece (the anxiety I referenced earlier). Either way, part of the appeal of this wee collection is the variety of structures and purpose, as well as the assortment of seemingly random curiosities, blended into the bone of her lyric, which make me very eager to see where her work goes next. The opening poem, “AFTER I DEFINITELY CAN’T AFFORD TO STUDY W/ SHARON OLDS,” for example, moves from first-person narratives on theory to family history, loss and trauma, weaving multiple threads across the weight of ten pages, ending:

To see an inversion of my own

hopes like that    In an effort to get close to u

it seems    There is nothing I won’t

write about