Showing posts with label Sawako Nakayasu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sawako Nakayasu. Show all posts

Sunday, December 29, 2024

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”)


Sunday, January 22, 2023

Sawako Nakayasu, Pink Waves

 

4

it was a wave all along

a passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apology

i sat with a friend the loss of her child

sliding between the heat of now and surrender

and then somebody holds your wild you

closer to the range

the specs of a body don’t reveal what it means, so which
body do you want to wear today?

the extent that we need another dollar

I’ve been an admirer of the work of poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu for some time, ever since discovering her remarkable Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) [see my review of such here]. Since then, I’ve followed her work through her subsequent Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], Yi Sang: Selected Works, edited by Don Mee Choi (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and The Ants (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. Set in three lettered section-sequences—“A,” “B” and “A’”—lyrics of her latest, Pink Waves (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022), exist in a kind of rush, one that nearly overwhelms through a wash or wave of sequenced text; a sequence of lyric examinations that come up to the end of each poem and retreat, working back up to the beginning of a further and lengthier crest. The first sequence, for example, offers an accumulation of eight poems, each opening returning to the beginning, with the line “it was a wave all along.” Each piece in sequence builds upon that singular line as a kind of mantra, rhythmically following repeating variations of what had come prior and adding, akin to a childhood memory game. As the fourth poem of the opening sequence begins: “it was a wave all along // a passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apology // i sat with a friend and the loss of her child // sliding between the heat of now and surrender [.]” The repetitions, something rife throughout her work to date, provides not only a series of rippling echoes throughout, but allows for the ability to incorporate variety without reducing, and perhaps even expanding, the echo. The fifth poem, in turn, opens:

it was a wave all along

a passing moment reveals itself to have cued the long apology

the extent that we need another dollar

it’s haptic; it’s your membrane

sliding between the heat of now and surrender

and then somebody holds your wild you

which parts available for naming

atop a sharp manicured nail

Perhaps everything about her work can be described as through water: from waves, eddys and ripples. Throughout Pink Waves, Nakayasu’s poems explore boundaries both physical and temporal, as well as the edges of grief, as the press release offers: “Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveforms by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak.” Given its response structure, there is something fascinating to Nakayasu exploring a work as an ongoing part of a previous conversation, responding not only to particular works, but a work that is itself a response to another. Through this, she allows this work a direct lineage of response, as she offers in her “NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS” at the end of the collection:

Pink Waves is a structured improvisation: the form, the sentence, the microtranslation, the language from the sources, are the structure with which I improvised in writing, on stage, with others. It is my attempt to be true to the thickness as I move through time and space, in cross-sections of wave upon wave. Some forms of otherness are more specific to my own history, some arrive through the discourse of others. All these spreading differences.

There is something curious in the way her poems, at times, actually stretch across the boundary between the left and right page, bridging the centre and to the other side in a way I’ve scarcely seen beyond the works of a variety of poets experimenting with visual and concrete—bpNichol, for example, who worked very deliberately with the boundaries of the printed page through his work with Coach House. As well, each of Nakayasu’s sequences are structured via eight numbered parts. Toronto poet Stephen Cain has long been known for working sequences as decalogues, but it was Nichol, again, who worked in sequences with eight as his base number over the established ten. And wasn’t it Sting who sang that love is the seventh wave, pushing that every seventh wave from the ocean is stronger than the rest? For Nakayasu, it would seem, her waves are accumulative, offering a build-up that brings an eighth to include all that had come prior; the wave with the most and final power. As the fourth poem in the third sequence offers:

it was a wave, one snapped, who blistered

passing moment reveals itself to have extinguished the
occasional light

that turned stranger into child

sliding between ceremony

and languagelight

world without cold

the specs of a body

and the extent to which it delivers

Monday, August 30, 2021

Colin Smith, Permanent Carnival Time

In a different world, my labour at the car wash would have me as a member of IU 670 – for making cars, IU 440 – for retail clerkhood, IU 660 – for making books and magazines and newspapers happen, IU 450 – for making anarchic art and visions available to a public, IU 620 – for making radio, IU 560 – for being a poet, IU 630. “Professional entertainer.”

 

Dear
Saint
Rike:
 

 

You must change their life!

 

Dismember
CentreVenture.

 

SmashTheDishes.

 

Because if we don’t resist
or “riot”, we’ll wind up with
no civil rights whatsoever.
 

 

Revolution as absolute
hankering. (“Necessities for the Whole Hog”)

From Winnipeg-based poet Colin Smith comes Permanent Carnival Time (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2021), furthering his exploration of civil discourse, neoliberal capitalism and chronic pain amid Kootenay School of Writing-infused poetics. Permanent Carnival Time engages with the prairies, including the historic Winnipeg General Strike, writing a wry engagement of language gymnastic and ruckus humour. “Labour is entitled to all it creates.” he writes, as part of the second poem, “Necessities for the Whole Hog.” Sparking asides, leaps and fact-checks, Smith’s lengthy poetic calls out culture and capitalism on their nonsense, deflection and outright lies, composing a lyric out of compost and into a caustic balm against capitalism’s ongoing damage. “Money with more civil rights than you.” he writes, as part of “Folly Suite”: “Luckless bustard.”

Smith is the author of 8x8x7 (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2008), as well as the out-of-print Multiple Poses (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1997) and Carbonated Bippies! (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2012), both of which were included as part of the collection Multiple Bippies (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2014) [see my review of such here]. As part of his 2016 Touch the Donkey interview, he spoke of the ongoing mutability of his writing, and his interest in refusing to remain static:

Six cans of Kokanee, half a dozen Mooseheads. Part contrivance, part intuition. While I mostly work in free verse, I don’t ever want to be exclusive about it.  

Considerations of aesthetic fit are the endless trump here, and should be. Finding the best strategy and vocabulary for each poem. The world is lumbered with more than enough limitations without me adding to them! I always thought that one of poetry’s better angels (or angles) was that it could help make our considerations of the world larger (I still believe this). So, no language need be excluded, no tactic need be forbidden.  

Although, having just issued a version of “everything is permitted” with that last sentence, I’ll now qualify it by saying that it’s morally noxious to maim the afflicted — one should just flat-out not do it. 

The linguistic cargo of a sonnet can be very different from a LangPo word-salad approach. If you want to, and you have the technical moxie to get away with it, why not do both? Why not head for other possibilities as well?

Permanent Carnival Time is structured into nine extended poem-sections, including “Folly Suite,” a suite of nine shorter poems. For each poem-section, Smith’s scale is expansive, referencing a slate of high stakes, calling out fascism, punitive legislation, capitalism, pollution and even references to the Highland Clearances, from “Human whites ratch. // Jacobites / stomped (Clearances / to follow).” of “Fiddlesticks,” the second poem of the “Folly Suite,” to the fifth poem, “Twaddle,” that offers: “If the Highland Clearances hadn’t happened / these poems would have been written in Gaelic.” Through a gymnastic collage, Smith offers both wry commentary and straightforward notation, connecting capitalism’s insistence on itself beyond all else, including human sustainability. As he writes as part of “Transmutable,” “Something you can’t talk your way out of. / A booing economy.”

There aren’t that many poetry collections that write on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, so it is interesting that Smith also offers Vancouver poet Rob Manery’s It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 2001) in his notes at the end as a recommended title for further reading. On his part, Smith writes: “30,000 Winnipeg workers withdraw / their permission, walk away / from the marketplace. The Hello Girls / say their goodbyes numerous / and numinous. /// A scant 40 minutes / to pass a clampdown / amendment through Parliament. /// Austerity / follies.” (“Necessities for the Whole Hog”). In certain ways, Smith’s work has a structural echo of a poet such as American poet Sawako Nakayasu [see my review of her latest here], except with a very different set of ways through which he arrives. As part of a writing prompt Nakayasu wrote for Woodland Pattern not long ago, she offered:

1. Choose an object or concept. Let’s call this thing “X.”

2. Tell yourself, in some fashion, that every poem you write from now on is going to be “about X” or “an X poem” or features an “X.”

3. Write poems in this manner for as long as you can.

There are ways in which one could see Smith’s expansive and accumulated poems following a similar trajectory, but through a single, extended piece over Nakayasu’s book-length project. As well, where Smith contrasts from others of the loose assemblage of Kootenay School of Writers poets of the past twenty-plus years is through that ability to write around an idea or a subject, pulling it apart from every perspective, and tossing in a collage of sly commentary, jokey phrases and gymnastic, as he calls it, “word-salad.” Unlike such poets as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri or Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Smith appears to originate with meaning, utilizing language as the means through which he plays, displays and explores that meaning, over a kind of composition that begins with language or sound. As well, Smith might utilize theory, but as a part of a larger structure that remains focused the ways through which people are affected by such policies, pollutions and punditries. His foundation of anti-capitalist ethos remains, and remains strong, but the poem “Necessities for the Whole Hog” begins with the history of the Winnipeg General Strike; the poem “Essaying Pain” speaks to his ongoing experience with chronic pain, etcetera. One could say that his Kootenay School of Writing poetics is also one intertwined with a deep empathy (and a curt tongue), writing out his anxieties for the possibility of human sustainability, down to a deeply personal level. As he writes as part of “Essaying Pain”:

What seems to be missing from “the literature”
is description of chronic pain or permanent affliction
that shows in any meaningful way

what, what, what, what, what
a deep-dish and ineluctable tedium it is.
 

Roaring at the sky, do you
expect a reply?

All the good temper of a rhino.