POET IN NEW YORK--GELLU NAUM--"ATHANOR"

Gellu Naum (1915 -- 2001) is one of the greatest European poets of 20th century.  He

started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with André Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. After returning to Romania in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career, riskily immune to the political agenda of the Communist regime. He reshaped surrealism by means of a mode-of-existence poetics that absorbed (often jocosely) erudite eastern and western references along with popular culture and the quotidian, thus managing to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions into a unique discourse, shamanistic and ironical at the same time. His verse contains varied infinities while staying mysteriously homogenous and enlightened by the pursuit of the same unmistaken path.

MARGENTO--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Thanks to poet Amanda Earl for inviting me to do this.  She writes about her own writing process here.

1) What am I working on?

MARGENTO: I am working on a poem already (re)written by other poets.  More explicitly, I am currently working on a topological poem mapping certain places by means of poems by poets who (in conventional terms) have never been to those particular places.  I rediscover America and describe it by means of poems from writers (that is, travelers) who never reached it or never suspected even existed.  In mathematical terms, I define a mapping from various ‘foreign’ corpora of poetry to my own ‘familiar’ spaces.  The ‘foreign’ will thus not only become ‘familiar’, it will actually prove itself to be the only possible way to experience, operate with, and translate the latter.  The topographical by means of the topological.  Coauthored with other poets (that is, translators).  There is no self but the other, which is for ourselves to discover through the others.  My Bucharest a Babel of bible bootleggers and babbling poets.

Apparently independently from that, but not really, I continue my work on the project titled the “graph poem” (graph as in network of nodes and edges) now at a more specifically academic level, together with Professor Diana Inkpen and a few of her graduate students in Computer Science at uOttawa doing research on and developing computational poetry machine learning and generation applications.

Also, I am curating the Poetries & Communities Project here, and working with people on a couple of continents on the third MARGENTO album. 

Last but not least, the premiere of amazing composer and singer Bogdan Bradu's rock opera I wrote the libretto for--Masca Lumii--is due later this year.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

M: It differs by the fact that it is openly and programmatically the same as the others.  And not (only) in the sense of Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing.  The problem is not being different or identical (no poem is the same with itself [just as nothing is the same with itself, since everything is a poem], and therefore, a poem that integrates poems as such is different from anything else anyway), the problem is how much and how representatively a poetry can absorb, integrate, and process (from) others.  Poetry nowadays must be an n-dimensional verse space, as its form and composition inevitably involve the links and commonalities it discovers, explores, and develops between ongoing poetries.  Its writing is a form of reading, and reading it is getting involved in its process of composition.  The map of the graph poem is the meaning of our world’s poetries, and that meaning is the generation of the graph poem. 

3) Why do I write what I do?

M: Are you kidding me?  Okay, well, maybe in certain respects, as Swift once put it, “for, what though his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full.”

4) How does your writing process work?

M: Whenever I get started I realize (I start hearing) a lot has already been going on and all I have to do is join the jam session and try and not embarrass the others.  The better I fit in—especially when doing my solos—the better I get to know them while making myself heard: that’s my way of being ‘original’, as a full time traveling translator.  And when I think I’m done, I discover (I start seeing) how things have already started to branch out across a wondrous new community of familiar voices: that’s my kind of ‘conformity’, sharing after-hours the form in which the others translate my own communal work.

Next week's blog tour participants are:

Felix Nicolau is the author of four collections of poetry, two novels, and five books of literary and communication theory: Homo Imprudens, 2006; Anticanonice (Anticanonicals), 2009; Codul lui Eminescu (Eminescu’s Code), 2010; and Estetica inumană: de la Postmodernism la Facebook (The Inhuman Aesthetics: from Postmodernism to Facebook), 2013; Fluturele-curcan: specii ameninţătoare (The Turkey-Butterfly: Dangerous Species), 2013. He is on the editorial boards of Poesis International, The Muse--an International Journal of Poetry, and Metaliteratura.

Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and a founding member of Calypso Editions. He’s published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, Stationary Landscapes and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation, Of Gentle Wolves. Along with MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu), he edited and translated a collection of Romanian poet Gellu Naum’s work entitled Athanor and Other Pohems. Martin spent 2009-10 on a Fulbright in Romania, studying contemporary Romanian poetry. Currently, he lives with his family in Philadelphia and is a doctoral candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers-Camden.

Raluca Tanasescu is a PhD student in Translation Studies at University of Ottawa and the translator of 11 volumes (fiction and non-fiction), as well as of many poetry selections. She is currently working on her doctoral research project titled Songs of Globalization: Trans/Inter-Cultural Patterns in North-American Poetry Translated into French and Romanian. 

GELLU NAUM LAUNCHES SOON IN NYC & PHILLY--translated & performed by MARGENTO & WOODSIDE

ADAM DICKINSON--THE POLYMERS--reviewed by MARGENTO

 

initially published on the MARGENTO website @ uOttawa HERE

Adam Dickinson--The Polymers--or the Poetry-Chemistry Continuum

Reading Adam Dickinson’s new book is quite a challenge.  The title sounds like a chemistry treatise, there is no contents at the beginning, and the interiors abound in chemical diagrams, symbols and illustrations, notes and lists, indexes and methods, etc.

Okay, says the intrigued reader, let’s start at the start—the first poem.  The disparate images seem to come from a refracted seascape filtered through a series of what could be a number of carefully hidden (sometimes ironical) literary allusions—“Hail from inside/ the albatross” (Baudelaire and/or Coleridge), “coral beds/ waving at the beaked whale’s/ mistakes” (Shakespeare and possibly Melville), “Hello from the zipped-up/ leatherback/ who shat bits of rope for a month” (Zeno’s tortoise paradox sarcastically combined with Sextus Empiricus’ snake-rope argument?)—and a progress from the inner-subjective—or what could be conventionally called lyric (“the inside of the albatross”)—to the exterior world of consumerist and popular culture.

The short sinewy lines have most of them two strong stresses across a variable number of syllables, an accentual pattern that may represent the symbol “H” for the hydrogen molecule the poem represents on the polyester diagram the whole section draws, also present in the title—“Hail”—as well as at the beginning of every sentence in the poem, all starting with “Hello.”  One also comes across “Halloween Hulk” but other than that, “h,” especially as the [ h ] or [ ɦ ] sound-denoting letter, is almost absent.  Lost again?

From the argument/epigraph—printed on a semi-transparent-paper so that the two paragraphs can be read and seen through at the same time on both pages, although never as truly contiguous, since they are in fact printed each of them on a different side (and therefore somehow working as a Moebius strip)—we find out that plastic is “an organizing principle (a poetics)” for the “macromolecular arrangement of people and waste in geopolitical space,” and are thus presented with the metaphor of “social polymers,” patterns of our culture and politics.

And in a good Language and/or conceptualist tradition, such patterns are to be dug out of and explored through the language.  One learns, therefore, from the “Materials and Methods” section at the end of the book, that “Hail” is a “partial list” of “disintegrated greetings.”  Still, Dickinson not only disintegrates common formulations (is that really all he does there?) but also deconstructs literary/cultural commonplaces, in this case the opening traditional salutation/apostrophe of the classic epic—the Greek “Sing, O goddess” or, say, the Anglo-Saxon “Hwaet.”

Each of the poems in the section (and similarly in the following sections) correspond to a molecule on the polyester diagram (“Hail” for instance being the hydrogen one at the top of the central hexagon), but not in a predictable order—as the second poem for instance, is the last but one towards the right end of the chain of molecules, another hydrogen developed as “Halter Top (Translating Translating a Polyester).”  But the order of the poem-molecules is far from being the only element that renders the whole enterprise multifaceted and comically confusing.  The bracketed part of the title is, of course, a poetics in nuce of the book in its entirety, therefore speaking of a (molecular) sequence of chemical-cultural diagrams translated into letter (lettrist?) symbolism and then into poems.

Still, from the ‘explanatory’ section at the end of the book (in itself a funny, captivating poem) one finds out that the lines of the poem are actually all anagrams of the letters making up the name of the substance at stake—“polyethylene terephthalate”—hence, a, e, h, l, n, o, p, r, t, y.  The outcomes are fascinating, as the ‘game’ ranges from Mother-Goose-like sing-song lines and tongue twisters, “Let the python plot the thorn/ Let the hornet paper the tree” to surrealist ecopoetic riffs, “Nylon antelope threaten the Tylenol people,” to a baffling (al)chemical, geopolitical, and digital-age restaging of the tree-of-knowledge scene:

Her teeth apply to the planetary apathy.
They are polar, they are throttle,
the error apparent
to the hyperreal
apple

with, among other things, a dart thrown at the multinational computer company in the last line.   The composition principle and the resulting baroque-surreal imagery work here (and not only here) towards, of course, a parody of Christian Bök’s Eunoia (in its turn a parody in so many respects), but while the latter’s main allegiance may be with Oulipo, Dickinson is adept at the magic philosophy of Pataphysics, which he fuses in his own fashion with biosemiotics, new media, and industrial chemistry or—when for instance reading another author’s text and counting the letters with most occurrences, then treating them as chemical symbols and drawing the corresponding substance diagrams—not pataphysical but “patachemical” lettrism and cabalism.

Actually, in a recent essay on Kenneth Goldsmith (J. Mark Smith, ed., Time in Time. Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North-American Avant-Gardism, 1963–2008, McGill-Queen’s U Press, 2013), he describes Goldsmith as “a kind of environmental scientist” that through his writing/recording techniques “illuminate[s] the membranes and structures through which information from and about the environment” (135, my emphasis) is processed.

It seems to me that if in the statement above we read the “structures” as polymers, we actually have a remarkably accurate assessment of Dickinson’s own poetics.  Moreover, if to that we add the proposition in the same essay to consider “the link between poetry that imagines itself as science (pataphysics) and science that imagines itself as poetry (biosemiotics)” (ibidem), we most likely obtain the most genuine key to the multiple layers of meaning in Polymers.  As a matter of fact, the typical pataphysical facetiousness and sarcastic humor are present in the very presentation on the back cover where we are announced this is “an extraordinary science project performed at the nexus of chemistry and poetry” (added emphasis).  This “science project” really combines poetry imagining itself as science and science imagining itself as poetry, since the “protocols” followed in writing the first poem (“Hang-ups”) in the “Polyethylene” section are: “Hiding behind humor can be dangerous applause in the hands of an addict.”

Maybe indeed, what “hides behind the humor” is a radical warning regarding the pitfalls of conformity in all walks of life, science and ecocriticism included (for not accounting for subjectivity, and the implicit scientific realism, respectively).  The only risk is for the reader who is even more skeptical than that to see in Dickinson’s pataphysical copious playfulness just the ‘joke(s)’ and, ultimately, an art-for-art’s-sake kind of accomplishment, since the criticism of everything can be seen from the other side (of the Moebius strip) as the critique of nothing.

But the poet does not flinch, and the stakes go higher and higher as he dauntlessly keeps adding new dictions, new puns, new facets, and, what is probably his strongest trump, ever shifting angles.  In one of the strongest pieces in the collection, “Chemgrass,” a fast-forwarded cartoon-style sex scene crossbreeds domestic “doing it” with home decor and surrealist vegetal-animal-parts and clothing and (heretically rendered) theology (and of course media and sports and politics) and what not in a deafening language blender (with a blown up diction) that will not (be) stop(ped) until the all-gulping poetic chemical grass (or “pot”?) is fully brewed:

… We shag all the flies
in the ripped-up scouting reports
from the dead-ball era.  Sunburns calisthenic
elbows and knees, exorcising exercise
with the double-stolen gnosis
of Clement of Alexandria, who declared
that for wedding performed on shag carpet,
the benediction remains in the dirt…

And so the sarabande goes on, reaching and then leaving behind fractal lines (oops, I almost said modular… ars poeticas)—“I field birdseed”—as the posthuman poetic catalyst consistently eschews any single-minded political critique: the “carpetbagging sentimentalists” commandeer the spot on the forehead needed for… faking.  It is not the ‘message’ or the attitude (of an “us” gradually obliterated anyway), but the configurations and maps of “geopolitical spaces” of waste(d) language.

Dickinson’s is therefore a fierce challenge, whereby, in spite of the apparent playfulness and exuberance, verse is actually confronted with (scientifically speaking) certain draconically stinted prospects.  Our age’s poetry thus becomes a huge mimesis and an ‘against-nature’ automaton at the same time, the most democratically inclusive manipulation orchestrated in ineffective elitist ways, an n-dimensional joke, vulgar without being popular, arcane without being revelatory.

But only a poet with an incredible vitality can make that compulsively apparent, one that, in a recent interview, has (paradoxically?) stated, that poetry is more relevant than ever.

                                                                                                             —MARGENTO


[Adam Dickinson. The Polymers. Toronto, ON: Anansi, 2013]

ADRIE KUSSEROW--REFUGE--reviewed by margento

(Initially published on the uOttawa website "MARGENTO" here)

Adrie Kusserow--Refuge--Travel Lyricism Traveling Between Cultures

Challenging political clichés, clashing voices, and employing chameleonic speakers—“No one wants to challenge your story,/ you who never should have left Burma” outrageously says one of them to an émigré (who in her turn actually outwits a system ready to assimilate her with an obtuse if not downright derogatory generosity)—Adrie Kusserow’s latest collection speaks in a both complex and enticing fashion of Africa and Asia, war and the aftermath, traveling and immigrating, and the reshaping of the familial in a globalized world of enmeshed yet infinitely specific locales.

While going through this book, one is impressed with two complementary features—the remarkable variety and, at the same time, the pervading persistence of certain themes and motifs.  “Mud,” for instance, is one of the latter, a recurrent, strong and complex presence in the poems—“he [Arok Deng, a Sudanese hiding from the Arabs in the branches of a tree] shinnied down, scooping out a mud pit with his hands/ sliding into it like a snake” reads the opening poem (“Skull Trees, South Sudan”), a similar image being later on used in a much less threatening context for what happened to the speaker’s son playing in the mud in Vermont—“cold mud sucking his foot into its mouth” (“Mud (Vermont/South Sudan)”) while her daughter gets to know the world “through April’s black mud” in a poem that typically travels between the two places in the US and Africa, while staying urgently familial.  “Mud” also conjures compelling images from the traditional, familial, and political life of South Sudanese communities, as the speaker’s husband’s desperate attempts to save a boy from the cholera decimating a village are put on hold by “tracks large as elephants lying on their sides.”

Other poems fail where “Mud” succeeds though—such as “Borders,” in which the daughter jabbing the son “hard in the ribs” inspires in the speaker an unconvincing repetitive series of cause-effect pairings in which the family scene looks disproportionately irrelevant compared to the (inter/trans)continental one: “[her] anger spilling red down her face and chest.// And it happens again,/ whereby war, […]/ whereby the suffering of Kenya begets Uganda,/ begets my husband/ begets me, begets Ana, begets her brother…// Later in the mudroom, getting ready for school/ I see Will kick our tiny old mutt.”

Still, the latter is an exception, and after just a couple of pages, a totally recovered speaker resumes bombarding the reader with powerful images and figures, as the opening of a secondary school for girls (again, in) a Sudan described as a “post-war nursing home” occasions grim reflections on the women “stirring and tending/ […] their daily cauldrons of meat and blood,/ the war still raw inside them,” and as the ubiquitous mud is equated with being devoured and then birthed again by the foreign land—“whole jaws of road gaping open,/ van rebirthing through mud hole after hole.”

Here, actually, and even more so, in “Milk” and “Young West Meets My East (India)” Kusserow powerfully and convincingly combines the foreign political and cultural, with the most private and familial.  In the former she both stages and suppresses the worries and sometimes even deepest fears about her son and her husband against a Sudanese refugee camp backdrop, where while “Will on my lap, [is] trying to nurse between bumps” with his mother’s hands symbolically protecting him like “a helmet to his bobbing skull,” the locals witness the humanitarian convoys as well as the tragedies of war or the weather; and where she labors behind her “dogged Dutchman” “he afraid of nothing, really, not even his death/ me afraid of everything really, most of all his death.”  Kusserow’s poems are once in a while pierced by such sudden pangs of fear and vulnerability, yet it is their pertinent verisimilitude and confessional genuineness that ensure the credibility of the unrestrained assertions of vitality—and, yes, happiness!—that follow, a tone so rare in our jaded contemporary poetics: “Will’s nursing again […]/ swelling like a tick/ and though I don’t want to love/ […]/ the lush wetlands of our lives/ […]// the fat claw of my heart rises up,/ fertile, lucky, random/ pulsing and hissing its victory song.”

Besides the confessional-testimonial-political tune, Kusserow masterfully plays three other scores in the book—portrayals, allegories, and travel poems in which the speaker (at least apparently) assumes an omniscient narrator’s voice.

All of the above are of course intertwined, as one would expect things to be in a coherent collection; they are all political, to start with, (but then, well, isn’t all poetry political?), particularly in the sense that being deeply familiar with African realities and at the same time keeping a sharp eye on American life (also as in the life of African and Asian immigrants to the US and its myriad of cultural and political implications), the poet is able to drop every now and then brief but acutely perceptive bits of social-cultural critique while mainly focusing on a particular character, event, or image.  Kusserow is in this respected one of the best contemporary illustrations of Simon Cooke’s recent critical assessments regarding cultural self-reflexivity as “a component of, rather than a substitute for, engagement with the other.” (Traveller’s Tales of Wonder, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p 36)

In fact, not only are these forms and perspectives intertwined, but like in other aspects of Kusserow’s poetry, they are so in the most unexpected and ingenious (and therefore relevant) ways.  In one of the portrayal poems, for instance, “Dinka Bible,” whose epigraph is a reenactment of the empty tomb scene in the Gospels, now in an African context, a Sudanese boy (relevant gender translation of the myrrh-bearers) who finds his parents’ home burnt to the ground, when asked by “two figures in white” (again, relevantly ironic transposition of the angels into [white-coat wearing and/or racially white] relief workers) why he is weeping, replies “[T]hey have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.”  But unlike the biblical scene, the figures in white remain silent.

In the poem proper, the “lost boy” already has an American host mother who, when powdered doughnuts are offered to the congregation after the church service, “wipes the sugar off his mouth,/ marking him as her own.”  Some “fat ladies smelling like diapers [noticing he’s sweating heavily…] pat his damp skull” making him catapult “out of the land of good intentions/ and throw up outside.”  As is typical of Kusserow’s poetics, the portrayal and the funny-cynical and ridiculous-sad story of Achak’s new life in America equally involves flashes of the quotidian that are so much the more (culturally) pungent since taken through the eyes of a foreigner.

But the poet saves best for the last.  The host mother’s coming outside to check on the vomiting boy triggers in the latter a stunning insight into (some of) the muzungus’ (white people’s) relationship with the landscape, the God of the Gospels, and the other.  As the poem goes full circle and back to the image in the epigraph, the white woman is perceived as typically missing the mystery of the boy’s otherness, along with two other huge (‘familiar’) mysteries, the one of the resurrection, and of the nature around her: maybe even the stone that once rolled away from the door of the holy sepulcher actually just tried to escape the blank eye of certain onlookers…

And he knew how lonely Mary must have felt
when she came upon Jesus’ empty tomb,
this pockmarked country, cold as moon,
the stones rolled back from the muzungu’s eyes,
the black hole everywhere.

In the second genre, her characters are God, the Buddha, and even Mother Theresa, always “looking down” (from heaven) on a Yoga class, on lonely and tormented people still “instinctively opening their mouths/ toward sky” “like small birds,” or on an orphanage in Calcutta.  Just as the portrayals and the travel poems say unexpectedly relevant things about the familiar while focusing on the (cultural, racial, and topographical) other, in these poems the grim or ‘trivial’ reality is both minutely examined and placed in a surprising perspective as the heavenly observers find themselves in the most phantasmagoric situations.  In “Hunger Sutras,” for instance, both God and Buddha look down on the earth from “the hospital for sick, endangered, and arrested gods.”

In another poem, God has spent 300 years in solitary and is now taken to the lethal injection chamber.  When the omniscient “He” comically asks the guardian what happened, she replies (note the relevant gender markers) that “the New Age arrived, the Old Testament stamped out.”  When he is allowed one last look on “the whirling cacophony” of the Earth, he spots a yoga class where “they were all women” which “was no surprise,” given that all women “did was bitch bitch bitch/ toward the end of His rule.”  A shrewd and complex satire, with a humor of rather the absurdist variety, and, of course, harsh (post)feminist criticism of long-expired male-centered mysticism.  The keenest irony though comes at the end of the poem where, right before dying, finally humanized (not through the mystery of incarnation, but by being… turned on) by the fascinating spectacle of the women’s shifting postures and undogmatic religiousness, God begins “to unfurl,” thus escaping his rigid authoritativeness and embracing at last (his?) creation.

Yet, the manifold irony brings about more than just that—what is more impressive than the spectacle God watches, is the very spectacle of God watching, his amazement at the  “sacrotropic” “sea plants” women are, the drama of his own reactions and reflections, as followed by the truly omniscient sensibility of the poet.  The architecture of the satire thus allows Kusserow to indulge in a cosmic visionarism refused nowadays to any ‘orthodox’ Dante or Milton, and the reward for her shrewdness is access to a poetic beauty that most contemporary poetry does not even dream of:

…His mouth would sag when they began to pray,
slow and fluid as underwater ballet,
their bodies like tendrils curling up and out,
deep sea vines reaching, uncurling like fiddleheads in unison.

“No one told Him they would look so graceful” reads a line before the above quoted excerpt.  No one, but the poet who simply has the guts to do it—and just did.
Last but not least, in the third class of poems, Kusserow masterfully describes exotic locales that in the progress of the poem become the stage for multi-leveled cultural interactions.  In “Beneath the Sky, the Longing (Thimphu, Bhutan),” the “lust for the West [that] huddles like fog” is obliquely reciprocated by the “schools of ghostly expats” who cannot helping coming back to the same “density of longing,” but what the locals and Westerners share is also paradoxically what separates them, the “hard kernel of desire where the bulky psyche chips its tooth.”

In “To Market, to Market (Dharamsala, India, Tibetan Government in Exile),” the Himalayan boys turn “the switch of authenticity ‘on’” for the Western girls studying Buddhism, ready to deliver in an exchange in which it is hard to be sure exactly which of the parties is the commodified one, since the girls themselves are also “ready to fling the cramped purse of ‘the self’/ onto the street and give themselves to everything.”  The contemporary condition—as described by Susan Sontag in At the Same Time and by James Buzard as the “meanwhile problem” (both analyzed in Simon Cooke’s above quoted book, 53-54)—is the very substance of such poetry.  As the American girls get home with the “opiate” of their exotic ‘spiritual’ souvenirs, the boys in Dharamsala dream of their own myths (most likely of immigration and success).  The picture is ironical, but not only, as contemporaneity (the complexity of which is rendered, paradoxically, by the time difference as well) involves, along with the teenagers connected across continents through commodification and, therefore, miscommunication, vicariously living in a delusive elsewhere, the contrapuntally simultaneous and elemental image of the Dalai Lama that “rises to meditate at 3 A.M.”

In probably the most accomplished poem in this third category, “Christmas Eve, Kampala, Uganda,” the sordid atmosphere of the god-forsaken celebrating “compost city” brings HIV infected soldiers, abusive husbands, western pop music and muzungus “working off their Western guilt” all together under an anti-post-romantic and postcolonial hungover moon, “creamy and subdued,” inspiring not a poet’s ethereal vision but a drunken man’s masturbation.  Still this all ends with a ceremonial invocation, an almost mystical effusion—and just as in “Milk” we have encountered a direct assertion of optimism and joy, here we have a vibrant invocation infused with praise and prayer, ecstatic and enthusiastic in the etymological sense of the world (‘filled with/thoroughly experiencing the sacred’), again so rare nowadays.  Kusserow’s speakers have actually been in hell, and therefore can uniquely sing paradisiacal chants as well.

The great advantage of such poetry is that while delving into the grisly grimness, chronic dereliction, extreme dangers, and sometimes overwhelming horrors of our contemporary world (conventionally and quotidianly [as the poet puts it somewhere else, on “this glossy CNN planet”] always out there, and afar), it probes and expresses a genuineness that will also afford it a ‘pure’ solemnity otherwise virtually impossible in mainstream lyric poetry.  What one encounters in this verse is posthuman humanity and postpoetic lyricism and hymnalism:

…and the drunken man
sitting in a corner
working his cock into a frenzy
as his groans stretch wide with defeat
into some warm swatch
of the moon’s sweet milk.

Oh holy tenderness of this mute misty planet,
bless the fragile, harried nests
the tired and hungry build.

                                                                                          --MARGENTO

[Adrie Kusserow. Refuge. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2013]

José Antonio Rodríguez--BACKLIT HOUR

The Poem Listening To the Community and Speaking with the Voice of Memory

(initially published on the UOttawa website MARGENTO here)

In the opening of Backlit Hour, José Antonio Rodríguez writes an ars poetica, specifically a poem about writing a poem—not any—but that particular poem itself.  The self-reflexivity is not meant here to express postmodernist skepticism and detachment, but quite on the contrary, to voice some of the deepest concerns of the poet and, to quote the title of another poem, his true “allegiances” (family history and communion, the immigrant’s condition, and community’s indelible stories—“I’ve never met the granddaughters,/ but how do you forget stories like those”).  Moreover, the poet follows the poem together with the reader as a performance presented ‘live’ before our eyes—“Anyway, the poem begins with wanting the juicy peaches/ but moves into the way they bruised so easily, how they fell [etc]”—, a work-in-progress.  But again, this does not play out (only) as a demonstration of the inconsistency and ‘unsacredness’ of poetry, which would be old news, but it also (re)defines the poem as a place and state of mind connecting us to “the quiet,” to those beyond ourselves who need to be heard (and who, while being heard within and by the poem, get a voice).  Therefore a poem-performance that rather listens than speaks.

Rodríguez is not afraid of recycling rich traditional (Anglo-American) literary motifs as he actually manages to render them so fresh that an unsuspecting reader may even miss the reference and still enjoy these accomplished poems nevertheless.  In the first section, dedicated to the childhood and early school years, a poem tells the story of a selection of presentations for a science fair (while the title is shrewdly reversed as “Fair Science”) and the speaker remembers coming up with a drawing of a blue whale whose belly the kid would fill with all sort of (impressive) data related to the creature.  But the boy keeps erasing and redrawing the outline trying to get more and more info in till the paper starts to flake off and the sound it thus makes therefore becomes more evocative of the mammal’s actual life than the biological data.  The dialectic of whiteness/erasure and drawing/remapping articulates an apt metaphor for the alternatives (or cycles) of inclusion and minority (or why not, Whitmanesque) ‘untranslatability’ attitudes both on the part of the outsider and the system—the boy is for instance aware that his “drawing” into the activity is “something/ to shore me form the playground/ of ruined homes/ where children shoulder an anger”—while of course it also ‘draws’ not only on the tearing paper but also on Moby Dick and its numinous white (paper) mask(s),  as well as Melville’s encyclopedic and cross-genre inclusiveness, now reinterpreted in a (self)ironical manner: “As if everything worth knowing could be/ chaptered into a bound page.”  The irony is not only literary, but, given the word choice—“chaptered”—political, just as the color of the whale symbolic of the ‘blues’ of somebody lost in the new world ocean, “[t]hrumming/ [their] song to find the other in the dark.”

A more subtle palimpsest is “Figs,” where D.H. Lawrence’s explicitly erotic metaphor is rewritten into an account of sexually coming of age.  Or so the reader would think, up to a point, and starting actually from the very first line which could be very easily read as sexually explicit, charged as it is with the common periphrastic and urgent syncopated syntax—“She told me to do it, said”—but in fact it is not, as it goes on with—“it would look better in the school photo.”  The story of the teacher getting the speaker to take out his undershirt for the school photo is indeed galvanized by an emerging sexual awareness (“I’ll hold it until after school,/ she said, her finger around,// that which had hugged my body”), and the Freudian reference to the mother coming after that would total make sense in the context.  Only that it is not just a passing reference meant to reinforce the erotic crescendo, as Rodriguez actually chooses to stick one more time to the familial and the political.  The long tradition of the fig as an erotic fruit (Lawrence himself draws on Graeco-Roman traditions) is now politically deconstructed becoming “the fruit my mother loved, the fruit/ she never held in her hand// because it wasn’t hers, she said.”

Rodriguez subtly equates the (again, Anglo) literary tradition with a monopoly of the metropolis even over erotica, to which the marginal speaker opposes the family and the community (“we,” “ourselves,” etc) that would paradoxically be dismembered if remembered in the system’s cultural code.  Thus the magic spell of the alluring teacher is cast away when the young “I” (re)discovers the “we” that would be entrapped in an eroticism of domination and registration: “[…] stolen form ourselves/ only to be re-membered into something/ worthy of a camera, all smiles and naked necks.”  All of a sudden, the deceitfully erotic first line of the poem reads, on second thought, more credibly as actually the master’s orders…

The second section seems to consist of most likely older poems, since the voice is not as strong as in the first one anymore, and the purpose far from clear.  Memories from childhood are now interspersed with surreal images, some of them mysterious—like the hen dragging the TV between its legs in “Tethered” or the “throbbing classroom” with its “shivering windows” in “Starving”—others just puzzling or even irrelevant, as the “stars I have stored in my underwear” of a boy who is apparently past the age of wetting the bed.  The mother is evoked in almost all of the poems, but there is hardly any portrayal or any eye-catching detail—except for the “beads of damp dirt pooled// in the crook of your elbow like remnants of a rosary” (“Ant Farm”)—and she is far from triggering the powerful multilayered discourse in the first section.
The sequence is all of a sudden interrupted by the strong gay confession of “Ache of Pupils” where the surreal finally falls into place as it backs up the blurred images and the tense reticence of the narrator shocked by his own outburst.  Within the section, it radiates like an oasis of very good writing, reminding one of Rodríguez’s real potential:

The splinters of the plywood dig into

my fingers until I unhook the latch and scurry,
whisper an apology that I hope reaches
him who stands silent somewhere back there.
Rushing through a hallway with doors half open,

television images flashing, I conjure
an image of light bouncing off clouds,
how it must overwhelm the surface of things,
almost bleach them out of particularity.

When I step out, sunlight floods my pupils
that, for a second, ache.

In the third section, the deconstruction of Anglo-American symbols continue, with sometimes a shift from the literary to the historically-political.  The iconic image of the minuteman becomes a patrol officer cynically pursuing illegal immigrants across the Arizona desert, and Mount Rushmore is seen as a symbol of marginalization for a speaker obtusely labeled as “Ethnic,” and whose “only currency here [is] silence.” 

Unfortunately, again, the voice is weaker and significantly less convincing than in the first section, the surreal and introspective effects simply seem mislaid in the context—“his [the minuteman’s] arm a threatening reach,/ hand splayed under a night/ that has turned its face today/ […] all that his mind won’t hold/ won’t utter in the light/ of a star that is also the sun”)—and the bombastic ironies misfire—“all I can think of is the half-million tons/ of rock blasted off [Mount Rushmore] by dynamite—a love/ so overwhelming it broke a mountain.”
Some of the ‘nature’ poems and pastels conjure once in a while passing lines or images of certain interest—“[I] wonder if the song/ of this scorched world comes to them [jackrabbits] as a roar or as a chorus,” “All of them [sunflowers] like halos/ without saints to weigh them down,” etc.—which are most likely accomplished exercises (when not loosely versified everyday jottings) from a poet’s notebook, but rarely anything more than that.

Although it contains only four poems, the fourth section may make up for the shortcomings in the second and the third.  The major themes of the book are revisited here in a strong voice—coming of age as an immigrant in a foreign language, powerful memories from the family’s past, coping with one’s irrepressibly emerging homosexuality and, to a lesser extent than in the first section, the life of the community (within another community).

In “Cows and Bonnie Tyler,” fore instance, the speaker starts out to write something inspired by a “poem about cows” by Matthew Dickman, but something on the car radio—Bonnie Tyler’s “throaty voice/ howling through that orchestra” the way Rodríguez’s voice becomes strongly audible in spite of the American poem he promised to rewrite—makes him remember how he would listen to Tyler’s music in his teenage without getting much of the lyrics and how he watched a video on an “old man’s” TV through the latter’s window, as the man was “[s]ipping beer—up to his lips, then down, then up—/ like an oil well.”  The political critique is there deftly intertwined with both popular culture as well as vivid memories from a young age.
Enter community.  And the local environment!  A masterful shift of focus allows the speaker to zoom out and come up with the overwhelming image of the region in the wake of April’s tornadoes (an ironic echo of Eliot’s “cruelest month”?):

Out by the road is the aftermath of April’s tornadoes
felling a small town.  Would you judge me if I said
the trees pained me the most?
Their twisted limbs damaged past repair.
The pile of lumber—what used to be a house
of already dead wood—making a mockery of them.
And among the debris, the cows mowing away.

[José Antonio Rodríguez. Backlit Hour. Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2013]

                                                                                          —MARGENTO

AMANDA EARL--THE SYMBIOTIC NATURE OF COMMUNITY & POETRY--on MARGENTO @ UOTTAWA

 Photo (c) Camille Martin

(This essay was initially published on the Poetries & Communities Project curated by MARGENTO at UOttawa here)

Community:  a social unit with common values OR a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment. (definitions paraphrased/cribbed from Wikipedia).

I have several communities: my apartment building; Chinatown, the neighbourhood in which I live; the city of Ottawa; its literary community; Canada; North America; the world; and within all those places, I am also in that literary community.

I imagine a series of globes nesting inside one another like Russian dolls. For me community is symbiotic: its members contribute to one another’s well-being and being in the community contributes to the well-being of its members. This is starting to sound like a palindrome or a Möbius strip.

For the purposes of this note, let’s consider the idea of community as the general public within my city. I am a member of the public, just as all poets are.

In this note, I don’t choose to address in detail a very important aspect of community because I’ve dealt with it elsewhere: that of people helping one another in times of crisis and how such actions bring a community closer together. In 2009 I became very ill. While I was in hospital and near death, members of Ottawa’s close-knit and caring literary community came to my and my husband’s assistance. For more on that experience, please refer to this post entitled “Community” in the “On Writing” series curated by rob mclennan.

How would you define the relationship between (your) poetry and (or poetry in general; as it does or should converge with) communities/the community?

I listen and I look. Wherever I go I am always in receiver mode. My poetry comes from the intersection between what I see and hear around me, interactions with others and my imagination, experiences, memory and knowledge of other literary works, music, art and other cultural works. I filter all this through my brain and somehow neurons fire up. Fortunately I don’t set the page on fire.

I read at readings which the general public can attend. It’s true that not everyone is interested in poetry or has a reason to go to a reading, just as not all of us are interested in hockey. A former lover of mine once said, “if everyone loved oatmeal, there would be a worldwide shortage of oatmeal.”

Audiences who have come to my readings or other readings I have attended are there because they are interested in my work or my fellow writers’ work; because they are friends or family, are also poets reading at the open mic or are enthusiasts of whatever type of literature is being featured. It is lovely when people come up to me after a reading to let me know that they were affected in some way by what I read. At one reading at Café Nostalgica at the University of Ottawa several years ago, a young student told me that my reading had inspired him to pick up a pen and write while I was reading. I thought this was a high compliment. Engaging with audience members is an essential part of my practice.

I run a site called Bywords.ca, which publishes poetry monthly by current and former Ottawa residents, students and workers. The main idea of the site is to foster and nurture community, to give back to the general public at large and to promote Ottawa writers in general and to publish poets. These writers and the visitors to the site are also part of my community, as are the selectors and other members of the Bywords.ca team.

One of the key features of the site is a calendar of literary and spoken word events which take place in Canada’s National Capital Region. Event organizers send me information about their readings, signings, slams, festivals, workshops etc and I post them on the calendar and also send out notices via social media (Twitter (@bywordsdotca) and FaceBook).

My mission is to ensure that nobody who is interested in Ottawa’s literary events misses an event because they don’t know about it. We have been very fortunate to have been funded for the last eleven years by the City of Ottawa so that we can pay contributing poets, musicians and artists. The City also funds other cultural organizations and individual artists to help ensure that the artistic community thrives and is able to provide the public with an enriched and culturally diverse experience. Without such a commitment it would be difficult for such organizations to offer services to the general public.

We also hold at least one fundraising activity a year for local causes, including Cornerstone Housing for Women, which provides emergency housing and support to downtown women and the AIDS/HIV Walk for Life Ottawa, which raises funds for several local organizations that provide care and support to people with AIDS/HIV and their families. I believe that it is one of the roles of any organization working within a community to give back to its residents since we are all part of the community. Poets can be homeless or afflicted with various health issues and financial difficulties too. We are all connected. We need one another.

In addition to the above activities, I run AngelHousePress, which publishes ragged edges, raw talent and rebels. The publishing activity takes the form of limited edition chapbooks, and two on-line magazines: Experiment-O.com and NationalPoetryMonth.ca. We also host an essay series on AngelHousePress.com. These essays are written by working contemporary writers and artists and serve to aid in the continuation of dialogue about creativity, literature and art. I am interested in inspiring dialogue between creative people, just as much as I am in inspiring responses from the reading public. I think both types of response are equally valid and interesting.

I consider AngelHousePress to be another avenue for fostering and nurturing community. Creative work from all over the world is showcased via AngelHouse and accessible to anyone who might be captivated by it. The Internet to me has shrank the world and enlarged the world: the former because now anyone in the world is able to connect with anyone else of similar interest and proclivities; the latter because the World Wide Web is a gargantuan digital repository much like a dump where one can find both treasures and junk. This is why it is helpful to have curators to find the treasure and alert people to it. I consider myself to be a curator.

I also have a literary blog where I let people know about my work, but also tell them about literaria I find interesting, whether it be poetry collections or chapbooks or online magazines or podcasts or even going a wee bit outside the range of literature and including music. I do this because I am always looking for connection, collaboration opportunities and intimacy with like-minded people… to create a community of kindreds.

How do collective energies find their voice in your verse and how do you think your poems (should) reach communal interests/relevance?

I like Margaret Atwood’s answer to Peter Gzowski in a 1968 CBC interview just after she’d won the Governor General’s Award when he asked her what her poems were about. She said that poetry, like any art form, is a form of expression, and that no one asked an artist what his painting was about. So I don’t think about specific interests or relevance, but we’re all human. My poems tend to have an emotional resonance that, all being well, is something readers can empathize with and relate to.

And faced with the onslaught of cases of social injustice, violence, poverty, natural disaster and disease, the illnesses and deaths of those I hold dear, I am as affected as anyone by tragedy and I find that there’s an echo of this  in my work. I always hope that what I write resonates with someone, a fellow lonely person or a whimsical person, someone who can identify with my work. I am a misfit in conventional society, as many of us are. Writing and reading are ways in which I try to find and connect with my fellow misfits. I should point out that many of my long poems or poem series are written in the voice of a historical or imaginary character. I think that such a form can have universal resonance and create empathy in a reader.

Sometimes I will write a poem in support of a cause, such as “The Enpipe Line: 70,000+ kilometres of poetry written in resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal,” (Creekstone Press, March, 2012) or “Air Out/Air In: 21 Poets for the Guatemala Stove Project” (Phafours, 2011).

At various rallies on Parliament Hill, I have encountered a number of my fellow poets protesting or supporting a cause. I believe that poets can be and are often engaged members of a community, as is this case, here in Ottawa. Whether they choose to refer directly to this in their poetry or whether such activism plays a more subtle role is up to them. My priority is always to serve the poem and do whatever is necessary to achieve what is called for within the work.

In this age of globalization and transnational poetries (Jahan Ramazani’s term, but not only) what do you think is the ‘community’ the poet addresses, if any, and what do you think are or may be the premises for emerging virtual and/or trans-national readerships (the “coming community” of theory again—G. Agamben—if you want)?

Here I’d like to give a specific example of a global community I belong to: the visual poetry community. We find out about one another through on-line and print magazines and blogs that publish our work, through FaceBook groups, through sites like Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter where people share links and post work from various visual poets. Through AngelHousePress I have published visual poets from Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, England, Canada, the USA and probably other places. Visual poetry lends itself very well to globalization because it works outside of the context of languages in that you don’t have to understand a particular language to appreciate the work as a piece of art or a form of communication.

When discussing the community the poet addresses, I have to refer to the main thesis of this note: that poets are part of the community. At least that’s how I see myself. I’m writing for myself but also for other misfits and unconventional kindreds. I’m writing for anyone who has ever felt an emotion. This doesn’t change because poetry is able to be read or heard on line throughout the world. In fact, it only makes me more determined to publish online in order to share my work as widely as possible and to connect with other like-minded readers and writers. The question is mainly one of dissemination. I am grateful to translators who make it possible for me to read the works of poets who are writing in languages other than English.

Is there anything nowadays such as communities/schools of poets, in any way relevant to the life of communities around the poets?

Academia continues to attract poets to its programs.  I have a number of poetry pals who have worked toward their MFAs in Creative Writing in Canada of late. This is fairly new in Canada, but  has been a big part of poetry in the USA. I’m not sure if other countries have such programs. The general public consists of students and family of students and their friends. Do parents encourage their children to take MFAs in Creative Writing? Can students afford to do so without having to incur debts the size of a mortgage before they graduate? These programs lead to more poetry books available to be read by the general public and more instructors to teach the general public’s children. It seems like a healthy contribution to me, except for the debt.

I think in Canada there are certain schools, but it isn’t cut in stone. For example, I would say that Cobourg poet, Stuart Ross, a long-time former resident of Toronto, is a mentor for contemporary surrealism and the small press in Canada. He offers poetry boot camps, manuscript editing and has recently published a book called Our Days in Vaudeville through Mansfield Press, that is a collaboration with 29 other poets, which is a terrific example of reaching out to others in the literary community. He was a writer-in-residence at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario a few years ago and mentored several emerging writers, including Michael E. Casteels, who is a small press owner through his chapbook press, Puddles of Sky, in Kingston.

In Ottawa, rob mclennan is an active promoter and publisher of poetry with his small press above/ground press which publishes chapbooks and broadsides he distributes en masse throughout the world. He also curates a series of on line magazines and is co-publisher of Chaudiere Books, with his wife, fellow poet, Christine McNair. Through these presses and publications, he has introduced numerous writers from around the world to each other and has put Ottawa on the map as a happening literary centre. His 12 or 20 questions series with writers and small press publishers is a great initiative that allows readers to learn about the writers and their works in greater detail.

He has also offered workshops and if he’s the mentor for any particular school, I’d call it the contemporary poetry playbox. He introduces budding poets to the works of contemporary poets they might never have heard of and encourages them to play and experiment. I myself took numerous workshops from him and have learned of/been inspired by the works of Nathanël, Erín Moure, Dennis Cooley, Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Cole Swensen, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Kate Greenstreet and more, thanks to rob’s efforts at fostering community.

What are the “actual” or fictional/utopian/dystopic communities in your poetry/in poetries you enjoy or are familiar with?

I’m fascinated with the idea of fictional/utopian and dystopic communities. My poetry lives in the world of my whacky imagination. And I can’t help but be influenced by the creative works of others, both living and dead.

When I first began to draft this piece, I was working on (and probably still am) a poetry manuscript which centres around a woman’s belief that she is Saint Ursula. I am fascinated with saints and historical figures, but not so much with what actually happened to them. The fun for me is in extrapolation. The work concerns a homeless woman who has visions. Through it, I’d like to explore the issues of homelessness here in Ottawa and also chronic pain, depression, schizophrenia etc. When I was in hospital in 2009, I had ICU psychosis, causing terrifying delusions that I believed to be real. It made me worry for those who have to experience such delusions in their daily lives. I’ve written of hell based on Dante’s Inferno via these delusions and the pain I endured during my health crisis.

I also write fiction and my characters are generally bad-asses, who don’t really fit in very well with convention. I have written a few stories set in the period leading up to and after an apocalypse where characters are fighting to survive in draconian circumstances. I find it satisfying to write out my fears and as a reader, I find dystopic texts compelling. I guess it’s a bit like being a rubber-necker at an accident: we don’t want to look at scenes of grisly death, but we can’t tear our eyes away. Sometimes it helps to understand that we are all suffering; there’s a camaraderie in that. These tales also serve as morality plays for what might happen if we continue to a) use up all the resources in our environment; b) continue to place a low priority on those less fortunate…

Wouldn’t it be fun to write within the perspective of a Utopian community! My ideal world entails free love, the end to heteronormative monogamy as the dominant culture, the disappearance of gender binaries, solutions to homelessness, poverty, disease and war. In addition I would like a fully funded arts and culture program, and an endless supply of strong coffee and profiteroles please.

Is your poetry/are your poems a community?  In what way(s)?

I typically write long poems and poem series. I think each one of them is a community. Sometimes they are populated with invented or historical characters; other times they are populated with soundscapes (“Sessions from the Dream House Area,” excerpts of which can be found on 17 Seconds Magazine here), metal textures (Me, Medusa, a chapbook published on line by the UK Press, the Red Ceilings Press). Sometimes they interact quite directly with the work of other poets (Ghazals Against the Gradual Demise: chapbook 1 – “Sex First and Then A Sandwich” is in response to Jim Harrison’s ghazals; “The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman” is in response to Robert Kroetsch’s “The Sad Phoenician.”

Could you give us a few considerations on/tentative predictions regarding the future involvement of poetry in the life of communities, or the other way round: the impact of future possible or virtual communities on poetry and their depiction in poetry?

I think we’ll need more curators to guide us in the increasing miasma that is the Internet. As independent bookstores, which used to be the primary hub for readings and author signings, close, we will need other ways to promote and foster a community of readers. In Ottawa in the last few years, we’ve seen the closure of several bookstores, including Collected Works and Mother Tongue Books. Both of which held numerous readings in their stores and sold poetry by local poets.

Sites like GoodReads.com and Canada’s the 49thShelf.com, OpenBookOntario, Lemonhound.com, help to maintain a literary community and inspire readers to purchase books, either on line or in print. There are a number of excellent literary journals on line: DitchPoetry.com, Numero Cinq (a warm place on a cruel web), the Volta, The Conversant, Penn Sound and Jacket2. As postal service is reduced, it is probably true that printed journals will cease to exist, which saddens me immeasurably, but these online hubs, for want of a better term, offer a lot of possibilities that printed journals cannot offer.

I tried to get into Second Life, the virtual reality / role playing game which also seems to have poetry readings somehow. It wasn’t for me, but perhaps others will find this sort of thing a help in fostering community.

I really like the idea of poetry events being broadcast live. The Griffin Poetry Prize for example, always streams the shortlisted readers. I wish the sound quality and video quality was better, but I think that’s coming.

Another cool thing is the book trailer where authors read excerpts from their books which are translated into short films. I think this is exciting, but it has to include an element of feedback, of direct access to the writer, either through social media or e-mail. I know many authors balk at the idea of such direct contact with readers, but for those who enjoy it, we are in a time of great opportunity for interaction between fans and creators. Take a look at the Moving Poems site, which has a huge list of poetry book trailers.

Brick Books, a Canadian publisher, has a slew of audio recordings of its poets and is at the forefront of ensuring all kinds of readers have access to poetry for free through these podcasts.

Two festivals, the Ottawa International Writers Festival and VERSeFest work with local schools to offer programs where authors are invited to schools to read and talk with children. The Ottawa Public Library and local writers organizations also offer similar activities, such as writing contests for young people. These programs seem to be increasing rather than diminishing.

The League of Canadian Poets in collaboration with an advertising company is publishing poems on public buses in a program called “Poetry In Transit.” I have read great poems by poets such as Dionne Brand, P.K. Page and Robert Kroetsch whilst standing on a crowded #95 en route home after a long day in a Byward Market café, penning my own poems and hanging out with fellow poets. Life is rough!

Community radio stations such as Carleton University’s CKCU and the University of Ottawa’s CHUO have programs which feature the arts, particularly poetry on shows such as Friday Special Blend with Susan Johnson, Literary Landscapes with Pearl Pirie, Dave Currie, Kathryn Hunt and Neil Wilson, and Click Here with Mitchell Caplan. The hosts interview poets and publishers on their programs. The CBC through shows such as Writers and Company with Eleanor Wachtel and The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, also broadcast interviews and highlights literary work, including, on rare occasions, poetry. You can listen to these programs live or as podcasts later on.

I believe all of the above initiatives and activities bring poetry to the community and community to poets. You don’t have to live in the city where a reading is taking place in order to enjoy the work of the poet in the poet’s own voice, for example. And with the help of good curators, this information can be passed on to those new to poetry.

Not to discount the reading as a great opportunity as well. Ottawa is a city full of readings of poetry and fiction. While there’s a tendency for such readings to attract the same old die-hard enthusiasts, there are often at least one or two Ottawa newbies who found out about the reading through a friend or some online resource, such as Bywords.ca.


‘Poetry’?  What kind of poetry, if any?  How does poetry look in that (any?) picture (of the future), if in any way present?  And speaking of virtual, what do you think is or could be the communal relevance of digital/electronic/new media poetry?  Is Marjorie Perloff right when she states in Unoriginal Genius that writing the new century poem (concerning itself not with inventio but with the processing and absorption of the foreign itself, and therefore typically proceeding by [inter/hypertextual] sampling and appropriation] is no easier than it ever was, just different?

I think poetry looks very much the same in many ways with books and chapbooks and online journals but as I said, print journals may go the way of the dodo. I think digital poetry combined with animation will be of interest to some people as it is now and perhaps more so. I can even imagine poetry book trailers beginning a film in a theatre, much like animations do today.

I’m hoping that poetry pioneers such as Christian Bök who combines science with poetry will continue to thrive. I hope that there will be more hybrids and fewer genre labels on types of creativity. I hope that the audience for poetry or for these hybrids will increase.

Do we want to see the end of copyright? How does plunderverse as described by Gregory Betts and other forms of appropriation fit in to what is legal or acceptable when it comes to publishing? Will publishers be willing to risk lawsuits and fines if they publish text recycled from others?

I’d like to be able to play with whatever is available. The Internet has made it easier to cut and paste text. I think of Jonathan Ball who licensed his poetry under Creative Commons so that others would be able to take the text and do what they like with it, including creating new forms of art. Take a look at Gary Barwin’s reversals of parts of Ball’s book, “Clockfire.”

I think that being able to work with existing texts or music or art opens up the possibility for creativity, so I’m all for it, provided people give credit where credit is due. The Internet has made it possible for people from all over the world to contact one another. This has also paved the way for collaborative poetry projects.
The Finnish visual poet Satu Kaikkonen has few blogs where she invites contributors from all over the world to participate. See Time for a Vispo.

Or, even beyond virtual community, in Mark Surman and Darren Wershler-Henry’s terms, what is the place of poetry in the “common space” and in the age of the “power of the collective,” and what kind of poetry could that be?

I hope that poets continue to question the dogma and propaganda that is prevalent in society, thanks to increasing Big Brother presence, censorship and double speak of government and large corporations. The poet is the canary in the coal mine, n’est-ce-pas? I am hoping that grassroots collectives such as the Occupy Movement, Idle No More and other activist groups continue to grow and gain support and that artists and writers who question the dogma are able to thrive, but I worry that Conservative intolerance for unconventional lifestyles, non mainstream thinking and the power and corruption of right-wing forces will keep free thinkers underground. The fact that we have to be concerned with governments monitoring our social media and Internet interactions is very scary to me. It shows there is a need now more than ever to make art and to find ingenious ways to disseminate it, as Diderot did during the creation of L’Encylopédie when he published entries that challenged the status quo under mundane items such as “Souliers” [shoes].

And, if, as a well-known playwright twitted a few months ago and then a Washington Post article elaborated on, “poetry is dead”—which is also the name of an excellent Vancouver based poetry magazine—is there any (chance for a) post-history post-poetry out there, or in here, in your verse?

T.W. Adorno wrote that “After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric;”yet we have an impulse to bear witness. I think this is more important than ever today. The Serbian poet Vasko Popa was one of the writers who utilized symbolism and allegory in his work to personalize and portray the horrors of war at a time when literal renderings were censored. Poetry is an ideal and subtle means of articulating the dangers of acceptance of the status quo and a way to question the language of propaganda. I think for this reason alone and there are many other reasons to add, it will survive because it is needed by the reading public to help us translate and convey emotion, tragedy, comedy and life in all its myriad and complicated facets. To create art is to survive and to rebel against convention.

I think poetry will continue to exist, change and adapt as it has always done, and to serve an audience. I have no intention of stopping writing poetry or whatever hybrid I choose to create, even if I had a choice in the matter.  As Mark Twain once said, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

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Amanda Earl is an Ottawa poet, publisher and pornographer. She defends your right to express your creativity in whatever way you please. She is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the (fallen) angel of AngelHousePress. Her poetry has been published both on line and in print in America, Australia, Canada, England, France and Ireland. Her visual poetry has been exhibited in Russia and Windsor, Ontario. Her most recent poetry chapbook, Sex First & Then A Sandwich is available from above/ground press. For more information, please visit AmandaEarl.com or talk to her on Twitter @KikiFolle.