my plans to participate in a National Poetry Month activity run by the Found Poetry Review are discussed in the following articles/blog entries:
Chaudiere Books Blog
Apt 613 site
Peter Simpson, "Breaking Poetry News" the Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, March 22, 2014 [can't find a link to the article
If you'd like to support this blog, you can donate via https://www.paypal.me/AmandaEarl
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
When Poets Write the Unspeakable
Honeymoon in Berlin - Tom Walmsley
with illustrations by Sandy McClelland
(Anvil Press, 2004)
I have been
enamoured with the writing of Tom Walmsley (& the man himself, frankly)
since I read his poetry collection What Happened (Book Thug, 2007)
last year. That book inspired me to write a long poem in five acts. I went on
to read & enjoy his novels, Shades (The Whole Story of Doctor Tin) (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), Kid Stuff: a novel (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Dog Eat Rat (Mansfield Press, 2009), and
more recently several of his plays.
What is consistent
about his work is the combination of raw honesty, minimalism, humour, vivid descriptions, a knife-edge's sharpness
& wit, & above all, passion. This passion is prevalent in Honeymoon in Berlin, which couples dark
desires with a fear or, perhaps a
realization would be more accurate to say, of death. What is it
that causes humans to go to extremes? The need to taste life perhaps? This book is full of ghosts. At any given
moment, someone is walking over our graves. Honeymoon in Berlin has been described as
dark. Duende is at work in this book, which sticks its tongue up Death's ass. Perversely perhaps, I see Honeymoon in Berlin as full of light, full of honesty, rather than the usual politesse & repression. A
hunger. A celebration of tiny crimes…
Yes, Loretta
I've done things in
darkness
drunk
the night swallowed
them up
& I showered
them off at sunrise.
Bloody Jack - Dennis Cooley (Turnstone Press, 1984), republished with additional poems & an introduction by Douglas Barbour (University of Alberta Press, 2002). [Note that I own the original, not the 2002 revision.]
Reading about the boxing in Kid Stuff reminded me of Dennis Cooley's "Bloody Jack,"
about John Krafchenko, a professional wrestler & desperado from Western
Canada.
This book defies genre, like many of my favourites. Bloody
Jack is an attempt to tell the unwritten story of a man who perhaps one
could say has been robbed of his own chance to tell his story, who couldn’t
read or write. "Blood Jack" continues Cooley's brilliant lyricism,
prevalent in all his works. One of the things I enjoy about Dennis Cooley is
his ability to embody other voices.
See, for example, The Bentleys (University of Alberta Press, 2006) where Cooley
renders the voices of Sinclair Ross' characters in As for Me and MyHouse (Renal & Hitchcock, 1941)
In the voice of Jack, Cooley's language is violent,
muscular, masculine: "you are the oil can/melts my rust." Poems give
a full picture of Jack, via his voice, an omniscient third, seemingly factual
newspaper articles, interviews & witness testimony, to his hanging, for
instance, & various people who knew
him.
This book is a precursor to Rob Winger's Muybridge's Horse (Nightwood Editions, 2007), which provides accounts of Muybridge from his friends, families &
associates. There's variation in style & tone, colloquialisms, formal
language in both books.
in his tangerine skin
we buried him
in mint condition
on his eyes
two georges
they shone like
hen's eyes
he inhaled the dark
bbbbgg bbggg
engorged it
like a badger
breathing
for blood
when we shovelled
him in
christ he was a
gorgeous man
the eyes were
breathing
& shining blood
Monday, March 17, 2014
My Writing Process - Blog Tour
Thanks to my pal, rob mclennan, for inviting me to do this. he writes about his writing process here.
1) What am I working on?
I'm working on a lot of things at the same time, but for the
purposes of this assignment, I will focus on one: a genre-blurry trilogy called
Trouble, Heaven & Paradise.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I don't even know other stuff in this genre. it's not one
genre. It's part poetry, part rock opera, part theatre, part who the fuck knows.
3) Why do I write what I do?
I'm always playing around. In this case, I had the pleasure
this winter of discovering the brilliant writing of Tom Walmsley, some of which
includes plays & a libretto. I've always been interested in the theatre. As
a youngster in university I took a few courses on the Theatre of the Absurd.
I
am also really fascinated by the work of Anne Carson & the way she mixes
genres. Her translations of Greek tragedy in An Oresteia are so poetic &
contemporary. This work mixes in the mythology of Eurydice & Orpheus with
the Bible.
4) How does your writing process work?
For part of this project, I edit using an electric guitar. Part
1 was a long poem written in 48 hours, responding to "What Happened,"
a poetry collection by Tom Walmsley while I listened to the music of Tom Waits.
I often write in a crazy quick way while listening to music.
It's always a matter of feeling an urgency to respond to
something that has affected me in some way. Could be a line or image from a
poem or a novel or a short story, a combination of sounds in a piece of
classical music, song lyrics, a painting or a sculpture, a tidbit of
conversation. I listen, I look around, I take it all in.
Next week's blog tour participants are
Rachel is an Ottawa-based poet whose work has appeared in
Canada, the United States and abroad. Currently, she enjoys writing from a
blanket-layered radiator beside a drafty window overlooking a quietly eventful
street.
Carol A. Stephen is a Carleton Place poet, shortlisted 2012
3rd place winner in Canadian Authors Association National Capital Writing
Contest,.authored of Above the Hum of Yellow Jackets, and Architectural
Variations.
Margento is a Romanian poet, performer, academic, and
translator who has performed and lectured in the US, SE Asia, Australia, and
Europe.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Anne Carson Leads Me Astray
Anne Carson - Nay Rather (The Cahier Series Number 21, Sylph
Editions, London, 2013) Text by Anne Carson with illustrations by Lanfranco Quadrio.
What I love about Anne Carson is her ability to lead me
astray and yet somehow, everything comes together. In this chapbook we move
from Homer to the the silences of translation when a target language isn't able
to cover a reality that exists in the source language to the voices heard by
Joan of Arc, to attempts to avoid narrative to Francis Bacon's painting of a
scream without painting the horror to Paul Celan.
All this in the first essay:
"Variations on the Right to Remain Silent," while on opposing pages
we have "By Chance the Cycladic People" an essay about a civilization from the
Neolitich Early Bronze Age where the order of the lines has been determined by
random number generation. The essay is another example of Carson's
modernization of myth or early human civilizations.
The second piece is
accompanied by drawings and goaches by Quadrio, an Italian artist
known for illustrations of myth. When reading these side-by-side essays, I found myself having to stop
with one train of thought & move to the other. A kind of disruption of the narrative,
which was apropos for the subject of "Variations."
In "Variations…" Carson talks about the meaning of
the word "cliché: "a French borrowing, past participle of the verb
clicher, a term from printing to mean 'to make a stereotype from a relief
printing surface.'" Since it is supposed to mimic the sound of the
printer's die striking metal, it is not translatable in English.
Carson is concerned with two kinds of silences: physical,
when parts of a manuscript have been destroyed, and metaphysical, when one
language cannot be rendered by another. I found it very moving when she
discussed Joan of Arc being forced to explain by her inquisitors where her
voices came from. The voices were not explainable in terms that made
theological sense to the judges. Joan did not speak Latin but Middle French and
so her words were often mistranslated, to her detriment. At the same time, Joan
rebelled against the narrative: "Light your fires."
Francis Bacon also raged against the cliché,
particularly, according to Carson, in his series of paintings of the pope
screaming. Carson points out that while he is a representational painter, he is
attempting to convey the facts differently: "By 'facts' he doesn't mean to
make a copy of the subject as a photograph would, but rather to create a
sensible form that will translate directly to your nervous system the same sensation
as the subject."
Bacon depicts
people screaming in a medium that cannot
transmit sound. Once more the evocation of silence. "There is a tendency
for story to slip into the space between any two figures or two marks on a
canvas. Bacon uses colour to silence this tendency." …"Bacon has
another term for this stopping: he calls it 'destroying clarity with clarity'.
Not just in his use of colour but in the whole strategy of his compositions, he
wants to make us see something we don't yet have eyes for, to hear something
that was never sounded."
The essay goes on to discuss the idea of violence in Bacon's
art, then the colour purple, which comes from the Greek porphura or purplefish.
Its ancient Greek name kalkhē derived a verb and a metaphor that is troublesome
to translate. The verb kalkhaienin, meaning "to make purple" also
conveys the idea of profound and troubled emotion. This caused difficulty for
the translation of Sophocles' Antigone by Friederich Hölderein who chose a
literal translation: "You seem to colour a reddish purple word, to die
your words red-purple."
His translation of the play made him a laughing
stock and he eventually had a nervous breakdown. This leads to Carson asking a question about
the relationship of madness to translation.
Her method of discussion, asking questions and then
providing evidence is a compelling and forceful way to make an argument. Bacon
threw paint at his paintings in the end as a gesture of rage. Carson refers to
these as free marks and connects them to Eve's putting a free mark on Adam's
apple.
"Maybe she was catastrophizing. Adam had just performed the
primordial act of naming, had taken the first step towards imposing on the
wide-open pointless meaningless directionless dementia of the real a set of clichés
that no one would ever dislodge, or want to dislodge -- they are our human
history, an edifice of thought, our answer to chaos. Eve's instinct was to bite
this answer in half."
The final section of the essay is devoted to a poem by
Ibykos, from 6th Century BC and Carsons seven translations of fragments using
only words from particular works: John Donne's Woman Constancy, Bertolt
Brecht's FBI file, page 47 of Beckett's Endgame with the phrase, "Nay
rather" used in all translations.
"In spring on the one hand" becomes
"In woman, on the one hand" [Donne]
"At a cocktail party attended by Communists, on the one
hand [Brecht's FBI file]
"In your kitchen, on the one hand" [p. 47 of
Beckett's Endgame]
"In the end, on the one hand, all those who sit behind
us at cash desks"
[Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch]
"At the excess fare window, on the one hand"
[stops and signs from the London Underground]
"In hot snacks, and appetizers, on the one hand"
[Manual of my new Emerson 1000 W microwave oven]
Anne Carson continues to be innovative with a firm
foundation of the antiquities and the classics behind her thinking and
innovations.
The second essay, on right-hand pages, "By Chance the
Cycladic People" is a kind of echo of the first essay, feels like a
translation, includes such objects as mirrors and stones. There's a stillness
to the behaviour of the Cycladic People that mirrors the silence, the stops,
the free marks of the Variations essay.
At the same time the poem concerns the
dying of a culture. In some ways, it feels as if Carson is still concerned with
the notion of undoing as she wrote about in Decreation, her response to the
work of Simone Weil. There are mentions of mirrors, handbags, honkytonk,
cumberbunds, frying pans, William S. Burroughs and Proust. There is plenty of
humour in this piece also. Anne Carson leads me astray. It bears repeating. How
I love to be lead astray.
Reading "Nay Rather" has once more whet my
appetite for Anne Carson and in particular: Decreation: Poetry. Essays. Opera (Vintage
Canada, 2006)and Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Vintage Books, First Vintage
Contemporaries Edition, 2000) I have
always been a fan of how she blurs the boundaries of genre and the way she
looks at history and culture with both the rationalist's eye and the poet's
eye.
A word too about this gorgeous chapbook by Sylph Editions
under their Cahier Series imprint. It is beautifully designed: 44 pages, 16
colour illustrations, the book is sewn and includes a dust jacket in fine
paper, most likely bamboo, but I'm hypothesizing or just dreaming. The Cahier
Series is a co-production of Sylph Editions and the Centre for Writers and
Translators at the American University of Paris. If I receive more royalties
from my nefarious writing shenanigans, I will purchase more from Sylph
Editions.
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