JoAnna Novak : on Une Couronne Cassée Pour Ma Sœur

 

 

 

 

 

Village cats, sunning on the stones in front of Église Saint-Thyrse; billboards for verveine, driving the N88 towards Le Puy; the beach in Saint Victoire sur Loire (where the café’s moules et frites are stunningly good) or the spun-sugar Baby Yoda sculpture at the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie in Yssingeaux. So much about the month I spent in and around Bas-en-Basset, France over the summer of 2023 crosses my mind every day. Yet mostly what I feel when I think about those days is the wise gaze of a woodcut portrait of a Mother St. John Fontbonne, borne Jeanne Fontbonne, in whose childhood home I had the privilege of staying. Fontbonne was, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “one tough nun,” though what she accomplished and endured as a religious in eighteenth and nineteenth century France puts any Infinite Jest subplot to shame. Saved from the guillotine by the capture of Robespierre? Disappointed not to have been able to serve as a martyr for God? Oui et oui.

These sonnets are loosely inspired by the life of Fontbonne, her relationship to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet as well as to her blood sister. I drafted them in blurry pencil with the  shutters open and rooftop cats across the rue in clear view. They were always sonnets, but they became a crown in revision—a broken crown, really, because they cared little for metrical rules and they reflect, probably, my poor handling of French. C’est la vie.

          

 

 

 

JoAnna Novak latest book Domestirexia: Poems was published by Soft Skull in 2024. She is the author of the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood. Novak’s short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is also the author of the novel I Must Have You and three additional books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.

Shelagh Rowan-Legg : Notes from the Field: finding poetry and community in cyberspace

 

 

 

 

I was very active in the poetry and literary scene in Toronto in the late 1990s and early 2000s: I was editor of Word Literary Calendar, a sometime host of the Art Bar Reading Series, ran my own reading series at Dark City, and had a small chapbook press. All the while, I also was writing poetry and getting published, and feeling fairly happy with my work. But then another path took me in a somewhat different direction - well, a very different direction, as I got a degree in film studies. I still read poetry, but the time between writing poems grew from a few days, to a few weeks, to months. Maybe I lost what used to inspire me. Maybe professional stagnation and personal disappointments cast a shadow over that part of my creativity. Maybe I was tuning in more with academic writing, and a newfound semi-career as a film critic and journalist. I set poetry aside, not knowing if it would come back.

I also spent nearly a decade living outside of Canada. When I moved back in 2018, I ended up in Montreal. It took some time to find my footing, and almost as soon as I did, the pandemic and lockdown were upon us. Perhaps as a result of now being more settled, or the strangeness of a situation not encountered in my lifetime: poetry started to itch at the back of my head and heart. There were no in-person options in 2020 and 2021, but I was still in touch with my friend and colleague George Murray. One of Canada’s best poets, he was also one who (rightly) advocated that poetry could be taught; that one could aim to write poetry just for oneself, for one’s friends and community, or with the aim to be published; whatever your reason, it was a skill to develop. He had also started teaching poetry classes online.

A long absence, I decided, needed a fresh start; and even someone who had had modest success, could benefit from an approach that would waken that long dormant writing muscle. This seemed the way to bring poetry back into my life: as one of George’s class is titled, to build from scratch. In the past, relying almost solely on inspiration might have been too much of a crutch. Often setting specific boundaries and rules can bring out the poem, as much as waiting for the muse.

It didn’t take long for me, as with many others, to become used to meeting via video chat in those lockdown days. And what George’s class offered was a way to rediscover why I was drawn to the poetic form. George designed his teaching methods to a class of students with varying levels of experience: by starting with what might be thought of as basic forms, we learned to recognize and appreciate how a poem is constructed from the proverbial ground up, to discover older forms that we might like to utilize (or not), and how our own voices would quickly become apparent, whether we were writing a sonnet, a villanelle, a haiku, or free verse.

But it was also about understanding words and their formation, how poetry uses line breaks and sounds. Again, for those who have been around poetry a long time, this might seem obvious, but there is something to be said about looking at it with fresh eyes. George’s guidance brought out each student’s individual voice within the forms and methods he had us try. Even if it was a form or method we might not have enjoyed or found worked with our style or subject, this learning process not only helped me find my way back to poetry, but helped me understand why it remains the style of writing that is closest to my heart.

I might argue that it’s the form most closely connected to the human soul - we understand and often speak in metaphor, in simile, in using words and images connected to what we’re talking about rather than exactly as it is. Poetry is the essence of expression. And in a short-form world of social media and bite-size interpretations, it remains even more essential.

And it might be cliché, but it’s true what exercising a muscle does. I found myself writing down quotes I read, or facts I learned, in the back of my notebook, information that would later find its way into a poem. George also started a bi-weekly writing group, where he would give us a series of prompts. We could use the prompts as an assist to write a poem, or we could work on our own. Even the act of sitting at my desk, having a group of people on my laptop screen, all of us silently working away and then sharing what we’ve written, became a comfort and a positive motivation. Would being in the same  room be better? Possibly, but these are now my poetry people, and if this is how we meet, it was and is working for me. My poetry is stronger than it ever was, and I find myself more engaged and enthusiastic about the art, and the work, of poetry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that poetry is helping me survive these very strange days we are experiencing.

I find that poetry asks us to focus and give time in a way that our minds and souls, even more so now in a world that feels increasingly louder. And what the online world has given me, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, is a greater sense of community. With colleagues as close as Ottawa, or as far away as interior British Columbia, with a group whose work is diverse in style and theme and subject, I’ve never felt closer to poetry and poets than I do now. Especially with a group who accept my often macabre metaphors (this is what more than a decade of studying horror and speculative fiction films will do to you), my work is helped not only from George’s classes, but from this diverse group, who make me see my own poetry in new ways, offering constructive criticism and encouragement. With a site on which we share our poems, ask for and receive advice on publishing markets, further education, or news and ideas about poetry, it seems that this online world has come to fit this stage of my poetry life.

In some ways there is no exact substitute for being together in person, but there is space and time for where and how we can find each other and connect online.

To learn about Walk the Line Poetry, visit https://walk-the-line.square.site/home

 

 

 

 

 

Shelagh Rowan-Legg (she/they) is a writer and filmmaker. Originally from Toronto, her poetry and short stories have been published in The Windsor Review, Taddle Creek, New Poetry, Carousel, and numerous other magazines. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world, and she is a Contributing Editor at ScreenAnarchy. She lives in Montreal. Find her at shelaghrowanlegg.com and on Bluesky, @bonnequin.bsky.social.

Drew McEwan : On And Absurd Cycle

 

 

 

This poem was written by manually copying out every eight words in Jeffery Schwartz’s OCD self-help classic Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviour. From this list, I only eliminated words and lineated phrasings, without adding words or changing order of appearance in the original text. Originally published in 1996, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviour is the first, and still one of the best-selling, books for self-treatment and public understanding of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The book utilizes a bio-medical approach that relies on now largely discredited theory of biochemical imbalance and describes obsessive-compulsiveness as a “disease” and a “tenacious enemy.”

This paragraph begins the afterword of my above/ground chapbook, And Absurd Cycle. The poem (an excerpt from a longer work) operates as a highly constrained exploration of the subject matter of obsessive-compulsiveness by one with lived experience. The rules were important for writing this poem, and I didn’t want to give myself much leeway to shift meanings. The constraint was the message. The constraint, too, was a reading strategy of imprinting lived experience into a text.

This poem operates as a poetic manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive checking sets of eight times in order to avert logical and illogical potential harms.

In moments of heightened anxiety, I check the oven burners by eights, check in on my pets to make sure they’re still alive and count to eight, I check the door’s locked eight times. After this though, doubts and fears remain. It’s not rare for me to return home (if there is time to return) or worry to the point of complete distraction (if there isn’t time to return).

In writing this poem, I applied obsessive-checking as a text selection strategy. Through application of a pathologized routine as a writing strategy, the poem draws out a text of multilayered meditation on obsessive-compulsiveness. With the language drawn from an early and primary OCD self-help source, the content of the poem is constrained by a program meant to eradicate the experience. Yet, with an application of an obsessive-compulsive process to this text, the form speaks back to the content and moments of a conflicted subjectivity emerge.

Obsessive-compulsive experience is clinically described as “ego-dystonic.” This means that in an experience one has a doubled sense of self – both the self that enacts anxieties and/or routines, but also a sense of self that understands these to be irrational or counter to one’s wants and sense of self. Rather than providing relief, the ego-dystonic experience actually heightens fear, anxiety, and a loss of autonomy as one feels unable to match thoughts and behaviours with one’s self-aligned sense of reason. The tension in this poem, between form and content, at times becomes contradictory and conflicted, but also creates surprising moments of intersection and resonance.

This poem is an example in what I have elsewhere described as obsessive-compulsive oulipo.

Although poetics and debilitating anxiety are quite different, their form has strong overlaps that become obvious when moving between these areas of experience. The obsessive-compulsive’s life is a constrained experiment in (seemingly) arbitrary rules.

This poem embraces the mad, insane, crazy organization of a life.

To intensely focus on text selection might itself be pathological.

This poem is an exercise in the paradoxical imprecision of intense focus.

One of the cruel paradoxes of obsessive-compulsiveness is that intense focus and repeated checking actually cognitively limit one’s memory and perception. Counting eights, manually through the text, I am sure was similarly imprecise. This obsessive-compulsive imprecision too becomes part of the text’s creation.

Leaning into a compulsive routine is maddening.

This poem asks what becomes of the rejection of the narrative of cure.

I’ll end with a quote I return to often, by Abby Sher, which I found quoted by Claire Ross Dunn: “I would say … to whomever needs to do all these things … thank you for keeping your hands washed, and for counting the cracks in the sidewalk, and for making sure the lights are off and the oven is off and the plugs are unplugged and the door is locked. And your work is done.”

 

 

 

 

 

Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). She has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can't tell if this book is depressing or if I'm just sad, Theory of Rooms, and Recoveringly. She works as an educator and researcher at the University at Buffalo.