The
literary career of Andrew Suknaski, Canadian Poet, provides an extraordinary
lesson on the ability of language to express the non-verbal. In his hands art
becomes a bridge to narrative. This immigrant son from Wood Mountain
Saskatchewan left home at seventeen and went everywhere, living in several
major Canadian cities and traveling the world from England to Australia before
returning home, to stay (at first), seventeen years later. His art during this
period away reflects a desire to make “the world his home” (Ghosts…
p.68-9) but the eclectic results of such a venture has made interpretation of
his work as a whole an elusive task. Critics instead have focused on his Wood
Mountain Poems, which actually comprise three books, Wood Mountain
Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor, and In the Name of Narid. While
these books are significant they are by no means the only ‘good’ things
Suknaski put out. His career is best viewed as one continuous book. The
creative act is guided by a character driven design. As George Bowering writes
in Harry’s Fragments “character is fate.” Suknaski’s life and art
represent this only too well.
Beginning
his career as a fine artist (painting, drawing, clay, wax sculpture) Suknaski
soon found he was writing haiku and pressing them into clay pots. The writing
had started late but it had begun, there were many more words to come. And just
like in grade 1 when Suknaski heard English for the first time, he had some
catching up to do. The late sixties and early seventies saw Suknaski produce at
least 10 concrete poetry chapbooks (including two anthologies), and many titles
by others beside with his own Elfin Plot Press. He floated poems and magazines
rolled up in Al Purdy’s cigar tubes down the North Saskatchewan River. He
folded an issue of Elfin Plot into paper airplanes and had them dropped from an
aircraft while flying north out of Edmonton. He buried others on mtn tops or
left them on beaches melted into tablet like candles abandoned for strangers:
something to light them home. It was undoubtedly actions like these that
prompted Douglas Barbour’s wry comment that Elfin Plot was “the most
underground of underground magazines.” The output during this time was
frenetic, sprawling, brilliant, compulsive and voluminous, especially
considering his transitory lifestyle and constant poverty.
This
is the characteristic milieu of Suknaski’s early work; he is an artist
compelled by some eternal/internal imperative. Leaving home at seventeen he
stayed away for another seventeen years. Such deep divisions in life mirror a
work also deeply divided. Curiously, his eventual migration home coincides with
an increasingly narrative tendency in his work. His concrete poetry had always
employed both picture design and lettering (hieroglyphic, ideogrammatic,
phonetic, Cyrillic, Hebraic) but as Wood Mountain drew him back so to did the
structure of narrative begin to take hold of his creative process. What pulls
him home is a story that has to be told and that he has learned how to tell.
The narrative here is prodigal. Coming home he transcends the non-verbal, and
carries the inarticulate of Wood Mountain with him. That is Suknaski’s gift, whether he is
lending voice to the silent ghost’s history, or the non-english speaking, or
the chaotic and inarticulate self, he is able to build bridges to narrative,
between this and that, us and them, here there now and then.
Suknaski’s
career divides naturally into three phases. The first, dominated by concrete
poetry experiments, displays tendencies of the anti-hero’s anarchy and
iconoclasm which becomes a natural lead into the radical poetry of revolution
presented in the Celestial Mechanics trilogy which comprises the
third stage of his career, leaving his Wood mtn poems as the 2nd
phase. A bibliography of his work divided into the 3 phases I suggest looks
like this:
from
1966 to 1976, Circles*, This Shadow of Eden Once, These
Fragments I’ve Gathered for Ezra, In Mind ov Xrossroads ov Mythologies*,
Blind Man’s House*, Four Parts Sand* (Concrete Poem Anthology), Rose
Way in the East*, Zen Pilgrimage*, Old Mill*, Y th
evolution into ruenz*, The Night Watchman, Storm Warning
(anthology), Suicide Notes, Writing on Stone*
1974-
1981, Leaving, On First Looking Down from Lions Gate Bridge, Wood
Mountain Poems (chapbook), Philip Well (chapbook), Wood Mountain
Poems, The Ghost Gun (chapbook), The Ghosts Call You Poor, In
the Name of Narid, Octomi (chapbook), The Land They Gave Away
(selected)
1979-1986,
East of Myloona, Montage for an Interstellar Cry, Silk Trail.
(Although there are no chapbook publications in 3 there are some longer
magazine publications as well as concrete works.)
* denotes concrete
(although Suknaski’s work can be separated into concrete and lyric narrative
all of his work contains visual elements.)
This
is an impressive and varied 20 year career. It makes one wonder why so little
has been said about his work as a whole or even why both his later and earlier
work are virtually ignored. I venture that this is in part attributable to his
being damned by both camps, the lyrical and the concrete. In his essay on
Suknaski in ECW 18/19 Patrick Lane summarily dismisses the early
concrete work as substandard and “imitative of bill bissett, bp nichol, and
others who worshipped Rimbaud’s ‘disorientation of the senses’ and Blake’s
prophetic New Jerusalem,” but really, the experimental edge of poetry as sound
and vision just isn’t Patrick Lane’s ‘thing’. In what is a significant
contribution to a critical dialogue on Suknaski, Lane shows a particular
blindness to the attributes of concrete and sound poetry. Much of Suknaski’s concrete work has a definitive
style, and is rooted in the process of fine art. From the other side I have
heard concretists complain that Suknaski went ‘traditional’ and was never
really a concrete artist anyway. Here are two responses to such posturing. The
first is a pox on both their houses, and the second more reasoned
rejoinder is that this merely adds to the overall coherence and design of
Suknaski’s work, and becomes, if you will, an example of its deeper inherent
irony. What it does is relegate his verse, in modern Canadian poetry circles,
to a kind of immigrant status, the realm of the half-breed or outsider that is
entirely in keeping with the content and intent of the work. As with all gifted
poets there’s just no getting around their aesthetics. Suknaski’s work has the
power to make us all implicit, all participatory. This too works in several
ways as the poems themselves are often written from the viewpoint of the
outsider and necessarily impose such a perspective on the reader.
This
notion of the outsider is present in all of Suknaski’s work as he seems to be
always either designing a code or revealing one, and we, the reader, are forced
to follow the tracks of the poet-prophet-guide thru the land of unknowing where
to de cipher is to speak\out of the unknowing. In all of this there is an
aesthetic consistency that makes his entire oeuvre deserving of attention right
from the concretists wax candles, monotypes and mimeograph’s thru to the
prairie narratives (naridives) of Wood Mountain and into the utter rage against
darkness and injustice of Montage… and Silk Trail. All his work
as well is deeply imbued with notions of struggle, struggle to articulate,
struggle to survive, struggle to know; in his art Suknaski grapples with all
the gods. The consistency throughout is that of the psychologically driven aesthetic
of true art. Suknaski’s work is layered, complex, and erratically literary,
pointing, as it does, to traditions that lay beyond the conventional scope of
the accepted western canon.
It
is clear that he has always written from under the shadow of Ezra Pound’s
mythopoeic and radical poetry. One of his early concrete works is titled These
Fragments I’ve Gathered for Ezra (Funch Press). Suknaski also often
employs the postmodernist provision of a subtext to the present text. In his
own deodar shadow press production from 1971 In Mind ov Xrossroads ov
Mythologies there are three such subtexts sighted in a foreword note. Silk
Trail also begins with such a note directing the reader to Cantos LII -
XCII as well as other texts. Pound’s influence is evident as well in a letter
Suknaski writes to bpNichol in 1970. “Hope yew get elf plot three leviath
izzyew cause eye sent it to yr ole
walmer address.” Such homophonic spelling owes much to the letters and style of
Pound.
Suknaski’s
later work, often overshadowed by his Wood Mountain Poems, is a powerful
redemption of his early career. In Montage… he puts it all together: the
concrete, the narrative, the iconic, the mythopoeic, the particular in the
universal, the anger, the craggy hope, the futility, the vernacular, the
unsayable, the madness, the human. Part 1 begins with allusions to cayin, which
is the gutteral predecessor of the letter O (Sacks, p 251)as well as Hebrew for
Cain, and yodh, which is the Phoenician arm and hand that eventually became our
letter I. What begins this 1982 book first appeared in a collection of concrete
collage pieces in Suknaski’s self published chapbook from 1971 In Mind of
Xrossroads of Mythologies. Suknaski is reminding us of his early rebellious
career and giving warning that he’s still ‘kicking against the pricks.’ This is
a book that challenges our conceptions of what poetry is. After redefining the
local in Canadian poetry with his groundbreaking Wood Mountain Poems he
sets out to claim the territory of the political as well by challenging the art
for art’s sake school. Through direct references to the bombing of Dresden,
Hiroshima and the atrocities of Pinochet he places the political and ethical in
the regions of the poetic. Truth, Suknaski says, is not all about beauty. And
only when this is so, when poetry can face both ways, into hell and heaven, is
it a voice capable of fighting for justice. Only by broaching the unspeakable
may it speak up against the tyranny of atrocity. In order to engage in a fight for
justice poetry must break the code of silence that shrouds humanities darkest
misdeeds. The human struggle is to speak the unspeakable, to translate the
wordless void. As an artist Suknaski has
never avoided such subject matter, but he is willing to present the other side
of the issue. In Montage… he quotes Hasishi Sakamoto as saying “man made
catastrophe…has nothing to do with literature,” but Suknaski’s book has a lot
to do with man made catastrophe and literature. Indeed, a great deal of his
work does. In a 1969 monotype entitled “hirosheema krakanosh” Suknaski works
with the same raw material: human tragedy in a night of death. In the painting
the word Hiroshima is written descending the page but is spelled like this
‘hiroshimahhhhh.’ This is what Suknaski later names the cry, and the
poem, the painting, the drawing, the book, is a kind of cry, or a Montage
for an Interstellar Cry. This is what mahzahkahzah, a character from the
poem, tells muzhik(Russian for peasant), who is also Suknaski, at the end of
the book.
…you have
the right of the cry
we all have
the right of the cry
that’s all we’ve got man
in this abyss (Montage, p. 74)
This
is revolutionary, especially in Canada. Montage doesn’t just rock the
boat, it wrecks it, and then floats away on the remains (splish\slash). But
Suknaski never stays in one place for too long and neither does his poetry. If
the earth is his house, then poetry is a mountain.
Silk Trail is again very different, though in keeping with
Suknaski’s overall poetic perceptions. Both prophetic and compressed it
anticipates the direction of Canadian Poetry by 20 years, the minimalist
utterance of a haiku like brevity being the rage of 2005, but Suknaski’s
already done it, look back down the silk trail and you’ll see him shyly wave.
This is a text of infinite compression, every word a strand of silk, a precious
trail to hope: gold mountain.
In
this preliminary sketch of Suknaski’s work we can see it is typified by change,
by an alteration in style, but within that change is an irrefutable,
indomitable and unmitigating constancy. And it is that core that remains
through out his work as he roams over much of global history, through several
languages, cultures, mythologies and poetic forms. A coherent critical strategy
becomes necessary if one is to make intelligible links through out Suknaski’s
work as a whole. I will illustrate the potential for these along the way but
this is by no means an attempt at being definitive. What I intend here is a
mere continuation of what Steven Scobie begins in his preface to the collected
work “The Land They Gave Away,” which is a late mid-career retrospective. Even
as I attend to the various threads running through Suknaski’s work many shall
be left untied, though with the hope that they too will be taken up by others
and woven in: silk trail.
Enter bifrost (pronc. bee frost), or what I
call, a bridge to naridive (read narrative). Suknaski’s poetry has
always tended toward the mythopoeic, as any student of Pound’s will see, making
interpretation of his work in mythological terms a pragmatic approach. In Montage…
an over-riding myth is that of Yggdrasil, the great world ash of
Scandinavian mythology. Yggdrasil
reaches from the underworld of its roots to Asgard (heaven) in its crown
where the gods reside along with the lucky souls of afterlife. Midgard,
middle earth, is where humankind exists and bifrost is the bridge
between Midgard and Asgard, which in Suknaski’s work can be
translated as the bridge to narrative. There is also Utgard, which is
the domain of elves, trolls, and dwarves at the base of the tree between the
human world and the land of the dead ruled by the goddess Hel. In Suknaski’s
work this is a defining myth. Elfin figures have always been prominent in his
work going back to the original Elfin Plot publications as well as to his
Polish\Ukrainian roots. Slavic folklore is full of elfin figures like the
bearded old woodsman Krakonosh who appears in several Suknaski pieces (see poem
‘Mountain Climbing’ from Leaving p 26, 27). In northern European mythologies the elf is a
trickster, a puckish figure, by turns malicious and benign, gluttonous and
giving. These semi-magical, semi-human figures populate Suknaski’s poetry and
become at times actual figures in the landscape (langscape) of wood mountain
with the two often merging as one becomes the other. The poet himself appears
as a kind of elf, holding light and dark in either hand and bringing them
together: kerblam!
Narid, is a dialectical variation of the Ukrainian
‘narod’ meaning the people or nation and first appears in Suknaski’s work as
the title of his 1981 collection In the Name of Narid. In the saga’s narid
is also a mythical plain or desert plateau and field of battle, geologically
this corresponds with the Wood Mountain region, also an arid plateau.
Coincidentally it translates as well into the Arabic word for light. Narid,
in Suknaski’s work is wood mtn, is home, is wisdom, is light. Another defining
metaphor in his work is that of the bridge, or bifrost, and where it
goes is to narrative, and by that I mean naridive.
The
narrative impulse in poetry, like the 3rd dimension in art, is a
natural extension of the medium. Just as language is self-propelled into
narrative so to is drawing drawn into the 3rd dimension. Curiously
both the experimental in painting and poetry depend upon upsetting these
natural tendencies. Modern abstract art resists the 3rd dimension
while often getting as close as it can; so too modern experimental poetics
short circuits the conventional use of language by obstructing narrative sense
and syntax. What results in the latter is a ‘new’ narrative, a narrative
created by the reader who imposes a structure upon the words even as the poet
attempts to resist such impositions. The third dimension of art is akin to
narrative in language. Suknaski’s concrete work often plays with both, at once
inviting and rejecting; his landscapes often function as a kind of langscape.
An example of this is ‘The Chess Game’ (. This concrete collage presents history
as a human narrative. The backdrop to this narrative of the people is the land,
making the poem a bridge to naridive. The chessboard squares
where the battle is played out at the foot of adjacent hills presents 3rd
dimensional space just as the images combined with the words present a kind of
broken narrative history of people and place. Suknaski uses the militaristic
image of the Chinese board game, chess, to tell the story of the native’s final
defeat at Wounded Knee and the betrayal of them by the Whiteman. This is the
voice of the people of the land.
In
his other concrete poem drawings, which are often mimeographs allowing for both
drawing and typing, word and image always encroach upon one another and are
made, deliberately, to co-exist on the page. Almost any early concrete poem of
Suknaski’s presents the reader with simultaneity of world and word. This is
significant for several reasons but what I’d like to highlight is how united
the verbal and the non-verbal are in his work and how the work itself functions
as a kind of bridge to narrative between the two. In the drawing itself one
image is often moving into another, there is a surreal continuity that typifies
also the shamanistic or plenipotential. His ideogrammatic pieces are word
sculptures, or iconic langscapes, that move in and out of narrative.
In
the poem picture ‘Light’ (In Mind ov Xrossroads ov Mythologies, p. 9)
Suknaski uses the Chinese ideogram for light as the structural center of the
piece which suggests again the 3rd dimension as landscape and space,
as a time/space complex of ply on ply; this is coupled with the words of an
emerging narrative. The ideogram itself also merges with a langscape of
Egyptian hieroglyphs as presented by the sign for water and the placental moon;
it also metamorphoses into both leaf and feather. The ideograms shape suggests
as well a wheel with spokes; spoke to spoke this feather image predicts the
appearance of a ‘handful of feathers’ which is mythological in several aspects
the least of which is not Icarus flying too close to the sun, source of all
light. The pictures here again are bridges to narrative, the narrative of
literature and myth but not merely the oblique Grecian reference to Icarus I
suggest but also much more to Egyptian mythology as presented by the words neter
xert and the outline of an owl that reaches from the top right of the page
to the bottom. There is a hell of a lot going on in this poem. In Egyptian neter
is the masculine law, which is similar to the Chinese concept of yin. The
hieroglyph for water ^^^^^, mem, becomes in the poem metonymic for sea, and
see, division of water and air, light and dark, heaven and hell, up and down:
just like Icarus, and human kind. The poem functions as a kind of bridge
to the meta-narrative of mythology.
The
3rd dimension in abstract art like the narrative in experimental
poetry is either avoided or employed only obliquely. Suknaski’s visuals do both
consistently. In his ideogrammatic drawings he often makes horizontal lines
across the page creating the divisions of landscape: cloud\sky\earth, which are
also mythical and elemental, and he does this overtop of language, or rather,
languages. These drawings are langscapes, bridges to naridive: bifrost.
Further
explorations into Suknaski’s concrete deserve a venture into the works included
in the Oberon anthology from 1972 Four Parts Sand. The tripartite series
Imago #1, #2 and #3 tells a story
outside of language and inside, or upon, a landscape though it employs the
non-verbal icon of the cross as a ‘t’ atop the mtn. While this series avoids
verbalization of narrative it does so in a 3 dimensional landscape: our stories
are of the land and our voices are figures of the land. Here Wood Mountain
becomes a figure of speech.
That
Suknaski’s poetry is a potent distillation of icon, myth and landscape is
evident in the abbreviation for mountain. Written in lowercase letters as mtn
the visual the verbal and the iconic are inextricably fused. The m and the n
rising on either side are mnemonic of a mountain and the t between them a
Christian cross atop a hill. This is bifrost, the bridge to naridive,
the cipher to gold mountain. I will elaborate on this further in
relation to Suknaski’s later book Silk Trail but for the moment I’ll
continue discussion of his concrete work, which is just as vast and sprawling
as his later creations.
Thinking
of narrative as a journey through language provides an interesting perspective.
When applied to Suknaski’s homophonic translations the results significantly
reflect a mythopoeic narrative. The homophonic translation is an abridgement of
narrative, but by averting this narrative it establishes a patter of sound
within the mytho-linguistic context of the poem. And here is one the stories of
language, of sound and sense that exists outside of reason yet is reason by
virtue of being language, a container for meaning, vessel of reason.
The
concrete poem ‘Blood’ from In Mind ov Xroads ov Mythologies presents
such an example: “bird/ bur den/ man age/ bird in/ cage.” In the context of this poem
which portrays the ideogram for blood as a chambered heart, over which is
written a hieroglyphic sequence that merges heart with mind from which a
backward looking face expels a word breath which trails across the page to
invoke the magic of the bennu/phoenix of lower left corner. The homophonic translations alter the words
so similar sounds evoke an opposite response; in Egyptian terms this is the ka
of being. Very much a poem focused on mortality, freedom, and fetter, it becomes
a bridge between the after life and this, a cipher to the barred door of the
heart to which access is gained by way of the bard as mystical prophet. All of
this depends upon, and is, narrative. Without disclosure.
There
are only a handful of published typewriter concrete of Suknaski’s that I know
of but they too can be seen as bridges to narrative. The poem reproduced
here uses the quotation mark key “ to form the outline of what is likely a
Henry Moore sculpture as the author had recently visited a museum featuring
Moore’s work while traveling through London England. Moving as it does from the
verbal to the non-verbal this translation of a three dimensional sculpture onto
a page’s two dimensional surface using a sign (cipher\key) that denotes dialogue
is a brilliant example of his art as a bridge to narrative. The
narrative here is also alluded to by the use of a typewriter, which is an
instrument of language, and by the words that descend the left margin of the
page: ‘woman/ ….’. With the aid of hindsight this poem is also ‘a life
fragment’ (what Suknaski calls his later unfinished Celestial Mechanics)
and belongs in sequence with the poems in the chapbook Leaving. This and the other typewriter poems in Circles
are well worth preserving.
Before
continuing my survey of Suknaski’s poetics I’d like to point to the relevance
of translating sculpture into poetic form by moving the non-verbal towards the
verbal. There is always something to be said about recontextualization and
translation. What sculpture and concrete poetry have in common is visual space
but the nature of that space is different, one being three-dimensional, the
other two. The use of sculpture as a starting point for the poem is an
interesting way of redefining the two dimensional limits of the page, of
poetry. While the poem tests its own spatial limitations by translating
sculpture so to does the sculpture itself move beyond its own non-verbal realm
and into the verbal by being represented with word, signs or letters, which in
turn are often being used in a non-representational mode. Back again to
Suknaski’s Henry Moore, which is an outline of a sculpture using quotation
marks; what the poem does then in essence is quote the non-verbal, quote the
silent speaking sculpture, and in essence quote space, in time and build a
bridge to narrative, bifrost.
Another
central aspect to Suknaski’s poetry as a bridge to narrative can be seen in the
opportunities for cultural exchange that it provides. In Mind ov Xrossroads
ov Mythologies, while doing just that, also crosses cultural boundaries
within the west by fusing English to Ukrainian to Egyptian to Hebrew to Hopi to
Art history (Goya), and creates a common linguistic ground for East and West as
well. This later point is critical in Suknaski’s work as he uses Ukrainia,
geographically positioned as it is, as a symbol or vessel of transport over the
bridge between East and West. In Suknaski’s work the poem, the page itself,
becomes a place for cultural exchange, where differences are bridged, dialogue
created, similarities found, silence averted. A gain, the bridge.
All
of Suknaski’s work is involved in the project of translating and travel,
translating the non-verbal, the non-english, the foreign culture, and finally
the self. Translation becomes, in his work, equivalent to a spiritual journey,
or quest; a kind of mental pre positioning in, out, over, across and through.
This is the self as art, art then becomes the way, path, or bridge. This is
also narayan, a term used in Montage…, which is from the Sanskrit
meaning “man path.” Art is devotional, a spiritual journey open to all, a
manner of speaking in all manners. This is narayan. What I also like to see in
this is that in Babel we learn many languages. The following piece, from Silk
Trail, shows how Suknaski draws cultures together by pointing to inherent
linguistic similarities.
neboY / nebiu*
the beyond
some
inner
place…
heaven /
Y Babylonian god of wisdom / Ukrainian for Heaven
* Chinese political and
celestial term
Here
it is necessary to add a note to the footnote from the text quoted above. The
symbol I use, Y, is not the symbol used
in the original text. The original uses an old world cross shape, which my
computer isn’t equipped with, forcing me to substitute, translate, and narrate,
to construct a bridge -explicating. That this is even worthy of explanation is
testament to the compression of Silk Trail as a long poem; even the
footnotes are ‘in’ the poem. Suknaski’s early concrete career has been
successfully integrated into his poetic narrative. The symbols introduce their
own meaning into the poems narrative, and they do so in a way that’s integrated
into the poem. Further to this is the phonetic and metaphoric similarity of the
footnoted words nebo and nebiu which in turn unite the differing cultural
sources of the words. This poem fragment of 8 words, 2 symbols, and 5
punctuation marks is a bridge into the workings of much of Suknaski’s work; the
poem is its own cipher. Heaven is in the self and is reached by going out
there. Art then is this bridge, or the key to the bridge that spans the heavens
to this place, home of the self, a people’s narrative: bifrost.
From
the outset Suknaski’s work has been that of the sorcerer, dipping into the
poetry of myth mysticism and knowledge, the sort that is a lantern lighting the
way, possibly, the poet then is a prophet, also a shaman baubled in iconic
symbol, babble, and lore. This leads to the notion of decoding and secret
writing which is further steeped with interpretations of the universe as being
a place of order and ultimately, if one is possessed of the key, which is
knowledge, predictable and knowable. The irony of such a positing, that the
universe is knowable and ordered, is that it leads to the theory of
predestination which is itself an argument against the existence of free will.
And thus the devotional aspect of art.
In
Jars Balan’s essay "Voices from the Canadian Steppes" he decodes a
Ukrainian phrase used in the visual poem ‘Autumn Equinox.’ As is typical of
Suknaski’s concrete work he breaks words into sounds and altered (altared)
meanings thru homophonic translation. The Ukrainian phrase ax tum, (in the
Cyrillic alphabet x makes a ch sound as in Bach) which then becomes ‘ah tumn \
au tumn\ autumn,’ is translated by Balan as a colloquial expression simply
meaning ‘Oh there.’ This is a curious phrase to interject into a piece with
such mythic and epistemological roots. It’s like throwing up your hands at the
edge of the abyss: ‘oh there.’ The poem, balanced as it is, is ultimately
suggestive of Autum Ra, god of both the beginning and end of Egyptian
mythology. ‘Oh there’ we say when confronted by eternity , the Egyptian ‘au’ of
expansion. Here the Chinese ideograms provide both figure and landscape, hence langscape.
The abstract tease of a third dimension, as a figure of speech, appears in
a language of space: language becomes a land bridge to narrative, story, myth
which is a creation of the self (I) and the eye. In drawing as in
language the eye can conclude a third dimension from the mere presentation of
foreground. This only happens in the minds eye however as the illusion is not
present in the drawing. The illusion here
then is the conclusion, or visa-versa, making then of existence and knowledge
an eternal paradox. The end, while under suspicion, is never in doubt.
Suknaski’s work always presents this hilarious edge, lets us in on the killing
joke: mortality and life, ‘oh there.’ As well this poem can be read as a bridge
to naridive; it is a struggle to utter the simple phrase of a people; ‘oh
there,’ something which would be said almost lightly but with the intent of
warding of further ill luck, a curse to accompany the dropping of a cup or some
other small thing, akin to ‘oh damn.’ Or
to take this further ‘oh hell.’ ‘There,’ then, is synonymous with ‘hell.’
Significantly the phrase ‘ax tam’ appears in the nether region of the visual
piece. ‘Oh hell’ is said from hell. Comes from, and goes to. And round and
round we go; ‘oh there’ this is an utter attempt to escape what is invoked by
not saying it, the power of euphemism is code. ‘Hell’ is ‘there.’ Not here.
This narrative as naridive is the life of the people, on the land, and there
art culture and religion is the bridge to heaven, bifrost.
The
under rated though admittedly uneven East of Myloona contains the
concrete sculptural poem ‘Inukshuk.’ Inuksuit (plural) are stone figures that
the Inuit build on the tundra as direction markers, sentinels, caribou herders,
and memorials. In the Inuktitut language it means “in likeness of man.”
Suknaski takes this raw material and fashions it into art, he writes a poem
about Inukshuk in its own shape and an Inukshuk is made of the raw materials of
the land and fashioned into art. This is art with utility, it provides
necessary information as well as the spiritual sustenance of memory: people
have been here and made a mark, told their stories. The poem as Suknaski writes
it in block letters is informational in much the same way an Inukshuk is. This,
is memory, or pamiat,’ as Suknaski calls it, which is Russian for memory of the
heart, the heartland. And art is a kind of memory, a translation of the past or
bringing forward to the present those past spirits. Art is history as naridive;
a bridge to the past depicts our future: a document of prophecy. East of Myloona is a wonderfully
unique book that is unfortunately weakened by an authorial voice that seems at
times somewhat over strident. From the outset, with the beautiful drawing on
the cover to the illustrations inside the book we are reminded both of
Suknaski’s training and talent as a visual artist, as an artist firmly grounded
in the non-verbal, non-representational. These drawings are typical Suknaski
creations with figures placed in a landscape of mythical reality. The cover
illustration shows polar bears on an arctic landscape\map scaling a snowy bluff
that is a man’s hat that has an image of polar bear on it. This is an inspired
recombination of the surreal and the starkly real. There is nature, and there
is human industrial reality. Suknaski looks at both, he doesn’t turn away, or
avert the eye, he builds bridges, these are realities, and they should be
talked about. East of Myloona is a break from the Wood Mountain
mode and a movement towards the documentary style he employs in Montage….
This new floating format allows Suknaski to bring all his talents to bear upon
his work by incorporating his fine art skills as well as his concrete
experimental experience. East of Myloona is a bridge to Celestial
Mechanics.
What
I like about Montage… is how it challenges a poetry of convention. This
book breaks all the rules, makes its own, and in doing so, breaks none. In the
end these scraps of modern horrors and the abyss of being an artist during the
late 20th century create fragments of beauty; tragedy is tailored
somehow into song. What Suknaski makes of the ash pit remains of art in the 20th
century is a kind of narrative reconstruction of history and humanity, a mosaic
of time –in time. The egalitarian manner of the text extends from content to
form, pan-national, pan-poetic. This is the poetry of prophecy, and it’s not a
prophecy of affirmation but rather doom, there isn’t much to cling to here,
adrift. Stepping onto the bridge we are soon pushed back; entering narrative we
are pushed back out again, into ourselves and into the unsayable: beautiful
mystery is a deathly void: where the bridge was/ a yawing canyon.
There
are several concrete bits in Montage… from the erratic alphabetizing of
part I and the ‘The Mike Olito’ box on the second page to the flagman signals
and deaf hand signs of part VIII. “Even the deaf receive the flagman’s message”
(p 42) Suknaski writes with wry humour.
Mike
Olito becomes Mike Odin in the poem. At first he appears to be making art out
of self destruction. Drinking 30 beer a day for 312 days he takes a photograph
of himself everyday in the same chair drinking a beer at the same time, then
looking back at the pictures and noticing no change Odin decides “he may as
well cut her down/ to a “20 bottle a day clip!/ and turn to art” (p 34.)
Ostensibly the result of this is ‘The Mike Olito Box’ which is presented as a
monochrome on the front and back covers as well as in a black and white
photograph on page 2. It is also referred to in the poem itself. The box, large
enough for a man to stand in, is fitted in front with a long window and
shutters which are opened in the picture (open shutter,/ open shut her, /o pen
shudder). In the box, in the window, stands Mike Odin, a naked bearded Metis: a
kind of God to self-reliance, to the resilience of the artist as an impermanent
part of the landscape, or an imaged voice of the land, a very nearly visceral
bridge to narrative. This how the people get to the promised land, through
themselves. At this point in our analytic journey I must turn to poetry in
order to continue as we find ourselves somehow outside of sense. The poetry is
my own, by way of explication.
The Guide Thru Hell is a
Blind Prophet
Thru hell be guided
By a blind prophet, the
one who has lost
both eyes
to truth
The blind prophet will
instruct you as you go amongst cataclysms.
The self is the artist’s
last refuge, and the artist
society’s
What we need
to receive
is ourselves, but not
alone on the land,
together
the people – narid.
This
is the cry of Montage… The end song, the wail. And to what avail,
the reader may ask?
Looking
again to Silk Trail we are presented with the possibilities of art, of
what art the people are capable of, the resultant beauty, of nature and
humanity in a kind of harmony. Despite this affirmation of the social
possibilities of art, how utility and aesthetics are woven in silk, Silk
Trail refuses to affirm current art and culture, but this is not the
book’s failing. In the end, that is our own. The Prairies is where east and
west have met, where the final drama unfolds and falls as ashes, the silk trail
at last abandon ended. This is Suknaski’s final book to date. The second part
of Celestial Mechanics, Divining West, remains uncompleted.
Bifrost, the bridge, is destroyed, the people ultimately betrayed by
themselves. That is how the story ends, with silence. We fall back from the
bridge, mute and resigned to what is ultimate and unknowable, this is our fate.
Suknaski
now lives in a group home due to poor health. He has abandoned art, and chosen
silence, his rage, given over, to the age. It also seems almost possible, or at
least it isn’t impossible that Suknaski may return, hit the concrete so to
speak and make that “sound of one foot step aheadda the other” (Montage…)
and returning, manage again that sad goodbye wave.
In
a remarkably prophetic painting by Suknaski from 1969 he seems to prophesy
(prophet\see) his own literary career. The text on the monotype print reads
“see palm\ sea palms \ see waves\ sea waves.” Amongst other things this is a
vision of goodbye, of going out to sea, of waving while riding the final wave
into nothingness. Drawn into the paint, as this is the method of monotypes, is
a hand, palm out and fingers up, and on the hand an eye. Above the hand is an
image of a palm tree and circling all of this is a wavy line. The painting
adumbrates through word, image, sound and meaning. This painting, done at the
beginning of Suknaski’s career, could also be an epitaph. We are guided by our
character driven design, what we see, is our fate…But wait, maybe it is that
the hand beckons, the eye upon it suggests the way has been found, this is narayan,
the man-path. Forward, to the bridge, what the hand signals: bifrost. Again,
our fate although certain, is uncertain. What is it the flagman signals? We
must be sure, and watch. Does the hand wave hello, or goodbye? Meanwhile, the
sun is going down: a figure of speech.
painting
by Andrew Suknaski, 1969
note:
this essay originally appeared online at Poetics.ca, back when Andrew Suknaski (1942-2012) was still with us.
Kemeny Babineau: Once there was a poet who wrote and
rewrote and edited and pondered and considered he shouldnta bothered so he
slept and dreamt and wept that he was inept which he was able to accept so he
kept what he would and swept out the rest and thought I did my best. Life is a
jest, this isn't a test.
