Michael Tod Edgerton : Process Note #71 : The Errant Muse (2009 to the 2026), or, An Erotics of Writing

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Michael Tod Edgerton are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he's not, sends me ahead…
                                                 ~ Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End 

The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again.

I did not begin again I just began.
                                                  ~ Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation”

 

 

What better way to begin than with a digression (if one can digress from nothing and nowhere…). There’s an adolescent-minded lit’l faerie-winged imp in me (okay, it’s just me) that loves the fact that serendipity has assigned my process note to number 69. (Or so I thought… ! And so, from the beginning, I erred as any knight might. But I shan’t, no, I shall not begin again and let it stand as an example of that happy accident every artist knows well.) Not only because it references a sexual position (one that boggles the mind—how’s a girl s’posed to focus on work and succumb to pleasure at the same time?!), but also and especially because it references one of my fave topological structures, the figure-eight-shaped, one-sided Möbius strip that somehow flips “sides” with a twist that leaves indiscernible just where one “side” ends and the “other” begins. It’s how I think about binaries in a way that preserves what’s unique to each term but puts them on a continuum rather than in false opposition (or having one consume the other like an evil in utero twin), e.g., sex/gender, masc/femme, dom/sub, or, in terms more directly related to art-making, form/content and the artist’s leading/following the “agency” of the work (the muse, inspiration, intuition, etc.). I think of the writing process on a dialectical model. Instead of thesis >> antithesis >> synthesis, however, moment by moment of writing it’s lead/craft/choose >> follow/associate/intuit >> poem. (Or, in the case of a good 69, work it >> feel it >> boom!)

In my poem-writing, as often as “leading” by making conscious choices, I follow blindly via a kind of third eye-ear the path that gets laid/I am laying in the process of following its lead, step by step enchaining analogical, imagistic, semantic, and sonic associations, similarities, and differences. And that again across poems, poems concatenating and pulling others into their orbits, to mix metaphors (or to link rings of chains around links in the larger chain, moons around the chain of poem-planets in the book-system…). And then, abracadabra et voilà—a book!

Or not. If you’re li’l ol’ moi, you’re just as likely to have an asteroid come break up the whole shebang and see one half drift off into the outer reaches… And that’s what’s happened to me one book manuscript after another over the past decade-plus…

Flash back 2014: I’ve published my first book and completed my dissertation at the University of Georgia, half essays on social practice artworks (with a detour into the theory of criticism drawing on phenomenological criticism and Sontag’s Barthesian “erotics of reading” to experiment with criticism as a form of ekphrastic creative writing) and half creative work. The creative half started like this (and this I take directly from my website for the project, What Most Vividly):

Such participatory, relational and investigative literary and art works as Kate Schapira’s Town, C. D. Wright and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self, the work of Krzysztof  Wodiczko, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bhanu Kapil got me thinking about including other voices in my own literary "voice." Taking my cue from Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, from which I took the idea of a questionnaire, I wrote a set of questions. I emailed these questions to friends, colleagues and acquaintances; I placed a binder of them in a gallery in Athens, GA for people to fill out; I started this website to cull further responses; I posted them along a stretch of the Atlanta BeltLine green space as a participatory text art installation; I waited and wait for answers. I hope you’ll offer me your own on the (questions) page of this site.

This had been brewing but was not yet fully formed when I ran into Lizzie Saltz, then director of the Athens (Georgia) Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA), in some shop or café or another. Having curated a couple of other literary readings by my fellow PhDers in coordination with previous exhibits, Lizzie invited me to do so again, telling me about her upcoming show of participatory art. This was perfect timing and just the extra push I needed to go into full gear on what would become “What Most Vividly (A Choral Work.” I weaseled my way into the show with an unofficial installation piece, a “writing desk” with pens and a notebook full of my questionnaires, the answers to which I would use for my own collage work as well as exhibit in their original, handwritten state, and which I wrote in response to the “upcoming” info on the show on their site. A piece featuring beds by Michael Lease, Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On, prompted my very first question, “What dream do you remember most vividly and what message does it bear?” The rest of the first set of questions followed from that one, as did the title of the whole project, as I followed the lead of my “Muse” (a cologne ad model of a man I hereby christen Rod Sterling for two reasons I take to be squarely apparent…). I almost never before or since (until entering a Lacanian psychoanalysis many years later) remembered my dreams. Right after writing that first question, however, I remembered quite vividly a dream about multiplying simulacra of my cat, Penelope, lost amid an end-times storm reminiscent of Dorothy’s gale. I wrote it down as “notes toward” a poem, later recognizing it as an already-written and nearly-finished first draft of the poem I would title “A Final Flood of Stars” (see the final version below).

In the end, after the ATHICA piece, after the installation as part of the Art on the Atlanta BeltLine project (simple question boards and pens hanging from trees), and responses to my website provided me with enough material from others to work with, a couple of the collage poems from the book-to-be version of “What Most Vividly” were published, including a version of the dream poem that interspersed snippets of others’ dreams. That was encouraging—but in the end, after already sending the book out to the usual publication opportunities, the whole of it struck me one day as simply, irredeemably unsatisfying. I took the best of my own writing, patched the poems back into their in-cohering, errant wholes, and started from those to build a new manuscript, one I would title after one of the art-cum-criticism-essays-turned-poems, “Still Sensate Life with Blazing.” I riffed off this title to title the book.

“Yet Sensate Light” attracted newer poems, in particular a set of Frank O’Hara-esque poems that a call for such by one journal or another (and some OKCupid encounters) had inspired me to write (if not in time to make the journal’s submission deadline). The book grew and developed, was workshopped by friends, and settled into a very strong manuscript that was a finalist in a couple of contests. It held for a few years, as I embarked on new projects, including an opera libretto turned play turned novel-in-verse turned “experimental verse play” that’s waiting for me to return to it for an umpteenth time—and hopefully this time—to finish it. “Sensate” was finished and I sent it out and tweaked it and sent it out and waited and hoped against hope. Then the Covid lockdown hit in March 2020. That summer George Floyd’s murder by police sparked an international explosion of calls for racial justice while a college professor had the police called on him by a white woman for birdwatching while Black in Central Park (or, more to the point, for being so “uppity,” as she would have said just a few decades earlier, as to dare tell her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules).

The poems I wrote documenting my particular perspective and experience of that historical summer completely altered the shape and character of the book manuscript. The ekphrastic poems dealing with more philosophical questions of aesthetics, ethics, and subjectivity no longer fit. The summer of 2020 struck “Yet Sensate Light” in two. I was left with one new book, now titled “Shelter Shutter Swerve,” and and a half-book version of “Yet Sensate Light” that would sit waiting for me for the next couple of years as I polished “Shelter” and focused anew on the play, “Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated (A Femme Mani-Fêste & Queerling Fantasia in Scenes Unwed).” “Shelter” was also a finalist in book contests (funny to be both a winner and loser, encouraged and disappointed, at the same time), and trusted readers assured me it was tight, fantastic, done and did—don’t screw with it. If I were finishing this process essay the day I started it a month ago, I would end with the hope that any day now “Shelter Shutter Swerve” would win this contest or be picked up in that press’ reading period, and we’d all live happily ever after (or at least those poems would…until the book went out of print and the humans stopped reading altogether and/or snuffed themselves out via eco-suicide, or…).

But a couple of weeks ago I was re-reading the whole manuscript. The second act lagged. The third couldn’t quite pick up the slack, couldn’t reinvigorate the energy. I looked at the limbless trunk of “Yet Sensate Light,” realized those brand new poems are fun but not amazing, that these three or four older, long-ago-published poems are pretty fantastic, but maybe too intellectual, too bloodlessly philosophical (so with “Still Sensate,” but you be the judge—and do let me know). From the initial split, “It the Hum” was continually pulled towards both manuscripts, and after multiple confirmations that it belonged in “Yet Sensate Light,” it now seemed obviously meant for “Shelter Shutter Swerve.”  As did that never-accepted poem I always worried was too weak. It felt strong and independent while beautifully resonating with other poems in “Shelter.” And the “Closing In” poem that tracks an experience with Bacon (and then, surprisingly, with a Hirst piece) I’d had at the Met and speaks to the nature of subjectivity and to my own self in its specificity, equally, felt pulsing and alive, as well. These three poems, along with two others (part of a sequence that was split between the two manuscripts and now reunited) brought a different but resonant energy to the book that reinvigorated it. Only now the title didn’t work. “Shelter Shutter Swerve” had to be downgraded to the title last, pandemic-themed section. The final (?) version of the book is now (as of now) titled “Yet Sensate Light.” I’ve had to let go, a little painfully (but a little more “Zen” than I thought it’d be at first), the rest of that manuscript’s poems. The one from which this title was derived, first published in Sonora Review and offered below (followed by the Penelope dream poem), may be the seed for the next book or may never see publication again. Only the Angel Muse might know or could, maybe, find out…if he can just find the cajónes to strut his fine runway strut on ahead…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queer girlie-boy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of the poetry collection Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, and VOLT, among other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is also the Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com and WhatMostVividly.com.

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

 

Stephen Morrissey : Remembering John McAuley, 1947 - 2026

 

                    

                     Work for true poems true to you.
                     The rest are Styrofoam and glue.
                               —John McAuley, "Four Tweets to a Young Poet"

 

 

John McAuley and I were the only members of the Vehicule Poets born in Montreal. John grew up on the West Island and lived most of his life in downtown Montreal, for many years in an apartment at 2151 Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks from Concordia University where he had been a student and then a faculty member of the English Department from 1978-2018. One evening in the early 2000s my wife, Carolyn Zonailo, and I met John and his wife Ritva for dinner at the Alexis Nihon Plaza, a few blocks from where John and Ritva lived, it was the only time we met Ritva.

Before marrying Ritva, before the apartment on Lincoln, in the 1970s, John was married to Diana Brewer, Marie and Griffith Brewer's daughter. John and Diana (or "Lulu") lived at 1206 Seymour Avenue in the Shaughnessy Village, just south of Ste. Catherine Street West; it is a mostly residential downtown neighbourhood and they lived in a Victorian grey stone building (with lots of old books and needing some work) which I believe was the Brewer's family home going back several generations; it is a ten minute walk to Concordia University.

Artie Gold loved John's poetry, no Trump-like nickname for John that Artie had for one or two other members of the Vehicule Poets. There is John's poem, "Nine Lives for Artie Gold", written just after Artie died in 2007, and published in John's last book, All I can Say for Sure (2013). Ken Norris reminds me that "Artie once said that John might wind up being the best of all of us", of all of the Vehicule Poets. John writes of Artie,

                               Those who know his books
                               will delight at absurdities
                               shadowed by the casual order of things.

All I can Say For Sure might be the best book John published but it received no prizes, few reviews, and little praise; however, here is what Bert Almon, a reviewer for the Montreal Review of Books (spring 2014), wrote about John's book: 

          John McAuley, one of the Vehicule Poets who were so influential in Montreal circa         1975–80, published four books from 1977–79. His new collection, All I Can Say for Sure,   is so good that the long silence must be regretted.

A reviewer for the online Montreal Rampage, wrote the following:

    While McAuley’s writing is poetry by form, it seems like musical prose when read aloud. 
    It is difficult to say why a piece of writing works. To use a cliché, but one entirely           appropriate, you know good writing when you see it. Or, as McAuley states in “Poetry Reading”, “the gut always knows first”—but take it in a happier sense this time. Here, the writing just works. It comes off the page: it is the words in an order and a flow only a long time poet would be able to write. I could “hear” many of the works in my mind.

John and Artie had been in George Bowering's creative writing class together at Sir George Williams University (present-day Concordia University) in the early 1970s. Sometimes I hear Artie's voice in John's work, it isn't just a similarity to Artie's work, John had an equivalent ability to surprise the reader with insightful metaphors; what they shared, and GB acknowledged, is the rare gift for writing real poems. John writes, "The elderly learn the despair of outlasting everything in their closets", "Ancestral dreams in the one dark mole/ on your neck", and "Tranquil poetry arrives/ like unexpected snowflakes/ on your brother-in-law's roof next door."

John is similar in some ways to Leo Kennedy, one of the Montreal Group of poets who brought Modernism to Canadian poetry in the 1920s and 1930s; Kennedy came from an immigrant Irish family and he felt he was always an outsider. John may have identified with Kennedy but, unlike Kennedy, John never stopped being involved with poetry, and unlike Leo Kennedy John lived up to his early promise as a poet. In "To Leo Kennedy 1983" John writes,

                               Half a century ago and one book published.
                               . . . . .
                               Tragic success in finding your music
                               too easy too early,
                               faultless memory for the cost of each line. 

Leo Kennedy published one book of poems and while he was perhaps the most original of the Montreal Group of poets, or perhaps the most idiosyncratic, he was not the best of the Montreal Group. I like Kennedy's book, The Shrouding (1933), but it isn't a book I have returned to after my initial enthusiasm for it; it isn't a book that I have reread as I have with the other Montreal Group poets. John has a long gap in publishing, from around 1980 to 2013; but Claudia Lapp also published few books; I didn't publish any books from 1998 to 2009, an eleven year period. In 2013 I offered to publish a chapbook for John, with Coracle Press, but Ritva vetoed it, she said John didn`t have the work needed for a chapbook; John seemed to be always busy correcting student papers, preparing classes, but not writing new poem.

John and I, and Bob Galvin, organized the 1976-77 poetry series at Vehicule Art Gallery.  Several years before this, in 1973, I had organized a reading at Vehicule Art Gallery with Guy Birchard, and with Artie Gold's suggestions for readers; it was Guy who introduced me to Artie in early 1973 and I often visited Artie's Lorne Crescent flat. A few years later, organizing poetry readings at Vehicule Art, I brought in bpNichol and later The Four Horsemen, they read at the college where I was teaching, and then read at Vehicule Art; I had been corresponding with Clayton Eshleman and brought him in to read at the college and then at Vehicule Art. I remember Robert Kelly's reading and Kenneth Koch's reading. Claudia Lapp knew Anne Waldman from her years at Bennington College in Vermont and that's how Anne Waldman came to read at Vehicule.

In 2013 I suggested to John that he read at the Yellow Door Coffee House, the excellent reading series run by Ilona Martonfi who has done so much for Montreal poetry; the Yellow Door is located just around the corner from Artie Gold's old flat on Lorne Crescent. At the reading I made a short video of John reading his Leo Kennedy poem. The Montreal Review of Books published a poem by John as its Poem of the Month in May 2014. It is not as though John disappeared from the poetry scene, he was present but less than in the 1970s. While Leo Kennedy disappeared from poetry and moved from Montreal, John kept writing and teaching; and Ritva was an excellent editor of his work as can be seen in the poems in All I Can Say for Sure.

Tom Konyves posted videos on YouTube of the readings we did that evening in April 2018 at McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections, organized by Chris Lyon, the former director of that department; it was an evening celebrating the Vehicule Poets including readings by John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and myself; Artie Gold's and Ken Norris's poems were read by other readers. An interactive screen displayed poems; exhibition cases contained books, letters, newsletters, and photographs of each poet; it was a great evening and well attended. It was great seeing John who was warmly welcomed, especially by Tom and Claudia, John was obviously emotionally distraught because Ritva was seriously ill.

The main collection of literary papers of the individual Vehicule Poets are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections on the fourth floor of McGill's McLennan Library; these include all of the literary archives of Artie Gold, Ken Norris, Endre Farkas, and myself. I agree with Ken Norris in the hope that someone who has access to John McAuley's literary papers donates them to the university, it would be a generous and important gift for present and future literary scholars; it would preserve something of John's literary and personal legacy. If you watch Tom`s video from that evening, you'll see that despite everything John was dealing with, Ritva's illness, John's reading at McGill University was a great reading, the poems he read were a showcase of his talent as a poet. Tom's video is the main visual document of John's public poetry readings. John was self-deprecating about public readings; in his poem "Poetry Reading"; he writes,

                     Years without a reading, no publishing, not much writing
                     as if the word really had gone out from Parnassus 

And then he continues, 

                     Some readers will even think he is dead or the next thing to it.
                     No one will want to talk to him nor he to them. . .
                     . . .
                     By the end of the reading, pale and shaken
                               I can only murmur,
                     "What's wrong with being second or third rate?" 

I want to show John's extensive involvement with poetry in those early days, and his lesser but still significant involvement that followed; I want to show that John participated in creating an open and inclusive poetry scene at a time when English language poetry was in decline in Montreal. John was never solely a traditional poet, he also has a substantial body of concrete and visual poetry. Looking back on things, John participated in the writing and performance of “Drummer Boy Raga”, on 16 April 1977 at Powerhouse Gallery; it was a group reading promoted by Tom Konyves. John's work was included in the anthology, published by Vehicule Press, Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (1978). John's Maker Press published books and he edited and published a literary magazine, "Maker"; he edited and published our first anthology, The Vehicule Poets (1979). John participated in our collective interview with Louis Dudek and published the interview with his Maker Press, A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (1980). Of course, John's work is included in Vehicule Days, An Unorthodox History of Montreal's Vehicule Poets (1993). John also read at our 2004 reading, C=a=b=a=r=e=t ==V=e=h=i=c=u=le, presented at La Cinquieme Salle of Place des Arts on 8 April 2004, and he was in the anthology of The Vehicule Poets_Now (2004). And John's work was included in Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (2007), edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift and published by Vehicule Press. In addition to the Yellow Door reading in 2013, John also read at Argo Book Shop when DC Books launched his 2013 title, All I Can Say for Sure. He read at both the Bleu Met literary festival reading in April 2018 and the Vehicule Poets' reading at Archives and Special Collections at McGill University, also in April 2018.

John and I used to correspond, beginning in 1974 and ending in 2018, up to 2014 our correspondence is archived in my literary papers at McGill University: there are five letters to John McAuley, in 1976 and 1979-1980; seven letters from John, 1974 to 1976; one letter in 1980; and then years of silence until two letters in 2003, a few letters between 2004 and 2006, and silence until 2010; writing this I reread his emails to me from 2013 to 2018. When John didn't respond to emails from Ken Norris or Endre Farkas I was asked to contact John, which I tried to do. Reading these more recent letters, 2013 to 2018, I even discovered an unpublished review John had written of my book Girouard Avenue (2009); he had been at the book launch for Girouard Avenue, at The Word Bookstore, and after the book launch we had walked along Milton Street, talking about the old days at Vehicule Art Gallery.

I tried to keep in touch with John but, after the Bleu Met reading, in late April 2018, it was with little success; after 2018 John's life was filled with care giving for Ritva. After the event at Bleu Met John and I sat in my car and he told me of Ritva's health situation and that he was her primary care giver; I commiserated with John, I know that care giving is constant solitary work, exhaustion, and worry. I never expected this would be the last time John and I would meet or speak together; I sent him letters and books but they were either returned by the post office or never acknowledged by him, if they were ever received. Ritva died in 2021 and then John's health began to decline.

Memories fade, some are authentic but many memories are forgotten or unreliable, and some things that we remember, in fact, never happened, they are invented by time. Writing this memorial has been a return to the past, a time to remember those years of publishing books and poetry magazines, of public readings, of knowing John McAuley, but it is also about the excitement of being young poets and committed and passionate about poetry. Other than being a highly talented poet, a dedicated teacher, a faithful and loving husband to Ritva, a loyal friend, my memory of John is that he was a good decent human being and that means everything.

                                                              Stephen Morrissey
                                                              Montreal • 20 April 2026

 

 

 

Montreal born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Véhicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 - 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married Vancouver poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995. Visit the poet at www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Jérôme Melançon : Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, by Mayra Bruneau Da Costa

Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, Mayra Bruneau Da Costa
Éditions Mains Libres, 2025

 

 

 

The title to Mayra Bruneau Da Costa’s second collection, “Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres” might translate as “Map of the apostles with two sugars.” It encapsulates the tone and the topic of the poems: they map out a separation and a series of encounters with men, and that amount of bitterness requires at least some sugar. They lay out men, each adoring in some way, or too eager to follow her, each adopting some position in relation to her body and the distance she has since taken from them. She displays both tenderness and sadness toward them, but also toward herself, bringing balance to the book through a constant teetering.

A deep self-awareness keeps the collection on track. Distance from herself allows her to maintain some distance from us and keep us in the role of readers rather than confidants. I felt a desire to say what isn’t meant to be shared, what’s held back out of decency and respect for her relationships.

The poems are mostly short and brought together tightly in eighty pages. We move through the separation from the father of the speaker’s children to moments of closeness with other men – there may be very few, there may be more, and she prohibits any such questioning by giving only extremely specific details about interactions and bodies, any of which could be amalgamated into two people, and addressing each in the second person singular. There is plausible deniability as to the identity of this you, the number of yous, their specificity, their coexistence – “how could I feel I had lost my way / when each of you / is a room in a house?” (comment me sentir égarée / quand chacun de vous / est une pièce de ma maison?, 27).

Around her separation, Bruneau Da Costa shows the stickiness and messiness of prying apart intertwined lives. Addressing her former partner in the second person like all the others, she places herself in the position of the deer in headlights and of a charging bull’s target. Yet both former partners are immobilized: “I smile when we end up / together in the same room / you seem even more striken than I am / in my straightjacket” (Je souris quand nous nous retrouvons / dans la même pièce / tu sembles encore plus atteint que moi / dans ma camisole de force, 29)

The two main clusters of poems are more or less divided by poems that borrow from ancient and contemporary mythologies. “To each their legends,” she writes. Nirvana, the golden fleece, Ariadne’s thread, Sun Tzu and Wu-Tang, tarot, Narcissus, Cinderella, the Gorgons, the Snow Queen, prayer, all appear for brief images, reigniting our myths. Bruneau Da Costa even mobilizes misunderstood and misappropriated symbols to display the cavalier manner we so often treat meaning, especially those of people(s) we do not take the time to understand but instead turn into our own stories.

Passing Haven

I hide in the map of tenderness
Carmen Santiago
to steal shards of you
to mould
an inukshuk a voodoo doll
I will leave with

  

Havre éphémère

Je me cache dans la carte du tendre
Carmen Santiago
à voler des éclats de toi
pour mouler
un inukshuk une poupée vaudou
avec laquelle je repartirai

When she speaks of the men she sleeps with, the speaker makes two fundamental aspects of their encounters clear. They both desire closeness, intimacy, and pleasure, but they each desire entirely different things: “I asked for nothing / you stroke the back of my neck / I make you want to be soft / you don’t quite want me / but are afraid of losing me” (je n’ai rien demandé / tu caresses ma nuque / je t’inspire la douceur / tu ne veux pas tout à fait de moi / mais redoutes de me perdre, 57).

And so it is her who leaves furtively or actively. Simply because there is nothing to keep her around. Likewise, there are no teachings, no lessons in these poems. Perhaps the speaker has difficulty being close to people (and she does recognizes something like that). Perhaps being close to people is difficult more generally, and the characters in the poems are full of character traits that can be read as endearing or infuriating depending on the tone that accompanies the readings.

This ambivalence is present throughout – “I made us into / foul cranberry cakes” (j’ai fait de nous / des gâteaux infects aux canneberges, 30) is as likely to be an adorable attempt or a complete disaster. Likewise, there is both relief and regret in “you were an octopus I was a ghost / and I frenched you like California / even though we were bitter” (t’étais une pieuvre moi un fantôme / pis je te frenchais comme la Californie / même si on était amers, 44), although there is also a tinge of humour since “on était amers” can be read “on était à’ mer” (à la mer), “we were at the sea.”

The first time I read the collection, I had an impression of joy, of freedom, of constant liberation from others accompanied by a kind of expected exasperation. The second time, I saw a profound sadness in the poems. And somewhere Mayra Bruneau Da Costa is shaking her head at me, happy with what she is doing, whatever that really is – stepping away from her character to breathe, finally but only for a moment.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.