McClelland
and Stewart, 2020
I
was excited when I read that Canisia Lubrin was coming to VERSeFest, Ottawa’s
annual poetry festival at the end of March. I have had the pleasure of hearing
Canisia’s mesmerizing reading at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in
2017 as part of the Basement Revue event, hosted by Jason Collett and Damian
Rogers. I loved her first book, Voodoo hypothesis, and her chapbook Augur (Gap
Riot Press, 2017).
Frankly,
I am envious of her ability to craft socially engaged poetry with strong
foundations and evocative images to articulate what is difficult to talk about,
to elicit or capture and communicate emotion, a shared feeling of helplessness,
and compassion in a fucked up world.
I
invited Canisia to do an interview with me for the Small Machine Talks, the poetry podcast
I co-host with a.m. kozak, to talk about the new book. She agreed and her publicist
kindly sent me the book last week, and I couldn’t put it down because it is so
compelling, well-written and relevant to our times.
Since
VERSeFest had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m sharing my
notes on this great book and urging
you to get a copy if you can. When the festival takes place again, I look
forward to hearing Canisia read, and all being well, to interview her for the
podcast.
The
Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart,
2020) is an important and timely follow up to Voodoo hypothesis
(Buckrider Books, 2017), Canisia’s debut collection, which I’ve already highly
praised and often.
The
Dyzgraphxst is an exceptional articulation of survival despite
everything: anti-colonialism, racism, climate crisis, oil greed. It is a celebration
of family, mothering, community, identity, an exploration of Blackness, erasure
and otherness. It evokes the consequences of forgetting history and the impact
on our 21st Century dystopian realities.
I
am reading The Dyzgraphxst during the time of the pandemic,
and I admit that this has influenced my response to the work. To be honest,
everything I’m reading, watching and hearing feels different in this time, has
a different resonance. I am inspired by this book and it has given me comfort
and things to think about.
Every
time I open the book, I find something different. There are so many layers to the
work and I’ve barely scratched the surface here.
I
am in love with the long poem format in general. And The Dyzgraphxst
excels as a long poem. To be engaging and readable, in my opinion, a long poem
needs anchors throughout the work: repeating motifs, themes and images, and a solid
framework or structure. And this is what we find in The Dyzgraphxst.
The
structure of The Dyzgraphxst is thoughtful and deliberate:
seven acts which explore/trouble/celebrate the I/i/eye. Within those seven
acts, titles and subtitles that read like their own list poem in the form of
questions: “Ain’t I at the Gate?/Ain’t I Nickname for Home?/Ain’t I Epistémè?
Ain’t I the Ode? Ain’t I Too Late?/Ain’t I a Madness/Ain’t I Again?”, a
prologue, a monologue and an epilogue, with many references to the concept of
logging, tracking or recording throughout (log your bones), the dream
and the return, and poems within poems as subtitles.
If
we examine the structure of the book more closely, we see regular and repeated
patterns, broken deliberately with other patterns. It’s almost like Morse code,
an SOS, or numerology, Biblical prophecy, call and response, a heartbeat and
breathing. What interrupts? What disrupts?
Each
act begins with a Roman numeral, followed by a poetic line with recurring words:
lift / log / bones/ new / utterly. The predominant form of the poem is the
tercet with some variation and break from the form.
Even
the use of the X in each act, the Roman number for ten, and the superscripts
feel like a pattern, perhaps some kind of exponential growth. Mathematicians
out there may care to weigh in. I am not one, but I do see the balance repeated
and I do make out a pattern.
Act
III has 40 dreams and returns, consecutively numbered, with an additional Dream
#41 that has been scratched out using a curve. Each act has a subtitle that
begins with “elsewhere called”: I – the means by which to burn; II. a matter of
fact; III. the transaction of dream and return; IV.to be; V. exhumations across town; VI.
archaelogy or case closed VII. the hereafter, or it’s just what we do. These
all serve to give the book momentum, the feeling of forward motion, while at
the same time the repeated patterns are circular.
Another
component of the structure is the contrasts and parallels of language, both as
images and as conceptual parallelism within the book. For every absence, there
is a presence, for every nightwork, daywork, for every vertical, a horizontal,
for every sharp, a sweet; otherness vs belonging, movement vs stillness, containment
vs spill. There’s a profound symmetry here. It creates a tension between each
opposing part and a coming together as well. The tension of attempting to survive while all
this shit is going on. And not just to survive but to love, to appreciate
beauty and art and music and one another.
The
dedication at the beginning of the book reads “For the impossible citizens of
this ill world.”
From
the “Prologue”:
dysgraphia[…]in this 6: 21 am breeze with someone/maybe you still
alive with familiar irresistible mystery where I choreographs | the manoeuvre
of to-come and give-way |where the world is full of reasons to push the back
seat down and set a life-force soaring back to its ragged world.
JeJune,
the only named character or the only named part of the character, is also part
of this symmetry, as a presence and an absence, “the character that never
leaves the stage. The character must always leave the stage.” p. 1, as part of
the I/i/eye and also as separate entity, which is the next thing I like about
the book—
The
use of I/i/eye is playful and ingenious, subtlety and carefully written. The use
of third person verb agreement to turn the I into a separate entity, yet still
blending with the lowercase first-person narrator (sometimes within the same
stanza or line): “I understand, here i am/the burned drop/of that telephone
beep” (p. 48)” and the direct address to JeJune. There is a twinning to the
subjects, which is part of the book’s symmetry and balance. The question of
identity-truth vs. fiction: “i am not what i say” (p. 48). “say I am where
someone who isn’t me sculpts me a legend;” (p. 57). the shift to “we” and the
power and empathy that this shift creates.
The
recurring imagery throughout the book adds to the sense of balance and helps to
reinforce the themes. For example, music and singing are repeated throughout as
a means of resistance or articulation of need or soothing: “where things are
drawn out by singing” (p. 30). an example of the ephemeral: “Aretha Franklin
today, another voice tomorrow” (p. 36) a swale of violinists (p. 48) , a tune
of dragonflies (p. 55) a cello, the father’s “maddening drum (p. 137), “the
calypsonian’s threnody” (p. 137), afro-beats (p. 74), the coming together of
voices in song, “the sung-of citizen” (p. 150), “voices joined and soothing,”
“I let you sicken me with song” (p. 64), “contraband of hallelujahs” (p. 125).
The
role of language is explored throughout. It both joins and separates people and
is often not able to communicate: the tongue (split or percussed), concealment,
saying and not saying, the unsayable. Creole is both lullaby and resistance for/of
its speakers. It is sometimes accompanied by a paraphrase and sometimes not.
There is also French and Latin in the text, colonialism, empire and anti-colonialism,
community.
Even
the title and the repeated refrain of the graph in the prologue, monologue and
epilogue: handwriting, difficulty writing, graphics as exclusion, the grapheme,
division into classes, hierarchies.
The
book portrays resistance to colonialism, witnessing and calling out: Dream #21
(p. 74): “the toiling where the/money is, the power is, why we/still wonder
where to leave our/voices for safekeeping”.
Here
are only a few examples of the strength and beauty of this text:
“what is love but the hand returning to
claim the dust red, white, black as a coal-swept evening” p. 15
“how much trust to have in the idea of our
voices altogether calling home calling home” (p. 30)
“In the drizzle and in the tune of the
dragonflies and in the tune of the two or Three small sons lit up with the same
charge of what the world heaves in” (p. 55)
Even
the way Canisia acknowledges who she refers to as “companions”: “Poets,
musicians, painters, writers and thinkers” who anchored the writing, how she cites
specific pages as “aiding pages” shows a sense of camaraderie and community, a
reminder of how art helps in times of trouble. How creativity begets
creativity.
These
notes are nowhere near enough to adequately communicate the skill, strength and
timeliness of the Dyzgraphxst. I urge you to get
the book and to read everything of the poet’s you can get your hands on.
Amanda
Earl
is primarily a lover, a friend and a reader. For more information about Amanda’s
writing and publishing, please visit AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on
Twitter @KikiFolle.