I.
DEEP CURATION
In its most basic iteration, Deep Curation is a term I
came up with to describe a project I’ve become very excited about over since
2018, a project which also combines my writing practice with my curatorial
practice—intertwining writing, reading and curating poetry.
As some of you may know, I used to organize the
monthly Resonance Reading Series in Montreal for six years between 2012 and
2018, and that’s really where my curatorial practice began. The format there
was quite traditional, in the sense of inviting four to six authors to present
10-15 minutes of work of their choosing. So while I was providing access to the
stage and mic, and I organized the readers in a strategic order of appearance,
the work that was presented was chosen solely by the readers themselves.
In the visual arts, curators have theorized a rift
between what is called the curational
and curatorial dimensions of
organizing an exhibition, and this is extremely applicable to a poetry reading
as well. The curational is basically all the practical, organizational concerns
like booking a venue, ensuring a good sound system, advertising the event and
so on. The curatorial, though, is the dynamic and interactive space that is
created by the presentation of creative work and the reception and kind of
energy exchange happening between the author and the audience.
I realized after some time that what I was falling
prey to—and this is really what most literary event planning does—is limiting
the curator’s role to the curational, and I was offering all curatorial agency
to the readers. This is, arguably, a valid division of labour. Nevertheless,
over the years, I started thinking more critically about what this division of
labour means for the poetry reading as a forum, about the responsibility of the
curator to represent work and vouch for work that they didn’t necessarily
choose. And so I became increasingly fascinated by the potential of poetry
readings with heightened curatorial
agency also.
This
interest was further sparked when I saw an exhibition called Reading Exercises, curated by Katrie
Chagnon, at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal some years ago in
2015 which was all about the act of reading. So here was a fascinating anomaly—while
writers insist on putting themselves on stage to read any which way, the fine
arts was stepping up, taking the act of reading and presenting it in a fully
mediated setting. Occasionally I still think of some of these works and I’ll
take a moment to describe a couple of them for you. One work had, for example,
recordings of people with drastically different accents reading the same text
over different speakers placed at the extremities of a room. So as one walked
through the space, some voices become more audible than others, while the
general feel of the room was mostly just chaos, voices mixing and merging with
one another. Another video project showed women from the waist up reading a
text, while beneath the table they were being stimulated with a vibrator,
implying that as they were reading, they were becoming increasingly aroused,
struggling to concentrate on enunciating the text. This last example is
obviously kind of extreme, but in both cases the listening experience of the
reading experience is highly mediated. The curatorial agency behind the
experience is pronounced. Someone chose people with different, jarring accents
to perform a certain text, and these recordings were then choreographed through
the strategic placement of speakers in the gallery space to create a very
particularized aural chaos. Again, the women in the video are placed in a
compromising position which changes the way they are able to act out a smooth
rendition of a text, and the viewer is led through the humour of the scenario
to experience an intellectual, sexual act.
The
goal of Deep Curation is not necessarily to create a dramatic performance, but
I think something can be learned from the exhibition space in terms of placing
work by the same and different artists adjacent to one another in order to
combine their generative potential. As Erín Moure and Karis Shearer write in a
collaborative essay called “The Public Reading,” “The
sounding of poetry, the choice of poems, the choice to elide lines or place
poems beside each other that are not beside each other in the book, is a
creative act.” They’re talking about the placement of poems at a traditional poetry
reading, so how much more intense is the combination of texts in the context of
Deep Curation?!
The
strength of considering how artworks or poems go together, enter into dialogue
with another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one
another…is endless. That is not to say that the goal is to embellish the poetry
presented with any theatrical additions (like lighting, choreography, gesture,
voice projection, etc.). The idea behind Deep Curation is rather to support the
minimalism of the poetry reading as a genre—poets on stage reading their
work—to present that poetry within an interpretative structure, to expand the
individual poetic voice to the parallel projects of peers, and to
self-referentially emphasize the act of listening so integral to any poetry
event.
Deep
Curation allows for poetry readings that are coherent, dynamic, and
interconnected with a driving thematic, narrative, or philosophical arc to the
whole. Works presented are now deliberately picked to be in conversation with
one another, creating links from excerpt to excerpt or from poem to poem, but
also projecting a clear progression of content from the beginning through the
reading’s development to its finale.
At this point, I’m going to shift gears into part two
of this talk and share a short Deep Curation script that I created to
illustrate what I’m rambling on about. As you can follow on the handout I gave
you, I combined excerpts of my poetry—and I think my poems are in the
majority—with that of poets I love, namely Etel Adnan, Dionne Brand, and Joanne
Kyger. I have excerpted down to the line, creating a poetic progression on the
subject of mountains, less pastoral than discursive. Leading from mountains as
language and intelligence, to mountains as woman and body, to mountains as
gentleness and openness.
To provide slightly more context, I should also
mention that Adnan’s excerpts are from her collections Journey To Mount Tamalpais, Night, and Surge; Kyger’s work is from a Selected
Poems anthology called As Ever;
and Brand’s work is from her newest publication The Blue Clerk.
My own work excerpts a few lines from my collection Ekke, but also includes more recent
poems, in particular two long poems called “To The Woodcut Above My Writing
Desk” and “Skin and Meat Sky.” There are many influential mountains and hills
in my life, but specifically Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, has
really come to embody a form of geographical presence for me. As some of you
may know, I often spend a month or two a year there and the studio that I’m
lucky to inhabit at these times has a 180 degree view onto Table Mountain,
which is truly a mystical, temperamental force of landscape. And then last year
I attended a residency in Spain, which happened to be located along the Mont
Serrat mountain range and I spent hours every afternoon walking and climbing in
this mountain and really achieved a level of intimacy with the mountain there.
So some writing came of these mountains and they continue to form my practice
and curatorial practice, as you’re about to hear.
II.
MOUNTAINS, A DEEP CURATION EXPERIMENT
A limited
edition mountain poem, bequeathed
to the
head of the poet (KdP)
Heading
towards the garden which is the museum
this
ontological greenness
mountains
are a form of ascension (KdP)
Mountains
rise in us, as language does … So mountains are languages and languages are
mountains (EA)
Skip
words
over the landscape
as it
were
a lake
(KdP)
If it is
not a mountain, it is not a meaning (KdP_
in this mountain basin
working
overtime to understand (JK)
the
mountain reveals a perfect Intelligence within the universe (EA)
Do not
climb that mountain unless you know it needs you (EA)
The
soft-jagged edge of the mountain range
where I
walk daily for three weeks, then leave
encumbered
by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder. (KdP)
The
author finds it hard to rise in the mornings, whatever she is carrying lies as
a boulder on her forehead when she opens her eyes, though it is invisible to
anyone else. (DB)
The
mountain is an animal wounded on its way to the sea, its limbs grasping the
earth. I call it ‘The Woman’ (EA)
Oh! she’s
a poet…
Who was
that woman? (JK)
Each
woman is a mountain. I remember those barren hills, ochre, yellow, amber-like,
dry and crissing under the feet, quivering on warm nights, shrieking in pain in
summers of sunlike violence (EA)
I ransack
my vacancy. Set myself apart from all the holy
mountains
I’ve consumed. The mouth of the river
roils
perpendicular to my opinion. Joanne Kyger’s mountain,
its tight
poetic gestures dipping into mundane detail.
Etel
Adnan’s mountain much smaller than expected
on
canvas, coloured facets of landscape pastel nuance.
Ramana
Maharshi’s mountain, a ventricular coursing,
a cavity
landslide dipping through eyes that are
the currency
for an intermediary in the colour wheel.
Paul Cézanne’s
mountain fading slowly away, this repetition
called
obsession, called passion, called devotion.
Cecil
Skotnes’ mountain which is my mountain, it’s the one I look
out on
even when it’s not there or I’m not there because
it is
always there, it is my ability to be there that fluctuates. (KdP)
The
softness of the sky envelops the mountain with solicitude (EA)
Freshness
of tumbling waters
purity of mountain air (JK)
It
is inner luxury, of golden figures
that
breathe like mountains do
and whose skin is made dusky by stars (JK)
I stumble
over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains.
I’d like
to posit a theory that we’re all descendants
of
headstones (KdP)
III. READING AS CURATING AS WRITING
To segue into the third and final part of this talk, I
should note that my illustration of Deep Curation today is a little different
from the three sets of readings that I’ve organized so far with Canisia Lubrin,
Aaron Boothby, Erin Robinsong, Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, and Katherine
McLeod—in that usually the authors are present themselves and the poetry is
passed back and forth between readers according to the script. Today, obviously
my one voice has carried many different voices. I was debating the pros and
cons of this point to myself quite a bit, and then realized that this might
actually be a good thing in the context of what I have to say today.
What I mean is—Deep Curation, from the perspective of
the curator and in terms of its curatorial impetus, showcases the interactive
vectors of energy between the act of reading and selecting passages, becoming a
way of writing new threads collectively. What I mean is that the process of
reading and selecting becomes writing. And I would argue that through the act
of Deep Curation, reading becomes writing on two different levels.
First, reading becomes writing through phrases and
lines and passages that are combined to create a syntax of thematic and
affective interconnection. In other words, my act of reading as the curator of
this Deep Curation project embodies a form of writing and creating something
new. Knitting together keywords and themes to create a new literary context.
One example of this reading to writing process would
be noticing and rearranging poetic lines with the same word to clip disparate
sections together. Take, for example, the following two lines.
the head of the poet
Heading towards the garden
These are both my lines, but they are from totally
different sections of a substantially long poem.
In this case the word head as noun or as verb creates a flow.
A less literal example would be something like the
following combination of my line, Kyger’s and Adnan’s.
If it is not a mountain, it is not a meaning
in
this mountain basin
working overtime to understand
the mountain reveals a perfect Intelligence within the
universe
Here the same word doesn’t repeat to shape the
continuity, but the implication of meaning,
understanding, and Intelligence does
offer an almost mystical sense of this intellectual, theoretical entity which
is the mountain, as interpreted by three actually radically different poets,
yet converging here in poetic concerns.
The creativity inherent to this kind of reading
process invokes some wonderful passages I’ve been collecting over the years on
generative reading by authors I like. Virginia Woolf, wrote, for example, in
her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” that “The time to read poetry is when
we’re almost able to write it.” I can really associate with this sentiment!
When you’re reading a strong book of poetry, every line seems to be a call to
action, to start writing something yourself. In these instances, reading catapults
you right onto a blank page and starts filling it up.
Similarly, Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text suggests that the best way of reading is
when you “look up often, to listen to
something else”—this seems contradictory, but it is also really on point. I
think Barthes is gesturing towards a kind of reading which makes you think of
other things not because it is boring and allows your mind to wander, but
because it opens up your mind to a myriad other related topics, and forms
pleasurable, creative connections. It’s that kind of hyperactive, sometimes
caffeinated, way of thinking when everything seems easy, when the mind can make
radical leaps logically, and when reading becomes a form of making through the
production of these intellection relationships.
My final example is Moyra Davey, who is actually
mostly a visual artist, but also works quite a bit with text and script, and
she wrote a wonderful essay with photographs to illustrate called “The Problem
of Reading.” Here she kind of works her way through the question of how to decide
which books to read and she progresses ecstatically to the conclusion that
books suggest themselves to the reader as links form and subjects of interest
organically formulate themselves. So in a way she’s arguing that even when one
isn’t, say, in academia and researching a particular topic with its reading
list of related books, the books one ends up reading, create a progressive line
of thought and development through topics and connections that the reader’s
brain shapes for itself. She then synthesizes these thoughts, suggesting that
“the most compelling vision of reading is […] the one that implies a relation
to writing, to work.”
For me, we’ve made a detour and returned to Deep
Curation here because in a sense, reading is always a project of selection. On
a deep, subliminal level, my reading eye is attuned to certain interests and
even without realizing it, I’m generating memory pockets of material, residual
images that maybe someday I’ll need to revisit.
I know that I’m making many grand claims over here and
talking without any kind of scientific backup, and that’s part of the joy of
being a poet! But think, though, of how differently different readers engage
with texts, how their different reading trajectories inform an approach to
those texts. To provide an example, I was recently invited to write a
multi-part review of Dionne Brand’s The
Blue Clerk for The Puritan, and
Alexei Perry Cox, Linzey Corridon and myself each wrote a 500-word piece about
the book from a perspective that intrigued each of us respectively. I wrote
about language and its vitality; Linzey wrote about post-coloniality; Alexei
about aesthetics and ethics. And although I could clearly see how each of these
approaches were completely valid readings of The Blue Clerk, I was still amazed at some of the quotations
extracted, like I had zero recollection of ever reading some of the passages
used to back up interpretation. I am so attuned to noticing work on language,
ars poetica, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetic diction…that that
is exactly what stayed with me, what was meaningful to me.
In the same vein, my interest in the female embodiment
of intelligence, especially through radical integration into the landscape, is
so great that somehow I have been able to combine poetry as disparate as the
Beat generation feel of Kyger’s work with the philosophical, mystical edge of
Adnan’s with the narrative quality of Brand’s, and to create an apparent
continuity of both subject and voice. I should also note that I don’t see any
of these women as being direct influences on my work, or rather, I’ve never set
out to emulate their writing. Our concerns have overlapped only in the sense
that I have been able to extract passages and place them parallel to one
another in such a way that formulates a collective interpretation of our work.
A mountain range of words is created, incrementally in moments of silent
reading, through the tectonic undercurrent of thought processes relating to the
writing of diverse authors and melding, molding and manipulating them into a
connected script of difference.
After much wandering, I now want to return to my
second point as to how reading becomes writing through Deep Curation. I’d like
to suggest that the act of reading a Deep Curation script out loud is also an
instantiation of writing, that enunciating words out loud together creates a
new text. Suddenly the words of different authors are combined, not only in
their juxtaposition and resulting interconnectedness, but in the sense of
fusing dialogue into monologue. With multiple authors on stage at
the same time vocalizing and interweaving their words, an intimate act of
listening happens between those authors as well. A concentrated depth forms
with authors listening to keep track of the script, to know when to start, when
to stop. But this also initiates a kind of listening that steps into another
poet’s words and momentarily inhabits it, understanding through sharing the
instant of an author’s poetic articulation.
In this sense, Deep Curation embodies a wonderful kind
of constant oscillation between the original identities of the authors, and
their recontextualization. Of course, there’s an ethical question of authorship
and I’m not suggesting that a Deep Curation script should ever concede authorship
to the curator. Not at all.
The process is stranger than that. The excerpts of
poems side by side retain their autonomy as works of Kyger, Adnan, Brand and so
on, while simultaneously residing in a collective, novel and also inanimate
authorship. The new author is not me, or whoever the curator might be. The
curator might facilitate growth between the works of authors, but those works
themselves seem to flourish in their new proximity, to saturate a whole new
work with interpretative possibility.
To circle back briefly to the distinction between the
curational and the curatorial, I might end my talk today by suggesting that the
placement of fragments of poetry by different authors onto a page together is a
kind of curational, organizational strategy. Reading becomes writing through
the inscription of that potential. And then I will further propose that the
moment of reading the Deep Curation script out loud stands as a curatorial
moment of reading as writing, a dynamic, relational instance of authorship. The
curator’s work, the authors’ poetry, the script, the verbal enunciation, the
audience, your listening [your reading], all these factors and certainly others
too, contribute to a poetic rendition at once egoless and authorial, free and
formalized, read and written.
Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and
shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Klara du Plessis’
debut collection Ekke was released from Palimpsest Press. Her second
book, Hell Light Flesh, is forthcoming Fall 2020. Klara is a PhD English
Literature student at Concordia University, a researcher for SpokenWeb, and
currently expanding her curatorial practice to include experimental Deep
Curation poetry reading events, an approach which places poets’ work in
deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward
the poetic product. She lives in Montreal and Cape Town.
Photo credit: Jean Dreyer