rob mclennan : lot, by Sarah de Leeuw

lot, Sarah de Leeuw
Caitlin Press, 2022

conversations on the long poem

 

 

 

 

Prince George, British Columbia poet and non-fiction writer Sarah de Leeuw’s creative work has long been engaged with latitudes and longitudes, an ecopoetic attuned to specific placings, markings and meanings, and she extends these engagements through her newly-published long poem lot (Qualicum Beach BC: Caitlin Press, 2022). lot is a book-length structure of accumulated bursts that explore and articulate the relationships between land and place, and the people that live there, composing a lyric formed out of carefully-spaced space, pauses, words and short even staccato phrases. In a long poem on Haida Gwaii, renamed by Europeans as the Queen Charlotte Islands, de Leeuw writes of lots, licenses and paperwork, moving through land and history, and how external designations direct the ways in which we interact with the land, from our depictions to our comprehensions. She simultaneously manages a rush of lyric thought and the sense of one word carefully and deliberately placed after another. As she writes, early on in the collection: “Form a line / from first word to last. // Form a line / from right to wrong. // Form a line / from left to right. // Form a line / from start to end. // From dark to light. / From damp to dry. // Form a line / from one to none.”

The idea of mapping is foundational in de Leeuw’s ongoing work, from her debut non-fiction title, Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2004) to her debut poetry collection, geographies of a lover (NeWest Press, 2012), both of which were constructed around topography, latitudes and longitudes, reminiscent of Ottawa (then still in Alberta) poet Monty Reid’s The Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), where he wrote out specific Alberta geographies through the lyric, or even the structure of Robert M. Stamp’s anthology of Alberta poets, Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta With the Poets (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2005). Another personal favourite of these types of structures is the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe’s infamous and thoroughly-researched Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot (London ON: Brick Books, 1995), “a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario.” Through finely-tuned lyric threads, de Leeuw maps the same detail, allowing the smallest fragments and discoveries to help determine her broad strokes, as her book-length poem opens:

Early on.
I learn.

The world.
Began here.

Begins.
Here.

As she writes as part of her acknowledgments at the back of the collection: “The genesis of this book is a 2013 conversation I had in Prince George, British Columbia, with poet and literary critic C.S. Giscombe. To say ‘thank you’ would not do justice to my feelings of gratitude….” It is interesting she cites Giscombe as a prompt for this collection: C.S. Giscombe is an American poet who has worked extensively around mapping and naming, geographies, race, class, sexuality and gender, including his interest in Northern British Columbia, something he discussed at length with Prince George poet Barry McKinnon in 2001 as part of episode eighteen of Phillytalks, a series organized by Louis Cabri and Aaron Levy as an event at the Kelly Writers House (the audio and text of such is archived here http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/phillytalks/Philly-Talks-Episode18.php). As Giscome wrote to introduce his Giscome Road (Funks Grove IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), this was a long poem composed “about the constellation of places in northern British Columbia that were named, directly or indirectly, for John Robert Giscome. Born in Jamaica in 1831 & coming to B.C. with the California black migration of 1858 ‘he mined the Carbioo and the Omineca country with considerable success.’” Giscombe’s poem writes: “The past is a skein of rocks. // The past is watery. // The past is tree’d. // The past is a list of houses. // The past is a fat metaphor sitting down to dinner. // The road so rocky & so long (the song repeated)[.]” Compare that to de Leeuw, as she writes, mid-way through lot: “I was still all the ideas // before me, my mother / and my father // and their mothers / and fathers too // who also took land so / I am those horse hooves // over ground, I am guns / and I am scripts // and I am bricks / and I am whips // and I am pelts / and I am crops // and I am trains / and I am cloth // and I am lumber / and I am mills // and I am houses / and I am bought // on payment / and I am schools // and I am grocery / stores and I am flour [.]” de Leeuw’s mappings through history, repetition and short, sketched cadences feel closer to Giscombe’s attentive lyric than, say, work by other Northern British Columbia poets, whether the extended lyric ecopoetic of Rob Budde or the late Ken Belford, Donna Kane’s metaphor-driven narrative view of the stars, or even through McKinnon’s own engagement with the destructive industry of his adopted city via the long poem Pulp/Log (Caitlin Press, 1991).

As well, there has been an interesting conversation around the poetics of space, and the poetics of place, over the past two decades or so, shifting away from what can be seen in hindsight as an exclusionary space of white settler-stretches, evolving (one might say, finally) into a larger conversation that includes elements of colonialism, race, privilege, occupation, original occupants and land protectors. Writing adapts and responds to thinking, after all, and de Leeuw attends to the multitude, and the polyphony of the land she occupies and how each are framed. She understands, perhaps better than many, about the importance of allowing those different perspectives to fully comprehend their impact upon such geographies, as well as their people. As she writes:

In 1776 Captain Cook landed.
He was unable to define an island.

He did not claim the country
for the British crown. Nor

did he name it. In 1787
Captain Dixon took possession

in the name of King George
and called it Queen Charlotte Islands.

There they lie, waste, fallow
and yet marvellously productive.

As we are told by Francis Poole
the only educated Englishman

who has ever lived
on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

He had no government protection
against the hostility of the natives.

The coast of Skincuttle
is very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), is now available for pre-order, scheduled for release on May 15. He is currently working on crafting the final draft of his suite of pandemic-era essays, composed during the first three months of original lockdown. Two weeks away from forty-twelve years old, he has decided to remain in his forties until the pandemic ends, likely entering his fifties “already in-progress.”