More Than One
Homage, Maureen Scott
Harris
KFB, 2022
Knife Fork Book always publishes beautiful poetry chapbooks. If you’re a Canadian poet, you’ll likely agree that they’re gorgeous to hold in your hands, and then open to read, because it’s about quality all around—inside and out. Read Maureen Harris’s More Than One Homage and slip into the found poetry of a farmer’s diaries. Harris has taken her source material from a dear great-uncle’s farm diary for the first part of the collection, and then continued with a series of poems that pay homage to Robert Kroetsch, Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon, and Lyn Hejinian.
The end of the first section in the chapbook finds a note which explains the context for the pieces which have just come before it. The first poem, “Will’s Diaries: how to begin,” is a primer for how to enter the collection. Harris writes: “Start where you find yourself,” “Begin with the traces,” and “Disturb the silence of/the blank page.” Start there. Then consider the thought-provoking question: “How do you grow a past?” Apply it to your own life and family history.
The poet continues with a factual list that describes Will: “born in 1891 grade 3 education.” Then, a pointed list of January 1st dates that cover the New Year’s Eve turns of years from 1930 to 1936. Simple, ordinary jot notes of a life, really, with mention of chores, small dinners, and going to gather wood for a fire. Simple notes, but ones that would ensure survival in a time that was much harsher than the one in which we live now. Through this first piece, italicized bits of text are borrowed from Robert Kroetsch’s work as Harris creates a poetic waltz on the space of the page. There is a back and forth here, a call and response that has a sweet, nostalgically meditative tone to it.
The following two pieces of the initial poetic triptych are “Will’s Diaries: Wood (Winter)” and “Will’s Diaries: Clare’s black calf died, a Pastorale in 11 Months.” In the second of the three long poems, Harris diarizes Will’s life, using bits of found poetry to create her new homage to him. Each morning is a routine, an echo of previous ones, with nothing new. Here is a list of common chores that just need doing, no matter what else happens in the course of a day, from “fix stable” and “fetch hay” to “chop oats” and “fetch flour” to “kill pigs” and “fix hen house.” Reading the poems made me think of the infamous William Carlos Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” with its lines “So much depends upon…” On a farm, everything is dependent upon everything else. Nothing is ‘unto itself’ or in a silo. In an age of pandemics, there’s something comforting about that, the notion that—once upon a time—people seemed more aware of how cause and effect might work. They were not connected by the internet and social media, and perhaps were much better off as humans because of it.
The second part of the chapbook is a series of poems that pay homage to Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon, and Lyn Hejinian. Structurally, the first part of the collection is a call, perhaps, and the second part is a response, like a ‘Marco Polo’ call between two children in a summer outdoor pool. These last three pieces also use list of clear, sharp imagery. In “Go Ask Alice,” there is a visit to see the ballet. At the end of the evening, audience members spill out into the street as “the wind iced into us we didn’t wait/for the light clutching scarves hats scuttled/across the street in the pause between cars.” In “Signal to Babble: for Joe Burns, Audiologist,” there is an homage to sound, and to how our ears work, first in hearing, but also in how we listen carefully to what is said and unsaid—as all poets must. In “Small Homage to Sei Shonagon,” Harris pays tribute to the writings of a 990AD Japanese diarist who used lists in her own writings. Under the sub-heading of “things that circulate,” some references include: “the blood/gossip/newspapers and magazines/breath/money/high-flyers at a party/schoolchildren coming and going/words.” This list runs in a column up and down the page, so the reader’s eyes skip down it, feeling pulled further along into the poem.
The fine attention to detail continues in Harris’s last poem, which is an homage to Lyn Hejinian. The poet writes: “Walking to work this raw morning reading my life as if it were old tea leaves/scattered in a china cup, my mouth makes a silent O…my eyes falling—lighting—upon the large long-necked full-breasted bird flapping/silently past just above the treetops, goose.” The goose “seizes her eye,” carrying it “along the curve of its slow flight.” These are the patterns of the natural world that never stop, and Harris has written of how humans often forget this wonder, this beauty, all the while thinking that they’ll go on forever. They won’t, though, and that’s perhaps the irony of the human ego. In the meantime, we too often miss the beauty because we are too distracted to notice the tiny, most important things.
In its entirety, Maureen Scott Harris’s More Than One Homage is a thank you note to those writers who have come before, who have inspired and intrigued. her It is also a reminder to the reader to be more mindful, to think of how humans work within the grand scheme of things, and to take note of the fact that time passes much more quickly than we’d hope or imagine it does.
