“The
paradox inherent in travel, the response system, the gall, the privilege, the
gifts, the assaults and accounting.” — Tawhida Tanya Evanson
Midnight Arrival
I’m writing this in Seattle, Washington, in the home of strangers, a young couple I’ve never met. They are in New York, staying in the home of other strangers. Last night, Cheryl and I arrived in Seattle just after midnight. We went to a hotel where we showed a number to the front desk and they gave us a backpack. In it was a fob, clicker and keys in the side pocket. This was the arrangement. We drove the final five blocks and used the clicker to open the parking garage gate and then we used the fob to get into the building (though at first we weren’t sure which entrance to use in the large underground parking) and then we used the same fob to get into the apartment where we are staying for a week. I feel like I’m part of some espionage operation though I don’t think Cheryl and I could pass for Nitin and Shivani and I have no idea what my instructions are. I mean I know I have to write and I’ve brought three books of poetry from Canada with lines that I’ve written out to pass along to strangers. At the end of the week, we have a two-day music festival to go to and so before then, I’m going to try to make myself feel less of a tourist by sharing lines of poetry from Patrick Grace, DS Stymeist and Jess Housty.
Day 1: Lune Cafe || Deviant
I have the best memory
of what it means
to be gay
at the end
of summer.
We’ve
arrived by city bus to Pioneer Square and I couldn’t feel like more of a
tourist. There are groups of tourists galore on most every street corner being
led by loud guides. We’re hungry so we’ve ducked into Lune Cafe, where we order
from a touchscreen which has pictures of all our options. At the end, there’s
an option for tipping, but I’m not sure who this would be for. There is no
contact with anyone working here. I sit and write beneath a wall of astroturf
suggesting something green. In neon are the words: glowww (with three w’s.) The
word is on other walls in the phrase ‘let’s glow!’
Words matter but it’s also the person (or
voice) behind the words that’s even a bigger part of what matters. In Patrick
Grace’s first book of poetry Deviant, a loose narrative is set up from the
first page, where
It began in a field where two boys
played in a circle of melting snow.
In this opening poem “Why Not,” an almost pastoral setting is created in an alliteration of “finches and foxes” “while the rest of the world / pressed buttons and touched screens.” Moving forward in couplets, the poem presents two boys throwing a baseball that they’ve found. One of them hurtles it at the other’s ribs for no particular reason. This escalates to the ball being thrown back within packed snow at the other’s face. The pastoral descends into a singular emotion: “boys learn the edges // of what they hold in their hands // when angered.” The pastoral opening (“creeping phlox flourished”) has been replaced by something cold and hard.
This mix of longing for something lovely and someone beloved with violence seems to be the central tension of the book. The way through is in finding the right words. “Dasterdly” is the second poem in the collection, one which begins with the speaker learning the word from his mother in describing a “devilish boy in red shorts” and the speaker’s uncertain stirrings of desire. By the end of the first section, this mix is blended in the last stanza of a poem about
learning to taste
another boys’ spit and dreaming
it could be warm, secreted
special, just for my mouth.
This poem “Nightcall” is one of my favourites in the collection. The geography is the most precise (“wandering up the hill from Kits Beach”) and the language play is at its loveliest (“banana-scented sunscreen sheen.”) There’s even a word made up for the occasion of the poem: Blundersight, which seems to be a portmanteau of blunder and blindsighted. It’s as if the tension between beauty and the ugliness of violence forces a new language into being.
The titular deviance of Grace’s collection mixes throughout the rest of the book in poems written in mostly couplets, tercets, quatrains or just single long stanzas. In a more varied stanzaic form, “A Violence” circles around an inquiry into an incident of domestic violence, with the speaker asking: “did they believe you / did the man in blue believe / another man / committed the violence.” This section (there are five in total, like fingers in a fist?) goes on to explore this toxic relationship. Fear, nightmares and the distancing language and cold, biassed word choices from those who are supposed to serve and protect dominate this section.
What heals someone after a lifetime of minor and major traumatic encounters? This books suggests language that reenvisions a life. The last section has four poems, the first one beginning:
At first the world was body.
I didn’t question the gold
hardening its rivers inside me.
The last poem recalls the image of a gap, a hole, a tunnel that has run throughout the book as a place of solace and the poem ends on greenness and brightness:
In the parking lot the older kids killed it
with their stories, their names, their viridity.
Miles away, a boy dove into a river of gold,
his body flexuous, extend under the sun.
Perhaps, I’m being overly optimistic in my reading. There is some ambiguity throughout the book, which may reflect the speaker’s coming to terms with who he is (ambiguity as a stand in for ambivalence?) What I love about the collection as a whole is the reworking of images and lines. One of the poems near the very end seems to be written from lines found throughout the collection. The obsession that drives any writer in trying to understand something is on full luminous (and ‘burning’) display.
Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.