And the Calgary Tower
sticks up in the sky / Like a giant fist raised up with all its might / And the
Calgary Tower is shining in the night / Like the mast of a ghost ship / On its
inaugural flight
—Rae
Spoon, “My Heart is a Piece of Garbage. Fight Seagulls! Fight!!”
I’m thinking about an essay I wrote for
a literary textiles call. It was a bit too, well, rigorous, I think, for the
“cross-stitching the word cunt is emancipatory” kind of poem-y stuff the open
call actually wanted.
Thinking about how if Derek takes this piece, it’ll be the second time I’ve written a piece for him that describes a failed earlier piece, two for two[1].
The root-work for this second failed piece actually pokes at Derek’s own ethos, or at least one declaration of his work that I think, and hope, isn’t totally representative of his poetics[2]. I think poets making big declarations know they shouldn’t be doing that. But how else to inveigle the grants bodies, the prestigious arts retreats and academic teaching positions.
When I was dating more often, before caregiving and my own unwellness had stripped the screw of my ambition for the foreseeable future, it was usually people with BFAs that would approach me before I approached them. Something about me being a writer that cannot be subsumed, a little cute bezoar for the literary community. Too mad, too mad. These partners and dates and flings and glancing encounters, thinking me an artist-writer, not a writer like they imagined writers were [insufferable, bourgeois, dumb, constantly inspired (not compelled but inspired), typewriter-owning, who knows].
One of these partners told me about a class they took with Derek at (the then named) ACAD. They said they stopped their own writing, and their own zine-making, after that course. They asked if all of CanLit was like Derek.[3] They asked me who it was who read CanLit,[4] “other than you, I mean.” And then they got afraid, they were worried I felt implicated (I wasn’t quite sure in what). And I’ve never been a part of this world, really, not a Toronto person, I’ll never be nominated and then have to sigh and very visibly withdraw from the Gillers, I’ll never write something that’s so nationalist and species-death affirming that I have to worry about a wide audience of practitioners who are also my friends who are collaborators in the ugly, evil sense of the word.
I don’t think I could compose something that a city like Calgary would willingly project along the neck of the Calgary Tower; I preferred the original branding, Husky Tower. It’s a funnier name, whether or not you deliberately misread the context of husky.
I liked that the relationship to our province’s extractionist death-doula JOI was visible in the naming. “Professional Writers” very loudly trucking in dissent, trading in revolutionary jargon while tweeting out affirmations of the Booker prize winner’s speech, no longer the Man Booker[5], because the new billionaires are humble, “ethical” billionaires.[6]
Our billionaires are more ethical than your billionaires. Our Jim Ball-Silly Atwood Gibson money is fine, his whole fraud thing is fine; of course fraud is fine to a community of writer-investors being ground to apolitical impotence in the prestige-MLM.
Petroliana logos are part of an age of visuality that had actual design sensibility. I feel myself beginning to fetishize advertising as Derek does, too. I like Husky a lot, but I love Black Cat cigarettes.
I made this rug—or these rugs, depending on the velocity of what I do here, the energy I can spare after working while unable to work, caregiving while absolutely deprived of self-care in any sense of the term—with a tufting gun.
I made a Black Cat bootleg rug for my dad by hand when I was younger. I hooked half in a hoop on a ferry ride from NL to NS, to attend poetry weekend, with a St. John’s poet, Clay Everest, who was a great travel companion. The second half I hooked in the rain on the return trip, while Clay took a leg of driving.
I tufted a bootleg Harley Davidson rug for my dad with my ex (the one who took a class with Derek and then stopped writing). Ex afraid they had implicated me with a tradition that Derek is really only abstractly tied to, is in some ways a gracious facilitator for but not so much a practitioner of in the main.
I think about that “failed” lit textiles essay I wrote. That then, I characterized the tufted rug boom (now over I hope, or disappeared from my algorithms at least) as pathetic, a way to strip rug making of everything that mattered: lanolin on your hands, real wool and less acrylics, the migration, the convoy, that, like the best poems [long-poems], could not be accelerated or finished on a whim. That you had to have an idea, and hold onto it as it changed, you had to work with the work you’d put in. ‘The Rug’ exceeded ‘The Poem,’ in that it was much more difficult to undo, to hide the scaffolding. That choice was permanent, in other words, actual choice.
Thinking I’m too tired now. My pain too high most days to hook by hand. Thinking now of the tufting gun less as a cheat, and more as a crutch, in the sense that a crutch keeps you on your feet; what a curious derogatory connotation it’s acquired[7]. It’s an accessibility tool.
An accessibility tool though the tufting gun is destructive. And it’s heavy. It hurts the parts of my back where my angel wings would sprout were I really a part of visible cherishable CanLit. Thinking about how I don’t call it carving, but I am learning to shave the rugs.
Shave because that’s not sculptural like carve. Akin to ~TransFem~ upkeep, shaving. Let all the ugly out. Let all the unnerving charm out. Beveled buzz buzz. Canterbury Tales audiobook in the ear buds, the razor shave done but the ears compensated, tinnitus amok, the ground floor signal completely unreal, everything sound shorn paper for fifteen minutes until I acclimatize to quiet again.
Ears undone, and wingmount so fucking tired, but my hands are okay somehow with the machines, guns and razors. Machines making rug more like my brain, my genderbad body. Not a cheat but a crutch.[8] Some sad cyberpunk, this vision.
Maybe it’s the farm in me, that a rattling machine, the clunking music of a PTO Tractor or the numbness bestowed by ride-on mower’s steering wheel or the care-demanding danger of welding torches, maybe it’s that nasty tactile work in me that makes light work of this machine, somehow lighter even than the handheld hook.
Gord Downie held onto Man Machine Poem as a thought, it changed as he held onto it. From a song title on the 2012 record Now For Plan A, then the 2016 album with the song’s name for its title entire.
This ‘short thought’ over a thousand words already, yeesh.[9]
Downie was an Aquarius too. I don’t believe in that. But I believe in that.
Revise: Them. Machine. Poem.
Me, a them like me, citing alsoquarius Downey, CanLit PopPoet laureate.
Me holding onto that essay, holding onto that anger and that work I did. Onto the gun for dear life.
Thinking now, less to make a rug of moat or bailey, but what’s in front of me: Oubliette.
But I’m not the whole way down there, not yet.
[1] Derek
and I chatted about this piece actually, but he doesn’t publish work that talks
about his own work at The Minute Review,
which makes a certain sort of sense! Shout out to Minute, though.
[2] Re:
advertising, poetry and velocity, enticement
[3] A funny
position, given Derek is part of
CanLit in an entrenched way, but is especially not representative if sampled
for a cross-section.
[4] Two of
them were reading or had read Karen Solie’s The
Road in is not the Same Road Out. I wonder how that got into the BFA
baddies ecosystem.
[5] Of
course the Gillers dropped Scotia Bank as a name but not a sponsor.
[6] Where
oh where is my ethical billionaire
handout?
[7] It’s
not new news that we hate disabled people, but it is hard to see it baked into
the language.
[8] I
wonder if Derek is too tired to lift the lid of a flatbed scanner somedays. Too
weary to peel and apply Letraset, precious and non-renewable as oil, some days.
I wonder this and am not being facetious. I wonder this potently enough to
footnote it. I wonder if Derek winces from the first-name basis I’m bullying
into this review, having met IRL just the once. I wonder if he knows this is a
barbed kinship I feel, gratitude for his outsider work, his being in Alberta,
however difficult I am as a mad poet.
[9]
Footnotes are free from word-count. Footnotes are free from immediate
recognizability, from commercial palatability. I love footnotes. So crunchy, so
texty. They’re fun to write and leave. I wonder if the 1K outpaced the footnote
after I added the bit about shaving.
bonnyCD works and lives on treaty 7 territory in rural Alberta. They also publish as Benjamin C. Dugdale. Their most recent book of vampires, femboy hooters employees, and hot-tub cum-whorl monsters, The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux, is available from Gordon Hill Press.
