How does a poem begin?
“Influence is related to admiration. I
would like to write like you. You are exploring what I would like to dare.”
-
Nicole
Brossard
“What is miraculous to me is the way the reading makes my writing possible,” writes American poet Laynie Brown in an interview with rob mclennan, recently published in periodicities. In that interview, Brown offers insights into her practice and, in particular, her book-length responses to the works by poets with whom Brown feels an affinity. She describes, “a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets” and explains that “my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets.” The generative possibilities that come from reading poetry, from being in community with the language of one’s kith and kin is further emphasized by the recently published Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone, wherein Renee Gladman, Trish Salah, Hoa Nguyen, Nicole Brossard, and many others describe how reading empowers their practices. Like Brown and these poets, I, too, marvel at how reading makes writing possible. For me, reading is where a poem begins. Immersed in the language of other poets, reading offers my language a breath, a rhythm, a line, a horizon.
Lately, my reading has been project-focused with numerous books that have given life to my forthcoming collection, I Confess. This collection contributes to the confessional tradition while exploring the technics of confession: How do technologies and techniques of truth extraction –– polygraphy, trial by fire, truth serums, and more –– give shape to utterances that are true and false? For this book, I sought poetry that consciously and conscientiously cross into the social and political, explores a diversity of forms, and is grounded in research-based practices. Each poem finds it shape with the guidance of other poems that follow a path that I, too, seek to follow. Among the many that helped shape my thinking for my most recent work, I’ll share a few words on three collections with which I found resonance.
Philip Metres’ Sand Opera (2015) offers political poetry that brings together a diversity forms, traditional and innovative, to traverse found testimony from the “US invasions of Iraq, Abu Ghraib survivors, torturers, alongside personal lyric on fatherhood and Arab-American life” (Solmaz Sharif). Informed by the conceit of the opera, every page in Sand Opera is unalike. The poems are polyvocal, and he has employed techniques involving black outs, erasures, translucent pages, physical imagery, and performance. Metres’ subject isn’t lost amid the flurry of innovation; rather, its richer for them. Rife with formal approaches, Sand Opera asks me to carefully consider what a poem and poetic expression fundamentally is and can be.
Anatomic (2018) by Adam Dickinson offers a model for putting the personal into dialogue with the systemic –– ecological, medical, social, political, and more. At the centre of that collection Dickinson places his own body, subjecting it to a range of tests involving blood, urine, bacteria, and feces to measure his exposure and retainment of environmental contaminants. Using these scientific insights as both a structuring principle and springboard for his language, Dickinson tells the story of how his body came to be within our petroculture. Like Dickinson, I sought to place myself, a poet, under examination and explore the implications and insights that can be gained by embracing such vulnerability.
Like Dickinson, though less overtly scientific, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (2018) is where I found deep resonance for her use of personal archives (photographs, memories, notes, etc.) as the foundation for her poetry. At the centre of Ghost Of is the disappearance of a brother by his own choice. Appearing throughout the collection are photographs wherein the brother has been removed, and the poems are built (literally and metaphorically) around those lacunae. For me, Nguyen’s book offers another model of an honest and vulnerable poetics that begins in the personal to offer relatable renderings of loss and longing.
Similarly to Brown, I feel “a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets.” In “La Déferlante,” Nicole Brossard writes, “Influence is related to admiration. I would like to write like you. You are exploring what I would like to dare” (83). Brossard precisely articulates what I seek when I read. All of these writers have done something that I would like to dare to do, and I have turned to them to learn how to do it. I find consonance with their language and modes that, in turn, provide my language its own possibility. It is with other poets that a poem begins.
Eric Schmaltz is the author of Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press), Surfaces (Invisible Publishing), and the forthcoming I Confess (Coach House Books). He is the editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks) and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn. His creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally. He lives in Kjipuktuk.
