Aaron Boothby : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

I like to think about what a poem does more than try to consider its value, which is also the kind of criticism I prefer. I think much time is spent attempting defences of poetry which argue it has value, without recognizing that our value system is skewed to power, capital, authority and a host of other ill things. When I read River Halen, in “Some Animals and Their Housing Situations,” saying, “Nothing alive belongs to anyone. Everyone is constantly learning this and forgetting this and learning this and forgetting this and learning,” I recognize the kinds of hands and voice that can make a good poem. I do deeply believe poems are alive, meaning I am unsettled when they’re treated as objects. They of course are objects, in a way, and deceptively simple ones, but more than that, and we know it.

A flower, let’s say a globe thistle deeply blue because I like them, has value beyond use value, right? Beyond beauty and beyond any human consideration at all. I’m aware not all would agree. I’m going to talk about poems under the terms that they don’t need to be valuable to anyone to be good. They just need to be and do things, and we can talk about them in terms of what they do. A good poem for me suggests a way of being that’s otherwise to destructive, transactional, possessive. In this sense, a good poem is also like a tree or a rock. Its speaker, is aware of position as much as relation as much as difference and does not try to flatten any of that out. In her poem, “Saturn Approaching,” Chimwemwe Undi, looking for more than what’s offered in ownership and belonging, makes a locale for more than surviving to say,“There is space where I echo, / and I find it, and I fill it like the fog.” An echo is always about listening, being able to hear. Isn’t fog insidious? That depends how you see it, feel it.

When the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan writes, as translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah, “Which flowers are speech / which flowers are silence?” something like the possibilities that keep me to a faith in poetry appear. There’s a way of being and listening that’s required to even ask this question about flowers, to hear either speech or silence, there’s an understanding that it’s not always easy to tell the difference between speech and silence. Perhaps at its best poetry is a form of silence, speaking the way wind does, or the sea, or the way we do to each other with glances. This does not mean it is always quiet. Silence has many registers, not all available to everyone or at any given time.

I like how the poet Annick MacAskill says not the same thing but to me a related thing, in a poem from her book Shadow Blight called “Variant,”

          In some, calls fade to silence,
                     grief stilling us to stone; in others,

          they crest to howls, domestic and unknowable
                     as a dog’s. Or so the poets say.

Which makes me ask, what calls to us? I think that’s how a poem begins, and informs the whole rest of whatever it becomes, why after a beginning the whole work is not making a good poem but hearing what the poem really is. Paul Celan places our singing, both against and in spite of oblivion, within the petals that are the word over the thorns of a rose. I find his “Psalm” to be a good poem; I never think about it that way. What’s between stone and howling, in our audible registers of being with each other, listening?

 

 

 

 

Aaron Boothby is a settler poet of European ancestry from Riverside, California in the traditional lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Payomkawichum, and Yuhaaviatamand people. The author of Continent (McClelland & Stewart, 2023), as well as two chapbooks, he lives in primarily in Montréal, also called Tiohtià:ke by its caretakers, the Kanien:keha’ka people.

Jérôme Melançon : Continent, by Aaron Boothby

Continent, Aaron Boothby
McClelland & Stewart, 2023

 

 

 

 

Among those who are concerned about the ongoing harms of colonialism and genocide, a rule of composition is emerging. We must position ourselves within our texts; point to beginnings and structures that go far beyond the words we are about to share; and then inhabit our words with an understanding of how our bodies are touched and targeted or protected, in contrast to the lived experiences of others.

Aaron Boothby follows this rule in his collection Continent: he positions himself in relation to his family and ancestry, through his body, through his personal origin and history, and the movements across countries, and within as well as against the country, all amid the facts of colonialism, racism, exclusion, and genocide. As in all grand, new, patient writing, the rule disappears within the writing, carries it and supports it. It gives it character – think of massive exposed beams, logs, or poles, with traces of their past lives showing, as they support new life.

Boothby adds forms of his own to this rule. Within each section, a semi-regular form appears, cloud-like or in cloud formations, always wth some variations through blank spaces and pauses, without titles. Neither linear nor non-linear, these arrangements give us fragments of speech, interruptions, jumps – and the knowledge that there is more at the angles or behind each element than we can see from our vantage point.

Taken as a whole, and in each poem, Continent is a meditation on being a settler and on taking on an anticolonial stance and existence. It would be unfair to this meditation to comment on a single poem by itself, since the collection is held together by the oppositions and contrasts between the experiences on which the poems reflect. Each poem offers glimpses into what the others let us imagine without unveiling.

An example of this interrelatedness of poems can be found in one that recounts the discovery of unmarked graves at residential school sites (page 24) and in another that describes the blockades that Indigenous groups had been building in order to stop different colonial projects (page 27). In the first, we read “What’s name without place to be held” and “What’s name // when one is not held,” alongside a deploration that people have become “anomalies,” “aberrations.” In the second, he creates an arresting impact through a caesura that reproduces the work of the barricade: “they said with their flesh you do not // have permission.”

In these poems Boothby does not hesitate to place himself where the country places him. In this second poem, he places himself within the group represented by the government and opposed by the blockade: “We said we do / We said words like critical infrastructure.” And with this last line, we can see the work that well placed ambiguity can accomplish, showing here that words of negation become like critical infrastructure in the functioning of the settler state.

In this careful position, Boothby also displays his sensitivity to history and its repetition, tying the blockades of the moment to those of the Kanesatake Resistance, when “we threatened children.” In the first poem, he maintains a different form of distance with the people whose graves had been located and numbered, only indirectly referring to Cowessess First Nation and Kapawe’no First Nation through the numbers they announced. At the same time, he measures what he knows and mostly does not know about them, carrying enormous emotion through a great economy of words. In a similar fashion, he ends the second poem with what could be read as a utopian perspective of reconciliation, but which I read as a recognition of settler responsibility, since the “we” of the book is the settler “we” rather than the “we” of Indigenous and non-Indigenous togetherness:

     If we are fragmented we still have common ties
no matter anguish      our legal bonds         our claims

These two poems offer but one example of the parallels that are created throughout this book. These are not mirrors, but continuities and refusals of realities that exist side by side. Within poems and across the collection, grand and powerful speech coexists with small, pointed questions; compare:

We who break earths in thresholds (32)
what does a map of our presence look like (48)

Through these poems Boothby explores the problem of saying “we,” the difficulties of being claimed by a country and favoured by its repressive institutions (the police is omnipresent in the collection, but wholly unconcerned with his speaker and turned toward Black bodies and queer bodies, who also resist it). His phrasing of “we” and reversals of expectations suggest a path to the recognition of collective responsibility that does not entail solidarity or support for the group as a whole – indeed, where “we” becomes a “curse” (26):

     We called this our own country       we were
herald of ruin    Who did we think would stop us (23)

The myths that support the continuation of colonial, liberal Canada are a frequent target of the often direct, concrete critique that runs through the poems. “I have questions about Paradise,” we read, twice, and find that “Our myths are nightmares     laws / their maintenance” (51).

Yet critique is not the central element in this collection. Boothby’s poems offer us ways to situate ourselves as well as ways to move differently, especially in their reflection on the relation of language to land, water, and sky.

These elements – these bearers of life – undo our language, and so undo our current relationship to them. By seeking a closer relationship to water and land, Boothby finds both transformation and lack of pre-existing profound relation: while “Water’s touches unsentence land” (26), he finds “what’s capitalized null in meadows” (59). He also connects to a different language that emerges from the land, water, and sky – not only in non-urban spaces, but within the city, or as city. He attempts to hear this language, to hear what things call themselves. He lets himself be taken away by the “syntax undertow” (60), to join his voice to a different choral than the Canadian settler “we.” The finality of this attention of the relation of language to land is practical and existential at once: “Could I learn perhaps to be gusted // to be guest” (65) – a possibility without an interrogation.

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.