2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry/2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Canisia Lubrin

The Dyzgraphxst, Canisia Lubrin
McClelland and Stewart, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist ; 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 23, 2021.

Canisia Lubrin [photo credit: Samuel Engelking] is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lubrin’s most recent poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, named a finalist for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol 1 and twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2019, she was Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, and was named a Writers’ Trust 2020 Rising Star. In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.

As the copy for the collection offers, The Dyzgraphxst is deeply engaged with issues of “intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster [.]” Given this, what do you think poetry can accomplish?

Given the snowflake, or the river, or the Candian woods, or the geese flying over head? I’m not sure I understand the dissection between the “this” of this question and poetry. Poetry is a wide-open space, where anything the poet is interested in can land. I don’t know if poetry is cabable of anything today that it hasn’t always been capable of. I am a poet who follows her interests into poetry. That’s all there is. I can’t tell anybody else what to do with poetry. As Dionne Brand says, poetry interrogates the reader. The nature of that interrogation depends on all kinds of things. All I know is where I am willing to go, and that I am willing to be lead, as Walcott says, into the home of the imagination.

There is such a wonderful polyvocal structure that holds the collection together. How were you able to keep all of the threads organized? Had you any models for this kind of work?

Both of my books arrive in the experimental tradition of Black diasporic art, and in the mode of Caribbean creolization. Polyvocality is very much deply embeded in Caribbean culture. Of course, if a reader is not familiar with the Caribbean as a space, as a grouping of ideas, as geography and poeple, etc., these modes would simply be missed entirely (as happens often). But I am concious about the writing being capacious enough that even if some crucial things are missed, in some places of the world, the poetry must still sing. I suppose I always want to write a book in which the reader must be involved actively in their own way through it. So, if 25 people read the book, they’ll come away each with their own signification of the work. And that is especially true for The Dyzhraphxst. In that way, The Dyzgraphxst does not hide its design, which is complicated, elaborate, even. So, if you’re looking for how the thing is working (which, of course, is part of the way it asks to be read), and you think you don’t quite get it (or whatever “it” is there suggesting itself), you must still be able to go along with the music, the rhythmic, the sonic. The pleasures of language. It is designed to be read both structurally and for something you might call epiphany. Complicated design but easy music, obvious emotional range. Like a completed house whose scaffolding you can see... a glass house whose interior is full of surprises, like one of those mirror playhouses, say. But the design isn't intended to keep the reader at bay. It is intended to let the reader become it, in this case. And that is hard, humbling, frustrating, work.

How was it working with Dionne Brand as editor? Were there elements of working with her that intimidated?

No. There’s no intimidation to report. Brand is an editor of immense sensitivity and nuance and skill. We were not strangers coming to this work, either. For a person like me who doesn’t need much push, a single gesture of hers would set me off in large ways. Simply brilliant working with Brand.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since The Dyzgraphxst was completed? What have you been working on since?

Always writing poetry. The next book is coming soon and it is a collection of short stories. That’s what holds my attention today, among many other things.

The Dyzgraphxst is constructed much more as a singular project than your debut. How did this project first reveal itself to you, and how different was it working on this collection?

Perhaps Voodoo Hypothesis prepared you for The Dyzgraphxst more than you might realize. The two books are quite different because they are different projects, but they are close siblings. I have answered this question about how the book “revealed itself” so many times that I fear I will become weary of repeating myself too often. The Dyzgraphxst has its roots in Voodoo Hypothesis. But, The Dyzgraphxst is my attempt to work through my distrust of the lyric I, especially in relation to the egologic individualism that has come to mark so much poetry, so much of the modern world. I wanted to put pressure on my own stakes in this work as a lyric poet with little confessional interest. I am interested in a thing. A question arrives. I follow its curiosities. That’s the movement. This process wasn’t different in terms of how I write.

There is such a joyous and playful sense of sound and rhythm in both of your collections. How important are sound and rhythm to you as you work?

Sound and rhythm are inseparable from poetry in my estimation. I have said this so many times already, but it might need to be repeated more than I’d like to admit: music is the anatomy of poetry. Which is to say my door into poetry is always aesthetic. No matter what the themes and all the serious business depict, sound is what I follow. I think sound carries its own kind of sense and challenges us who read and listen to make more of meaning than the predictable thing that syntax offers. Sound opens up something that puts us closer to the pre-verbal and then the oral roots of language. The page is an attempt to hold all that dynamism. And that dynamism is the sensorium of language that is given the pressurized space of the page in which to move us. I don’t let up until I feel moved in that sense.

Amanda Earl : The Dysgraphxst, a poem by Canisia Lubrin

The Dysgraphxst, a poem, Canisia Lubrin

McClelland and Stewart, 2020

I was excited when I read that Canisia Lubrin was coming to VERSeFest, Ottawa’s annual poetry festival at the end of March. I have had the pleasure of hearing Canisia’s mesmerizing reading at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in 2017 as part of the Basement Revue event, hosted by Jason Collett and Damian Rogers. I loved her first book, Voodoo hypothesis, and her chapbook Augur (Gap Riot Press, 2017).

Frankly, I am envious of her ability to craft socially engaged poetry with strong foundations and evocative images to articulate what is difficult to talk about, to elicit or capture and communicate emotion, a shared feeling of helplessness, and compassion in a fucked up world.

I invited Canisia to do an interview with me for the Small Machine Talks, the poetry podcast I co-host with a.m. kozak, to talk about the new book. She agreed and her publicist kindly sent me the book last week, and I couldn’t put it down because it is so compelling, well-written and relevant to our times.

Since VERSeFest had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m sharing my notes on this great book and urging you to get a copy if you can. When the festival takes place again, I look forward to hearing Canisia read, and all being well, to interview her for the podcast.

The Dyzgraph^xst by Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart, 2020) is an important and timely follow up to Voodoo hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017), Canisia’s debut collection, which I’ve already highly praised and often.

The Dyzgraph^xst is an exceptional articulation of survival despite everything: anti-colonialism, racism, climate crisis, oil greed. It is a celebration of family, mothering, community, identity, an exploration of Blackness, erasure and otherness. It evokes the consequences of forgetting history and the impact on our 21^st Century dystopian realities.

I am reading The Dyzgraph^xst during the time of the pandemic, and I admit that this has influenced my response to the work. To be honest, everything I’m reading, watching and hearing feels different in this time, has a different resonance. I am inspired by this book and it has given me comfort and things to think about.

Every time I open the book, I find something different. There are so many layers to the work and I’ve barely scratched the surface here.

I am in love with the long poem format in general. And The Dyzgraph^xst excels as a long poem. To be engaging and readable, in my opinion, a long poem needs anchors throughout the work: repeating motifs, themes and images, and a solid framework or structure. And this is what we find in The Dyzgraph^xst.

The structure of The Dyzgraph^xst is thoughtful and deliberate: seven acts which explore/trouble/celebrate the I/i/eye. Within those seven acts, titles and subtitles that read like their own list poem in the form of questions: “Ain’t I at the Gate?/Ain’t I Nickname for Home?/Ain’t I Epistémè? Ain’t I the Ode? Ain’t I Too Late?/Ain’t I a Madness/Ain’t I Again?”, a prologue, a monologue and an epilogue, with many references to the concept of logging, tracking or recording throughout (log your bones), the dream and the return, and poems within poems as subtitles.

If we examine the structure of the book more closely, we see regular and repeated patterns, broken deliberately with other patterns. It’s almost like Morse code, an SOS, or numerology, Biblical prophecy, call and response, a heartbeat and breathing. What interrupts? What disrupts?

Each act begins with a Roman numeral, followed by a poetic line with recurring words: lift / log / bones/ new / utterly. The predominant form of the poem is the tercet with some variation and break from the form.

Even the use of the X in each act, the Roman number for ten, and the superscripts feel like a pattern, perhaps some kind of exponential growth. Mathematicians out there may care to weigh in. I am not one, but I do see the balance repeated and I do make out a pattern.

Act III has 40 dreams and returns, consecutively numbered, with an additional Dream #41 that has been scratched out using a curve. Each act has a subtitle that begins with “elsewhere called”: I – the means by which to burn; II. a matter of fact; III. the transaction of dream and return;  IV.to be; V. exhumations across town; VI. archaelogy or case closed VII. the hereafter, or it’s just what we do. These all serve to give the book momentum, the feeling of forward motion, while at the same time the repeated patterns are circular.

Another component of the structure is the contrasts and parallels of language, both as images and as conceptual parallelism within the book. For every absence, there is a presence, for every nightwork, daywork, for every vertical, a horizontal, for every sharp, a sweet; otherness vs belonging, movement vs stillness, containment vs spill. There’s a profound symmetry here. It creates a tension between each opposing part and a coming together as well.  The tension of attempting to survive while all this shit is going on. And not just to survive but to love, to appreciate beauty and art and music and one another.

The dedication at the beginning of the book reads “For the impossible citizens of this ill world.”

From the “Prologue”:

dysgraphia[…]in this 6:   21 am breeze with someone/maybe you still alive with familiar irresistible mystery where I choreographs | the manoeuvre of to-come and give-way |where the world is full of reasons to push the back seat down and set a life-force soaring back to its ragged world.

JeJune, the only named character or the only named part of the character, is also part of this symmetry, as a presence and an absence, “the character that never leaves the stage. The character must always leave the stage.” p. 1, as part of the I/i/eye and also as separate entity, which is the next thing I like about the book—

The use of I/i/eye is playful and ingenious, subtlety and carefully written. The use of third person verb agreement to turn the I into a separate entity, yet still blending with the lowercase first-person narrator (sometimes within the same stanza or line): “I understand, here i am/the burned drop/of that telephone beep” (p. 48)” and the direct address to JeJune. There is a twinning to the subjects, which is part of the book’s symmetry and balance. The question of identity-truth vs. fiction: “i am not what i say” (p. 48). “say I am where someone who isn’t me sculpts me a legend;” (p. 57). the shift to “we” and the power and empathy that this shift creates.

The recurring imagery throughout the book adds to the sense of balance and helps to reinforce the themes. For example, music and singing are repeated throughout as a means of resistance or articulation of need or soothing: “where things are drawn out by singing” (p. 30). an example of the ephemeral: “Aretha Franklin today, another voice tomorrow” (p. 36) a swale of violinists (p. 48) , a tune of dragonflies (p. 55) a cello, the father’s “maddening drum (p. 137), “the calypsonian’s threnody” (p. 137), afro-beats (p. 74), the coming together of voices in song, “the sung-of citizen” (p. 150), “voices joined and soothing,” “I let you sicken me with song” (p. 64), “contraband of hallelujahs” (p. 125).

The role of language is explored throughout. It both joins and separates people and is often not able to communicate: the tongue (split or percussed), concealment, saying and not saying, the unsayable. Creole is both lullaby and resistance for/of its speakers. It is sometimes accompanied by a paraphrase and sometimes not. There is also French and Latin in the text, colonialism, empire and anti-colonialism, community.

Even the title and the repeated refrain of the graph in the prologue, monologue and epilogue: handwriting, difficulty writing, graphics as exclusion, the grapheme, division into classes, hierarchies.

The book portrays resistance to colonialism, witnessing and calling out: Dream #21 (p. 74): “the toiling where the/money is, the power is, why we/still wonder where to leave our/voices for safekeeping”.

Here are only a few examples of the strength and beauty of this text:

“what is love but the hand returning to claim the dust red, white, black as a coal-swept evening” p. 15

“how much trust to have in the idea of our voices altogether calling home calling home” (p. 30)

“In the drizzle and in the tune of the dragonflies and in the tune of the two or Three small sons lit up with the same charge of what the world heaves in” (p. 55)

Even the way Canisia acknowledges who she refers to as “companions”: “Poets, musicians, painters, writers and thinkers” who anchored the writing, how she cites specific pages as “aiding pages” shows a sense of camaraderie and community, a reminder of how art helps in times of trouble. How creativity begets creativity.

These notes are nowhere near enough to adequately communicate the skill, strength and timeliness of the Dyzgraph^xst. I urge you to get the book and to read everything of the poet’s you can get your hands on.

Amanda Earl is primarily a lover, a friend and a reader. For more information about Amanda’s writing and publishing, please visit AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.