Geoffrey Nilson : The Real Ethereal, by Katie Naughton

The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton
Delete Press, 2024

 

 

the question of address (elegy: suburbs)

some questions never leave the garage the basement
the hedges and other plants circling the house
the rock wall stratifying the small hill in the back yard
between oaks and wax begonias
a house can be a place you never leave
it can be the hatch door to the basement
the bare construction of stairs
a place to carry a bicycle up or down
a machine no more beautiful than complex (54)

I’m terrified of the basement of the house I grew up in. Fear rises in my body even now as I think about standing at the bottom of those basement stairs with the door at the top swinging shut, incandescent light dimming through the crack. I’m there, again, desperate, certain something is about to grab hold of me from inside the darkness, from beyond what I can see and understand. That basement is constructed in the architecture of my memory and yet the fear it evokes is visceral as ever. Exposed, I am bound to its shape.

“A house can be a place you never leave” (54), Katie Naughton writes in her debut trade collection The Real Ethereal. Memory is dialectical – at once concrete and hazy, there and not there, capable of producing bodily affect in the blooming present. Great and sustained efforts must occur to place my basement [circa 92-03] back under contractor plastic. The work of living is getting up in the morning and covering our wounds. If “history is what hurts” as Fredric Jameson argues, then The Real Ethereal is a singing reprieve.

These poems occur a constant coming and going, city to city, text to text, one day forward and the next back into memory. For Naughton, the poem acts as a place of storage, of containment, and of mourning: “I write these poems / I put you in here. / The places we were / are still as vigil” (39). But something always calls the speaker back to the present – “dust / blooms” (63); the burning wick of a candle; the sound of traffic through an open window – those “sliding sounds of daily being” (10) which constitute the beautiful, insistent noise of living. The poem, for Naughton, exists on the “threshold” between nothingness and existence, “a structure of time / we made are making” (81). In its poetics of the present, The Real Ethereal chooses life, now, in the poem, rather than dwelling with the burdensome “enigma of history” (79).

Naughton never loses sight of “real” talk, though, and her casual interjective quips create a rhythm of tension and release between the lines. She builds a pathos of loss in sequence “a second singing” before gleefully declaring near the end: “not everything’s elegy” (74). A moment of welcome levity. Let’s do as Naughton suggests in desperate times: let’s “drive each other / up the closest hill we say what kills us” (31). I read “kills” here in the double sense of naming that which destroys life, but also that which makes life worth sticking around for [that song just kills me]. Naughton’s compression of syntax opens her lines to multiple readings Gertrude Stein-like and she hints at a confession of wanting to be “killed” in the best way [la volupté de la douler]. Another moment of levity, perhaps, or simply an acknowledgement that we each get to decide [“we say”] what history and what memories hold the power to affect us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Nilson is a poet, editor, musician, and literary critic born in Duncan, BC. Nilson is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University where he researches the long poem and is the 2024 recipient of the Charles Olson Award. His most recent chapbook, Light Makes a Ruin, was published in 2022 with above/ground press.

Geoffrey Nilson : The Poetic Body in Architectural Space

 

This piece originally appeared in Geoffrey Nilson’s above/ground press chapbook Light Makes a Ruin (September 2022).

 

 

 

 

Poetry doesn’t exist to represent the poet; the poet exists to present poetry to the public. Poetry isn’t an expression of the poet but an expression of natural and architectural space. The poet is “digested” by architectural space, to evoke John Hejduk, and a building transforms the poetic body within it. How and what the poet composes is determined to a large degree by the space(s) they choose, are placed in, or have the privilege to occupy.

Every space is a voice amplifying the poem as I receive it. Starting March 2020 in Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns meant millions either laid-off or forced to work-from-home. For a time, orders to “shelter in place” meant even the public parks in my neighbourhood were empty. This limitation of space emphasized the relationship my poetic practice has with architecture, between my spaces and my ability to compose different kinds of texts. My job writing advertising and website copy entitled me to ergonomic office furniture and a 360-degree-view of North Burnaby, panoramic windows all-around the sixth floor of an entirely forgettable office tower. Postmodern and asleep, the tower glows with one redeemable quality: a foyer atrium in golden wood and Carrara marble. The sound of feet moving from the elevator would echo softly in the glossy sheen, the lift of light pulling as you enter late-morning, early-coffee. I miss that building, that atrium.

The pandemic is not over and experiences of this global trauma have not been shared equally. Inequalities of class, race, and wealth are more obvious than ever as barriers to total health. I am still alive and so are my family. I have been incredibly lucky. Still, confined to a rental apartment, a healthy human quickly becomes sick. Anxiety, panic, insomnia, depression. Loneliness arrives with a 26% increase in risk of premature death. While my job afforded me the option of work-from-home, I was confined to a tiny apartment, without any of the technology or ergonomic support I required to do my job to the standard my contract required. I have no home office, no elevated dual monitor apparatus, and my laptop is arranged at one end of the kitchen table, books and papers spewing out across any nearby horizontal surfaces. Since copywriting depends on productivity, my body paid the price: in back pain, arthritis in my wrists and fingers, and oftentimes severe eye strain from the heavy increase in screen time for all day-to-day business activities. The corporation takes government aid and shed expenses in real estate while the pandemic worker is expected to carry the investment cost like a good team player. Save your receipts for a tax credit. Work-from-home represents a promise of social and bodily protection and the failure of that promise, because it aims to protect human beings from a deadly COVID-19 virus but in turn forces workers to labour in situations which do real, lasting harm to them.

Spaces are life; spaces make up a part of personal identity; when spaces are removed from our lives, part of our existence is also removed. The pressures of productivity invade the home through work-from-home transitions, but also through the writer themselves. The writer must speak (somehow and always) to the contemporary moment. Light Makes a Ruin writes the bound, painful, and isolated space of pandemic lockdown as an extended series of visual poems. A creative practice of necessity where poetic limitation is an expression of architectural limitation. The five-inch-square of the page becomes the claustrophobic, seven-hundred square-foot, one-bedroom apartment I share with my teenage daughter. Without additional space(s), my small apartment becomes the site of work, family, education, artistic practice, and all aspects of my daily life. Open-source typography and free online design software create the illusion of control in an uncontrollable situation. The digital text recognizes that supply chains have been crippled by the pandemic’s effect on international trade, and analog materials (like paper) are increasingly expensive and difficult to acquire. The text depicts a spatial reality of lockdown writing practice where I am unable to hear the signal of poetic voice, so I enact limitations on form and technology as procedures to enable composition.

Jeff Derksen writes in Annihilated Time: “Economic determinants are not abstract…we see them, walk through them, live through them daily” (251). Light Makes a Ruin walks through the daily economic determinants of work-from-home for a poet and father of limited means, as he struggles through pandemic space to access poetry itself. If an architectural photograph is like a dream of space, as Hélène Binet suggests, then my visual text is a dream of the poem from behind a single closed door.

 

Works Cited

Binet, Hélène. “Composing Space.” Lecture to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 19, 2012. Harvard GSD. https://youtu.be/YkpeFr87wOo

----. “From John Hejduk to Nicholas Hawksmoor.” The Journal of Architecture, 21:6, 939-963, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2016.1217555

Derksen, Jeff. Annihilated Time. Talonbooks, 2009.

 

Notes

Visual poems typeset in EB Garamond. Paratext typeset in PT Sans and PT Mono. Digital design enabled by pixlr.com.

 

 

Geoffrey Nilson was born in Duncan, BC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Cowichan Tribes. A poet, editor, and literary critic, he is also the founder and publisher of micropress pagefiftyone. Nilson is the author of four chap-books. In 2020, his poem “The Sound of Cellulose” appeared in the anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press), and his critical writing has appeared recently in Canadian Literature and Arc Poetry Magazine. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an MA in English from Simon Fraser University, where he is at work on his PhD studying the contemporary long-poem in Canada. In a past life, he was musician, songwriter, and recording engineer for various solo and collaborative projects. The BC-YK Representative for the League of Canadian Poets, Geoffrey lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt nation. Website: www.vcovcfvca.com

 

Geoffrey Nilson : Four poems from Light Makes a Ruin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Nilson was born in Duncan, BC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Cowichan Tribes. A poet, editor, and literary critic, he is also the founder and publisher of micropress pagefiftyone. Nilson is the author of four chapbooks including In my ear continuously like a stream (2017, above/ground). In 2020, his poem “The Sound of Cellulose” appeared in the anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press), and his critical writing has appeared recently in Canadian Literature and Arc Poetry Magazine. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an MA in English from Simon Fraser University, where he is at work on his PhD studying the contemporary long-poem in Canada. In a past life, he was musician, songwriter, and recording engineer for various solo and collaborative projects. Geoffrey lives with his daughter in New Westminster on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt nation.