Grant Wilkins : In Which Pearl Pirie Consults Julian of Norwich On Gardens, Suffering And The Revelation Of Love

from Report from the Pirie Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

Applesauce

 

 

Your prayer came to me as a gift

of white blossoms

and applesauce in spring

your love and desire

your pain and understanding

a vision of knowing despair

folded into my lap

as a small inhale of coal dark words;

a poem endlessly overthrown

in which you and I are brought to nothing,

like seedlings left too long on the windowsill

while the shadow of the winter sun

dies slowly in the west.

 

 

 

The Horizon

 

 

While I was still alive,

to become a poem

meant to stand apart –

to become a vision of a vision –

an instrument of storm and suffering

when the sun hovered

two fingers above the horizon.

We did this willingly,

writing poetry like Manitoba maples,

the completeness of our love

resonant and fresh,

for seasons out of time

and time out of mind,

knowing the words

would eventually develop 

like a fine-flowering rose bush

carefully covered in winter.

 

 

 

Mustard Jar

 

 

I wish I could have been there

when the lid on the mustard jar

finally swallowed

your splendid and glorious tongue.

The smell of ozone and fear

was made reverent by its lingering –

and your emerald eyes

lit small flares that began to flower,

covering the ground

with beetles and chicory stems

like blood and panic in the afternoon,

like vertigo.

 

 

 

Crucifixions

 

 

Love is not a reward, you said

it is a spiritual thirst

a longing and a compassion

for all that is made

when Spring bursts forth like a bead of sap,

Nature at some tipping point

we can never see.

The eternal providence

of long winter nights,

frost-wet earth

and pine needles burned to rust in the snow –

the contemplative life up against

champagne, dancing, potatoes boiled in their skins

and ecosystem collapse,

arriving just as the geese begin migrating north again

to the Maple trees, insomnia

and small Crucifixions

that flower each spring,

once the rotted manure

has been forked into the soil.

 

 

 

Forgetting

 

 

I sometimes forget

to paddle the canoe around

those poor, unworldly creatures

sinning and sunning there on the peninsula.

 

I sometimes forget

the universal truth that although we are all one,

I should keep practicing my French,

just in case.

 

I sometimes forget

the extent to which all in the world is not good,

but that – whether I like it or not –

some days, I am the gun.

 

I sometimes forget

that I could have been there with the Magdalene

stoic, spiky and unsubmissive,

with very harsh words for His childhood.

 

I sometimes forget

the power of incanted song,

hymns to death and delirium

sung out while rejoicing in heated pools, caffeine,

and cold bottles of craft beer.

 

I sometimes forget

that I am a deus ex machina,

filled with silence and patience

and the capacity to transcend biologies

when sown indoors during spring.

 

 

 

A Hazelnut

 

 

“I will make all things well” was the pledge,

name-dropped as a couplet and a coup

to the glory of the sky.

The promise made was a small thing,

the size of a hazelnut

bright as a mote

and in need of the shade of a book.

These are the seed moments

of our security and comfort,

truly taught and listened for

like chrysanthemums

and blood pumps in the ICU,

where we heal and we breathe

and stand against the tribulations to come,

translucent as glass

hard as Spruce bark

seedlings, unseen,

still covered in an inch of soil.

 

 

 

Sources:

Pearl Pirie. footlights (Radiant Press, 2020).

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love (short text) (Penguin Classics, 1994 / Trans. Elizabeth Spearing).

 

 

 

 

 

Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.

Grant Wilkins : Martyrology Methodology

 

 

 

 

Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology is part of a series of non-intentional process-based treatments of The Martyrology that I began in 2014.

I first started experimenting with chance, indeterminate and non-intentional techniques in the 20-oughts, largely inspired by bpNichol’s brilliant Translating Translating Apollinaire. My interest in these kinds of forms properly crystalized a few years later, when my participation in the literary responses to several of visual artist Michèle Provost’s exhibitions gave me the opportunity to investigate and to apply these kinds of techniques on a broader scale.

By then I’d also taken part in several iterations of jwcurry’s ongoing “Messagio Galore” project, which, amongst other things, gave me a granular-level exposure to the writing of John Cage. All of this led me to dig further into Cage’s poetics, which in turn led me to Jackson Mac Low… so it was through the window that these three writers (Nichol, Cage and Mac Low) opened that I really jumped into the process work that has become the main line of my poetic output.

In exploring this mode – or maybe this field of modes – I was particularly struck by Cage and Mac Low’s interesting treatments of the works of other writers: Cage riffed on Henry David Thoreau, Mac Low mined Virginia Woolf, and both of them took runs at James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Anyway, I’d gotten as far as pondering how something similar might be done with The Martyrology when Sandra Ridley – who was then guest-editing Book*hug’s BafterC journal – asked if I had anything to contribute to the next issue. The deadline was a little ways off when she asked, so this turned out to be exactly the sort of motivation I needed.

It took me several tries at Book 1 before I came up with an approach that seemed to work, and gave me results I thought were interesting. Sandra did put the poem in BafterC too – and all of this was enough encouragement that since then, I’ve worked my way through most of The Martyrology, with only Book 9 left to go.

The approach I’ve been using through the project is based on Jackson Mac Low’s version of the “diastic” reading-through of a subject text. The basic process involves starting with an “index” word or line, and essentially using it as a lexical sieve to sort words and phrases out of a subject text. If you use the word “poetry,” for instance, you’d start reading from the beginning of your subject text until you encountered the first word starting with the letter “p”. You’d then continue on through the text until you found a word in which the second letter was “o”, and then on to the first word in which the third letter was “e”… etc.

There are a lot of rules you can apply to this process, and a lot of compositional elements you need to sort out before you start. I typically only take lexically significant words, and I try to avoid repetition. But how far do you let yourself read through the subject text without finding a match? Do you just take the one matching word, or do you take the “wing words” – the word or words on either side of the matching word – or do you take the whole line, the whole sentence? You can work chance into this as well, and use dice or some other randomizing method to determine the starting point in the text for each search.

Anyway, this project turned out to be the perfect way for me to investigate the field of “process” in detail, and it opened up a lot of different avenues that I’m still exploring. As I said, I’m pretty much exclusively a process poet now: everything I write is based in some manner on a pre-existing text or texts – either something someone else has written, or something that I have somehow collected or selected. I still often use various versions of the diastic method, as well as versions & combinations of Cage and Mac Low’s other chance and non-intentional forms… in addition to still having a soft spot for Nichol’s text/letter/sound sorting & ordering/reordering methods.

All of this has led me on to the less mechanical methods of processing, arranging & translating texts used by other writers. I definitely see some of Erin Moure’s work as being processual in a way, and M Nourbese Philip, Caroline Bergvall and Lisa Robertson each do really interesting things that seem to fall into, or at least next to, this ballpark.

I find poetry as process – or process as poetry – an especially appealing form of writing as, to paraphrase John Cage, I really have nothing in particular I want to say, and this gives me a way of saying it.

While I very much admire poets who can crystalize a moment into verse or who can observe a slice of life or a figment of nature as it goes by and translate it into a few (or many) lines – I don’t, can’t, and never have had much interest in doing this sort of thing myself. What I do like to do is to find an interesting text (or texts), apply a process to it, and let the resulting combination of words, letters and chance generate a new text or a new image. It’s like you’re discovering a new poem or a new arrangement of words and ideas that have been there all along, hiding in plain sight.

 

 

 

 

Grant Wilkins is a printer, papermaker and occasional poet from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.

 

Grant Wilkins : Two poems

 

 

Hummingbirds

 

(In which Lisa Robertson examines the complicated history of grace in Henri Bergson’s

“An Introduction to Metaphysics,” with special attention to the nomenclature of colours)

  

A nomenclature of the symbols and the colours with which to translate gates made of cold shuttlecocks has long been desired in the arts and sciences.

In the one case, you must begin outside the process of translation in order to possess the original object; in the other, you can no longer move the remaining fiberglass, balsa wood and copper indices with which we first sought to cloak our intellectual ampleness.

A girl in a black cotton dress feeling simple and indivisible should experience this exhausted narrative hardening to currency, into which your unfortunate descriptions will continue to disappear.

You worked with painstaking fidelity on the colour which properly constitutes its essence – indigo blue – but which cannot be perceived near the ocean. Then Jésuitique, en valise, à l’Italienne and à la Russe were all mixed with a little carmine red, and a small portion of chestnut brown.

Thus, reason stood identified with the infinite, an impression that passage in Homer made upon me, when I first saw the shadow of the hummingbird translate these lines into azure and reddish-black, with the act’s absurdity balanced by its excess.

You knew a lady who wanted to release the antithetical expression you announced in your video. “Your female coloration,” you’d said, which was both esoteric and practical, with the measuring, testing and rebelling reducing the object to elements already known – elements common to the one you did not wish to represent in an infinite parking-lot.

By this intuition, it is possible to hear the sound of pages slowly turning, with the gate looking a lot like the entrance to a world of tree houses, where the ordinary function of positive science is analysis.

This positive science conducts a kind of deeply described change, with the weight of living beings and their organs and anatomical elements making comparisons between these forms and the present confusion in the naming of colours all but impossible.

In flowing through time, our selves endure by means of description and a whole mass of insistent perceptions which are profoundly clear, distinct and juxtaposable, one with another.

This crowd of virtual actions is more or less firmly bound to the uncovering of the potential indifference of carnations to peat moss, with the latter’s leek green colouring composed of emerald green, brown and bluish grey.

That woman certainly inspired you to a thoroughness which can, properly speaking, be said to form multiple states when compared to the unrolling of time, wherein the second moment contains the colour veinous blood red, which is carmine red mixed with brownish black, over and above the first.

Such facts lie beneath the grasp of contemporary research, which curates its procession of hormones, continually dying and being born again. In what other way could one represent unconsciousness as a velocity? (Please excuse the rhetorical question).

How difficult is it to choose between systems in which every comparison will be insufficient? The unrolling of the symbols of our duration in reality cannot be substituted for the five hundred words in your nervous lines on the concept of unity, multiplicity and continuity, or for the metaphysical investigation of what is essentially unique to the object of your spit.

Your prosody of being can only symbolize a certain general knowledge of colours, which, though differing in shade and tint from any other colour in the series, will produce that great vulnerability I see on your face.

This is the fucked-up surface of the shapely pleasure you spoke about, with the ennoblement of your other hand in that old photograph. Your lipstick was black, of course, and when you awoke from your dream you did indeed boil your dress in ink, adding a little lavender and red ochre.

The concept of a nomenclature of colours generalizes at the same time as it abstracts, positing a museum of bread, screws, taffeta, twill, flannel, velveteen and satin – worsted or nothing, so you said.

Sometimes, the confusion between formal levels and the vicious circle does that to your data, and more or less deforms the properties which the extensions first gave to it.

It took you a long time nonetheless, with the specificity of your desires shivering in the brutal mobility of the old turquoise city. It was once a place of diminutive need, with everything inscribed in so many circles, none of them now fitting exactly where you fall to your knees.

This is the time for your late crying style, because its properties coincide with the reality of the larger circles dividing the concrete unity of the objects into distinct schools of inconvenience – each a rigid and ready-made pessimist, with its immateriality spoken, transmitted and made entirely temporal.

Maybe your resistance came over you like that dream in which the suites of colours are accompanied with examples in, or references to, the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Kingdoms.

Divided into juxtaposed portions of cream yellow, which is ochre mixed with a little white, and a very small quantity of dutch orange – like porcelain jasper, or the breast of a teal drake – you again saw the shadow of the hummingbird come first, and the hummingbird itself second.

This problem of human personality contains within it virtually the entire past and present of that line of description in which your theory of tears became rhythmic. As such, that special colouring of the personality – which cannot be expressed in common terms – is actually composed of berlin blue, a little black and a small portion of apple green.

To reconstitute the poem in different possible arrangements, you went out into orality to purchase a pencil with an image of open weeping. There, you fell out of your ink-stained sheets and frayed lingerie, and into a world of plurals, according to your preference for God and for the existence you saw beneath the tree.

Between these psychical states you have invented nothing with which to fill the gaps, should one part of you catch fire in the non-convergence of the transformed rhymes.

The transcendental speculations of certain German pantheists have to be chosen from a heap of nearly identical rose red melodic patterns.  In the sequence of curiosity so formed, we are able to understand the model of the descent from the summit into the multiplicity of pyramids on the green graph-distribution cloud.

There is hardly any concrete reality to this hostile alien shabbiness, with its elbow grease fumbling in smoke grey (which is ash grey mixed with a little brown), by way of the remarkably indirect path you took through the diurnal irregularities with your superlative social intellect, and so far from the remarkably secular index of rhythms we’d compiled with such difficulty.

To carry this modus operandi into philosophy is to pass from concept to contradiction through the very heart of the object and the method of your mind.

This uncertain convention of intimacy, agony and insult rears its battered head in the considered psychology of the stationary, especially when isolated from the totality of the dress as payment for entrance into the symbolic order.

There will be a period of spinal flower-wearing, for which the city has the right to destroy you, in light of the operations which science needs to make for the proper development of a socio-affective structure through which to describe the skies and meteors of different countries, and the numerous varieties of colours that can occur therein.

To that end, I have extracted a general becoming and not becoming of peculiar things from the preoccupied margin of the vocable concept of time which this state clearly occupies.

To look at these different concrete durations will permit us to count both esoteric and practical feelings and forgettings, with the irresistible tendency to consider the data as it shimmers over such iterative terrain in aurora red, which is tile red, with a slight tinge of carmine.

This often useful concept of the qualitative change in a colour you know has already been forgotten is going to spare you the immaterial quarrels perpetuated between the trees and the lights, which are on a level with the duration of the psychical nature of the component parts of the symbols given in this series.

Two melodic patterns sequenced into splendidness at the same time as the essentially violent metaphysical intuitions of apocalyptic consciousness dissipated the obscurities accumulated around the city’s great battlefields. Nonetheless, the cooking pots you felt necessary for this hypothesis will only be here for a single winter, amongst an infinity of other possible durations.

Henceforth, although you may want total gestural plasticity, Mademoiselle Falconetti’s anarchic excess already has the illusion of quivering and variegated concrete reality, the distinct moments of which will describe your odd survival as not incompatible with this first effort towards a concrete durational intuition.

Having presented a general view of the first application of pale bluish purple to the train crossings and tape loops, the insufficient means by which you slept, wrote, and listened became mainly functional in your tendency to process change in the ordinary course of life, the fixed points all marked in scarlet red and umber brown within the taxonomy of the imaginary structure of love’s choices.

Each concept (and each sensation) is thus a practical question which puts the lateness of the city’s feelings for sex and bodies together with the pulsing civic medium in which you saw the shadow of the hummingbird, and beneath which the skeptical, critical doctrines of indispensable civic impotence really dwell.

In fact, all such doctrines attaining to the absolute transience of banality do violence to the perpetually revised and recast categories of colours which have become so useful in the description of the objects of natural history and the arts.

Your insistent indifference to the sex of the expressive atmosphere branching out from Saint Radegund’s desk makes this a site for terror, warning us against the hostile and alien horns which arrived in the diagram, accompanied by a strong aroma of melancholy and coffee.

This limiting case of natural metaphysics will measure the earth for its wretchedness, moving towards that chimera of modern philosophy: the objects of metaphysical differentiation and integration performed in pitch, or brownish black, with all of your cruelty still intact.

You believe this object has been lost sight of, which is why science itself has bitten into the fruit you invented as a continuous action of the given world, carrying with it the great discovery of poetry as freedom, not form. You wanted the shape of these well-defined concepts to lead the professorate in considering the paucity of the various shades of dark green, the new colour of Werner’s added since the publication of his Nomenclature.

Forgetting the metaphysical abstraction from which this truly intuitive union of science, metaphysics and charcoal springs, the vines and crumpled mosaics of this error not only lie there, but dominate the belief that the cracks in the wall are peeling and collapsing in greenish grey, the colour of the quill feathers of the robin.

An enfeebled period of contemplation followed, in which the specificity of your desires remained an unfinished happening in the affirmation of our knowledge that misapplied metaphysics has frequently labored to the same unfortunate end.

The negative rhythmic sexual sequencing of our thought has remained intransigent however, even as the emotional education you proposed has been scaled up to differentiate the illegitimacy of the windowsills and driftwood.

This longing after the restlessness of life – an invisible undercurrent in modern philosophy – does indeed focus first on the shadow of the hummingbird. For, once brought down from heaven to earth, as Plato held, it is in the common coloration of all these small animals fighting in the trees in which we delight.

Our whole prosody of noise has been misapprehended in the russet and scotch blue mountainsides, where, mixed with a considerable portion of velvet black, the complete Critique of Pure Reason rests on the postulate that our unknowing pronouns can expand within the convivial manifestation of so many arbitrary and ephemeral solutions.

In the end, this is yet another theoretical fantasy of the all-responsible senses and the modern metaphysics of irreducible oppositions.

The modern science of philosophy consists precisely in this effort to seize an intuition which is gone but for the memory of its dress, recognizing that for a long time we swam through the splendidness of psychological analyses full of  tenderness for the feminine.

This wordless lightning shoots upwards through all of the positive sciences, but has become far too specialized for the metaphysical intuition you felt was justified by the cadences of our sonic structures. In the end, these have not been faithful to the summary and synthesis of that miniature world’s knowledge of the methods of distinguishing colours, their shades, or varieties.

It is a distinctive property of this essence that intuition without conception is a banality. Your gentlemanly literary pursuits annotating the idea of a long elastic present fall within the province of Werner’s analysis, and from successive points of view we can note many resemblances between the blue and green objects and the absolute and unconditional demands of transcription.

This is a decision we may sympathize with intellectually – our own windshield wipers, train crossings and tape loops stirring these tendencies and motor habits – but the flaw in this crowd of virtual actions is clearly visible wherever you go in the city.

Your differential collective of vermilion red cosmetics (which is scarlet red, with a minute portion of brownish red) queries a face made of pure cotton, nylon, rubber and leather, with a fidelity so solidly organized and so profoundly animated that I could never have believed your new skin would be so parodic, esoteric and practical.

Fleece, honey and hummingbirds – partly vibrant, partly wavering, partly failing – this is the prosody which has been ultimately misapprehended here. It occupies its intended psychological space, certainly, but juxtaposed against the notion of the pure durational contrary, we are inevitably drawn back to Werner’s unfounded conclusions regarding morbid anatomy, social rupture, and the mixing and laying of colours.

 

 

 

Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through
Book 2 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology

 

Time told you what moving the muse will save: useless saints, fucking lies

Never much good, i watch thru a gate of clouds
                                                                            saw Saint Ory in a silken shroud
                                                                            knew which mask to wear 

Once i thot each phrase new      & now see the tight phrases      & cursed verse screaming
My thot slurred together   
                                       you to me, Mister Reat 

These puns are stronger than words i could throw down at this tumbling green land, spun for your own destruction 
          the times so pointless, blaming you
People watch over as you pass the bodies, slipping off  dreams 

The country spoke of having travelled     the daze     dust      & centuries
pile up within my vision      of the world’s end       & beginning   
                                                                                                     lost chords struck within, look to start new the moment

You reach for the knife & Saint And too, the difference exploding at what signs, what miraculous bright sun      clear like it was a casual gesture
                                                                                            opening the palm of his hand
                                                                                            made the transition 

Many chose to follow the first Saint Orm, with the final resolution      
                                                                                                          to be truly Saint Orm
I mean you no wrong, but the country channels     blue sky
                                                                                 music
                                                                                 upon the image of her face

All these years to love the folk tales of the saints    
                                                                              tensions building in the poem, to pass thru senseless, as i know nothing
                                             the truth’s obscure behind the body’s veil

In the midst of the poem, a bright moon, perfect circle on the world’s rim. A saint’s face among the stars     & it changes     constantly

Saint Orm i know is over the spell of language, the form of memory turning inside you. i dreamt the world ended last night in town     

                                                       you chose to travel
                                                       love is carried in her eyes
                   a trick     a lovely gesture in the air

You drifted in thru the door my dreams left open     i step sideways to regain the chance     the part least recognized merges with me

                                               times change     the earth slips     the bodies
                                               (Saint And you) stand in mourning                               hearing this i refuse yr telegram in van

Too long breaking the ideas, the words or that illogical confusion love is. Saint Rike, old & grey, did offer keys     rules     perceptions charted       You were there that moment, then Saint And stumbled thru
                      no longer trusting senses     we dream       make them more real 

His lady     the greatest mystery     deceives us. We raise you up     
                                                                                                      the closet opens
      into the blue, it’s true 

There on my right, the white tiger; on my left, afternoon poems as acts of geomancy – the lost art noone teaches. With real energy my body releases one apparent life destroyed      made whole again     repetition, the rythmic structure

Born in the states, came north with their sons – older or too young – & found his voice again.  My lips move to speak     
             poor John’s dead & gone

 

Here i have illuminated the dream announced in Kitchener: instructions to the unknown millions. Saint Rand walked out too, to rip off the mask of words the chains we must pass thru to the light thru the window
              I always will, you cried out       passing as you are here beneath the land

 

Men carry them to the last night      we found the first charioteer, a rider of the missing Pleiade going nova around 2000 b.c. The temple of Ptah, its these figures apparent as glyphs between the rocks
        my heart faster than i thot it could

Your fingers blessing among the leaves     slowly     nights spent watching the constellations swing round one time
                      as the dragon’s wings  
                      the trees
                      these words, move, conjoin      a common point of death is unexpected  

These poems are prayers     west into darkness, ellie & I driving. The world is not only the words you trust      too often by making the present living history      

                                                                                             to make difficult fences
The window pane
                             i want to explain      as composition
I stop writing, i cease to matter, only the moment we exist. In this section Terry died       & here i am now  talking with Phyllis    
                                              the kropotkin poems, she’d first realized     gathering what’ll we say next time North America crumbles down

We spend time wrapped in our separate silences. Where do you go, when some lonely night like this you are dead?

                            Christ, you are dead, dead     
                                                                      flesh becoming real                                                                      scraptures behind the assertion of reality
Ah there is only the words
                                          this moment everything present & tense. The mind moves free, free of presence, your voice speaking, whispering

I do love you.

 

 

 

 

Grant Wilkins is a printer, papermaker and occasional poet from Ottawa. His writing has appeared in the pages of ARC Poetry Magazine, The Ottawa Press Gang Concrete Poetry Anthology, Train: a poetry journal and BafterC magazine amongst other places, and he recently published Literary Type with the fine folks at nOIR:Z. 2020 was a good year for Grant, as his sequence “Roman Alphabet: Readings and Translations” won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition, and his poem “In Which Gwendolyn MacEwen Translates Émile Nelligan: II” was shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year prize. Grant has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.