rob mclennan : Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo), by Erín Moure

Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo), Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press, 2023

 

 

 

Listening. The patter of voices elsewhere in the house. In the Room, the three women American modernist poets whose works/voices I have chosen to open myself to: all have in some way a relation to elsewheres. Thus translation. An elsewhere of nearly forbidden light:

To expose my Being to their voices in the Wood and Light of the Room. We say we are hearing a ‘Voice’ but is it not the Breath making this Voice, and who can breathe? who speak? who listen? I breathe and listen: how and with what Text or Articulation will I Respond?

All three poets have made migrations, are formed by elsewhere they touched or inhabited, and each has been marked as ‘questionable’ in some way—gender, sexuality, race—by the socius in and through which they vanish and appear.

Over nine days in the Room, I try to discern the forms (what’s still), grasp the contrasting shapes (what moves) in the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop and Angelina Weld Grimké. In the United States of America in 2017 at Harvard in the Woodberry Poetry Room, I arrive across a border to apprehend an American poetry of the 20^th century as a translator might approach works in another tongue.

To extend English from a foreign English, and a foreign time.
To attune to a minor language (Kafka, Deleuze). To listen. Breathe.

Then I didn’t write anything new in poetry for over three years.

The latest from Montreal-based translator, poet and critic Erín Moure is the expansive Theophylline: aⁿ a-po^retic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2023), a collection that achieves a remarkable balance of referential complexity and linear clarity, writing on and through the threads of three other poets. Moure focuses on, around and through the interconnected writing and lives of modernist poets Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), as much to speak of them as on the act of translation, a notion of fluidity that emerges from that single and mutable point of perspective, offering the distances of certain offerings that are wildly outdated, and others clearly offered years before such might be possible. “Even though a woman, a lover of women, a Jew, a single mother are conditions encumbered by prejudice and misogyny in America,” Moure writes, “Rukeyser can assume the rostrum. Wind in her hair. She steps off the plane in Barcelona, in Hanoi. She clears her throat and looks outward.” Moure’s migration begins with an opening of grief, a distance from her own writing and a deep dive into the archive; it begins with a cough, and a wheeze, as she worked through the Woodberry Poetry Room, her opening notes dated April 17, 2017. There is an echo of American poet Susan Howe’s prose through Moure’s explorations, exploring the archive and seeking narrative threads on literary construction and creation, comparable as well to those essay-poems of such as Barry McKinnon and Phil Hall, but with a far more expansive canvas and deeper complexity. Moure threads the lyric through narratives of these poets, their approaches and decisions, and how they lived their lives and their work.

This is a book simultaneously on the act of translation, the works of these three modernists and of asthma, writing of queer bodies and breath, sexism, racism and female histories, all the shared and discrete threads of otherness that permeates both her own perspectives and the perspectives and responses of the three poets she focuses on. As well, Moure is fully aware of her own perspectives, referencing her frustration that there are no audio recordings of Angelina Weld Grimké’s readings or voice:

Will some future bring Grimké into the archive of a Poetry Room, she and other women of the Harlem Renaissance, into the publicly available? ‘Poetry’ ‘Room’ ‘Archive’? What even are these words? Will we hear their voices? They are already always there. Will the archive itself shift and break so they are audible?

Angelina Weld Grimké in this book appears inevitably in the pattern of my voice, which is no voice. A white voice. I have no other.

I’m fascinated by how Moure works to articulate the act of translation, as she describes it as something that exists in motion, as opposed to a fixed point: a living, breathing entity that exists within its own time and space. And she, as translator, operating at the compositional consideration of attempting a single moment from a particular perspective at a particular time. Even for the same translator to attempt to translate a single work a year earlier or a year later might result in a variation. As she offers as part of her section around, on and through the work and life of Elizabeth Bishop: “The desire that utterances exist in a language other than that in which they are created: translation. In the body, an awareness of where in the mouth a particular language is spoken. Between languages, form is not still.” A bit further on, she adds:

Translations age and need redoing (as they are readings, and readings are always contemporary), whereas texts, on aging, simply gather exegesis. Exegesis is reverence, points to the eternal. Translation is a cut in time, and its texts bleed time and are often later discarded, bled out. Its perpetuity falls away. It is not naïve. Black Brazilian culture born of forbidden speech has today long outlived Bishop’s gaffe.

I recently caught an episode of David Steinberg’s 2012-2015 series Inside Comedy that interviewed American comedian Chris Rock, who offered a similar perspective on the temporality of comedy: “Comedy rots,” he said. In many ways, Theophylline: aⁿ a-po^retic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) is simultaneously a book of mothers, and a shortness of breath; a book on culture, a difficult breathing, and the mutability of language as culture evolves; how easily the landscape of cultural modes of thinking become outdated, and others emerge. And of course, Moure’s hetronym, her alternate (even, translated) self, the wry and sly troublemaker Elisa Sampedrín, offering lyric and commentary in a way that perhaps Moure herself could not, providing this lyric as part of the section on and around Angelina Weld Grimké and her work:

Regard
Elisa Sampedrín

Where would I take decidability
if weary were a game I

could stop reviling?
Delirious in fields and

pondered by grasses, amid
timothy’s green-grey feathers,

as if I were lying down every day
in my very creature

not abstract as endeavour but pure
homonym

or sexonym or synonym

For life?

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan's latest poetry title is World’s End, (ARP Books).

 

 

Bruce Whiteman : Qui seminant in lacrimis: John Thompson’s Stilt Jack

 

 

“Malachai Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.”
          W.B. Yeats, “High Talk” 

“Too many stories: yes, and
High talk: the exact curve of the thing.”
          John Thompson, Stilt Jack XXXVII

 

 

 

John Thompson’s second and final book, Stilt Jack, was published posthumously in 1978. He had died two years earlier in circumstances that suggest suicide but are not conclusive. That he was self-destructive is undeniable: often full of rage, frequently full of booze, possibly dominated by childhood trauma as an adult; an English prof beloved by certain of his students but turned down for tenure initially by the authorities at Mount Allison University for whom he had no respect, a lack that often showed in his behaviour. Academically clubbable he was not, and his personal unhappiness was evenly matched by ill fate or bad luck. His wife left him and took their daughter back to the United States, where he’d done his graduate work, and his house in the Tantramar burned down, with all his possessions, while he was away in Toronto on sabbatical leave. He loved his rifle—he even named it—but it was taken from him by the police, while his manuscripts and most everything else disappeared in the flames. His misfortunes would drive any sensitive man to drink, and he was already a serious drinker even before they occurred. His promise, in Stilt Jack XXII, not to scream when he died, is infinitely sad. “I’ve burned everything” he goes on to write. I suppose that if you have nothing left, then there is no fear involved in your own exit from the world. So why make an emotional scene? Infinitely sad, as I say.

          Stilt Jack is one of the books of Canadian poetry from the 1970s that has had staying power. (It was included in two separate editions of Thompson’s Collected Poems, and later reissued by Anansi as a separate book in 2019 in its “A List” series of reprints, with an introduction by the poet Rob Winger.) Its poetry comes directly from the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” (Thompson calls it “your blind, stupefied heart” in the opening poem), yet is highly literary too—based on a formal model little used in English before Thompson adopted it (the ghazal), frequently allusive, and with a vocabulary that is by turns high-toned (“rodomontades, anabases”) and demotic (“how far down on whiskey row am I?”). Such a tessitura is not atypical in contemporary poetry and is perfectly aligned with Thompson’s own rangy voice: now hermetic, now crystalline; now despairing, now openly celebratory; now passionate about poetry, now completely unbeguiled by the Muse. He will quote Gerard Manley Hopkins twice—“The world is full of the grandeur [of God],”and express certainty about the Resurrection (“We’ll rise as one body./A wedge of geese”), while confessing that he “can’t talk to God.” Stilt Jack embodies a constant pendulum swing between nature and human contrivances, essentialized twice in the image of “a silver cross and a bear’s tooth,” or in the book’s final rhetorical claim: “I’m still here like the sky/and the stove.” These and other dualisms in the book are never reconciled or resolved. “Should it be passion or grief?” begins the final poem, in a question that remains unanswered because, well, it is both. In the end, all that Thompson can give readers--his “friends,” as he says--is “words.” Maybe words are all that any poet can give readers.

          But of course that’s not really all. I imagine that every reader of Stilt Jack, even someone  unfamiliar with Thompson’s life story, is left feeling the poet’s despair, since it is so unmistakable. He tries to temper it, even quoting in No. XVII the Psalmist’s comforting lines about “they that sow in teares: shall reap in joy” (Qui seminant in lacrimis in exultatione mettent). But his own joy is obviously intermittent and never ascendent. He is “looking for the darkest place,” and mostly finds it. The book is clearly divided into two halves, with the first part (Nos. I-XIX) ending in a mix of hopelessness (“oblivion”) and hope—a strangely punctuated group of three couplets is surrounded by the words “out of all this beauty something/…must come,” a line from Canto LXXXIV of Ezra Pound. The second half (Nos. XX-XXXVIII), which starts with the line “I begin again,” commences with one of the longest and most allusive of the ghazals. It contains references to Yeats, to Thomas Merton, and to C.S. Lewis, along with a complex couplet that seems to refer to the “Nunc dimittis,” the prayer uttered by Simeon after he held the baby Jesus, as told in the Gospel of St. Luke:

Now let us servants rise like Atlantis.
By lying down, I’ll wake, depart in peace.

Simeon had been told by God that he would not die until he had seen the Christ, so Thompson’s fragment of his prayer (“Lord now let your servant depart in peace”) is symbolic of death, even if he has inserted Atlantis into the mix. Of course Atlantis, too, disappeared from the world.

          In his brief prefatory note, Thompson characterized the ghazal form as “drunken and amatory,” and did not mention its conventional mystical cast. In truth his ghazals are less about love and booze, though both are present at times, and more about God and death, another unresolved dualism—“contrasts,” Thompson calls them, to which he adds “dreams” and “astonishing leaps” as the linguistic heart of the ghazal form. For him, the grave is dark (in a phrase borrowed from a poem by Abraham Cowley: “Dark is the grave wherein my friend is laid”), yet he and “a woman” are “as safe as a toad in God’s pocket” (wonderful line!). He quotes a fragment of Psalm 121 (“I lift my eyes”) but finds no succour in the thought of God as the Psalmist does, only “my dreams, disasters, my own strange name.” (The latter is rather odd, since his name is about as commonplace as they come. Yet ghazals in old Persia were supposed to incorporate the poet’s name, so perhaps this is his indirect way of doing so in Stilt Jack.) Heaven, he writes in one ghazal, “goes on without us;” and in a later poem, thinking of Yeats’s “rook-delighting heaven,” he confesses that he has seen just “one crow.” Heaven, in other words, is largely empty and not meant for him.

          He takes some spiritual comfort in poetry, as a poet should. Poetry is “sweet, comely song.” The poet is (minimally, but crucially) “a cinder never quite burned out,” and while he has a difficult time surrendering to God, he can “surrender to poetry, sleep/with the cinders of Apollo.”  (Apollo is the Greek god of poetry, but his presence has always struck me as strange in the book, which has no other references to ancient mythology that I can recall.) Thompson does get angry with words—“words, goddammit, words,” he mutters in No. VIII; and while the many references to W.B. Yeats suggest a kind of hero worship for the Irish master, the opening line of No. IX records Thompson’s utter frustration with the anxiety of influence and maybe even with poetry itself. (Yeats’s name is repeated seven times.) Words become a safety device, something to tie onto as the mountaineer “belays” (his technical word) a rope around a rock or other outcropping. (At that point in No. XXXIV he intones the names of mountains not as a climber might, but for their evocative music. He does this elsewhere with the names of wildflowers and bushes.) By the end of Stilt Jack, Thompson is fed up with words in one way. Talk is “this folly of tongues,” and as for the Flaubertian search for “le mot juste” (the exact right word), Thompson rejects it as hopeless (“forget it”). Yet he leaves off with the line, “Friends: these words for you.”

          Poets have admired and learned from Stilt Jack for many reasons. For one thing, it has profound technical subtleties. Just listen to the opening couplets of No. II:

In this place we might be happy; blue-
winged teal, blacks, bats, steam

from cows dreaming in frost.
Love, you ask too many questions.

Let’s agree: we are whole: the house
rises: we fight; this is love…

There is a lot of alliteration here, though it does not overwhelm the reader, and vowel rhyme too (teal/steam/dreaming/agree/we), which is equally unobtrusive but key to the poem’s music. Furthermore, as disconnected as the couplets and the poems often feel, one from the other—Thompson uses the descriptive phrase “an alien design”—over all the book is in fact quite closely thought out and designed. Images of light and dark predominate. The whiteness of the “great northern snowy owl” of No. 1 becomes “the deep lightning/of swans’ wings” of No. XXXIII, and the dark of sleep or sex in No. V (“I feel you rocking in the dark”) evolves to become the very innermost heart of things in No. XXXVI (“have I dared the dark centre?”). There are subtle cycles in the book: the wildflowers that “grow anyway” despite the poet ignoring his garden, the moon that keeps returning, repeated images of fire, fish, books, stars. And of course the ghazal form appealed to several poets who looked to Thompson (and Adrienne Rich perhaps) as a model. Phyllis Webb’s book Water & Light was by her own admission an excited response to Thompson’s book. She wrote her ghazals, she tells us in a brief preface, on “unlined file cards,” and her book of ghazals begins with this couplet:

I watch the pile of cards grow.
I semaphore for help (calling stone-dead John Thompson).

Instead of setting her own name in the poem, as is conventional, she sets her predecessor’s, in a rather moving act of acknowledgement. Along with Webb, Lorna Crozier and Rob Winger have also published ghazals, and I feel sure that there are other poets too.

          I forget when I acquired a copy of Stilt Jack, but it was the first edition of 1978. Like other books of poetry, it sat on my shelf silently until I needed it, much later, during a period when I too felt as though heaven was going on without me, that “I’m not good enough” (No. XXXI). At that time, the mid 20-teens, I was living in Iowa and working on my long poem in prose amid the chaos of a broken relationship. So my ghazals would be “invisible,” in the sense that they were not in conventional poetic form. Yet I wanted to adapt Thompson’s own adaptation of the ghazal’s rich accessibility to ruin, to pain, to grief, to abandonment—not just by the lover but by the Muse too. I took my epigraph from No. XXVII, a couplet about inspiration:

I wait for a word, or the moon, or whatever,
an onion, a rhythm.

My fifteen “Invisible Ghazals,” included in a book I called Intimate Letters (2014), drunken and (in their way) amatory as they are, are painful for me to read now. So full of psychic writhing are they—like Thompson’s own—that, as poems should, they revive feelings in me that I am happier forgetting. For the first but not the last time in my work I too quoted the Psalmist, though unlike the Biblical poet and unlike John Thompson, I invoked only the first half of the line (“They that sow in teares”) and not the second (“shall reap in joy”). At least, thankfully, I went on to admit that I was asking for help from “New found friend, melodrama.” I wallowed, but I watched too.

          Since those trying and unloved days, I have taught Stilt Jack several times in an Introduction to Poetry class, and by and large my students, all adults, have all come to admire the book as much as I do. Of course it remains painful to read, but its brutal honesty is more than rescued from self-pity by its brilliant technical accomplishments.

Friends, I believe I’ll burn first:
I’ll find you by compass: dead reckoning.

Sing no sad songs. A tree stands:
Lay a stone against it.

 

 

 

 

Bruce Whiteman is a poet, book reviewer, classical music writer, and cultural historian. His most recent collection is The Invisible World Is in Decline,Book IX (ECW Press, 2022). He is the co-author with Ken Norris of Reading Wide and Deep (Poets & Painters Press, 2022) and the editor of Best Canadian Essays 2021 (Biblioasis, 2021). His collection of essays and book reviews, Work To Be Done, will be published by Biblioasis in 2023. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

 

 

Kim Fahner : Passengers, by Michael Crummey

Passengers, Michael Crummey
Anansi, 2022

 

 

 

 

Passengers is an interesting exercise in creativity and poetics. Throughout his book of poems, Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey creates “loose, amateur translations of pieces” that he imagines the late Swedish poet Tomas Transtrōmer (1931-2015) might have written had he visited Newfoundland and Labrador. He didn’t, though, and so these are Crummey’s poems, but with the poet imagining they are Transtrōmer’s first. Then there are subsequent sections that still focus on the notion of journeying, but in a different sort of way. A bit of a cerebral jig here, poetically and imaginatively, and so you need to suspend disbelief as you read—especially for the Transtrōmer and Lucifer sections. Don’t worry. Crummey makes it an easy thing to do, to open your mind and imagination, as you slip into Passengers to explore this poetic landscape.

He begins with a preface that tells the reader that Tomas Transtrōmer “was a Swedish poet, psychologist, and translator, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. His work explores the wonder and mystery of human consciousness, often using the stark landscape and weather of northern Sweden as a mirror or a foil for his obsessions.” Crummey continues, writing: “I’ve tried to remain true to the spirit and tone and to some of the most obvious strategies of Transtrōmer’s poetry. But it goes without saying that these pieces would in every way be superior in the original Swedish.”

The first section is “You Are Here: A Circumnavigation.” The first poem, “Transtrōmer on Arrival, St. John’s International,” will remind anyone who has flown into St. John’s of what it feels like to arrive there by plane: “Our feet reach blindly/for the city as it crests beneath us.” Passengers on the flight, on the journey, sit “upright at their narrow desks,” as if they are students “facing the empty blackboard.” We are all students of life as we observe the things that happen around us. Soon enough, the plane has landed and “the day’s lessons are about to begin.” The next page holds space for a map of Newfoundland, for those who may not be familiar with its geography. Other maps of the province lace through the book, as a cartographic touchstone of sorts.

“The Dark Woods,” the second section of the collection, gathers a grouping of place poems that hopscotch across Europe, with titles of poems named simply after various cities. In “Vienna,” Crummey writes of “Market street corners busked/by the classically trained who insist/on playing the same damn waltz.” Then, in “Belfast,” the poet writes of how surnames can divide a city when, in a pub, the “veteran barmaid” pauses in serving drinks, demanding “his name, his family provenance,/rejecting his disclaimers with a fatal charge: Your people likely come over here to kill us.” Read “Stockholm,” which begins with the single lined declaration: “No tourist escapes cliché,” and the reader hears an echo that has rippled through Passengers from the much earlier poem “Transtrōmer on Signal Hill.” With this repeated line, the poet seems to be saying to the reader, ‘follow me here,’ and so you do, recognizing the structural echoes of the book’s architecture. 

The third grouping of poems, “Devilskin,” imagines what would happen if Lucifer had stowed away on a ship that landed in Newfoundland at the end of the Middle Ages. In “Native Devil,” Crummey writes of Lucifer’s initial reaction to the ocean, and to Newfoundland: “Christ, he/hated the ocean. Its featureless breadth, its mercurial savagery. How it/inspired the staunchest apostate to faith. Every sailor ends up on his knees eventually, praying for deliverance…It was love at first sight.” This tone, of push and pull, of revulsion and desire on the devil’s part, is consistent throughout these poems. Crummey writes of how Lucifer “lost his Latin altogether” and “is almost happy.” In “Lucifer on George Street,” the devil “lurches drunkenly as he/ navigates the drunken crowds, the bleary racket. He wears a leather coat to his ankles, his sulphur stink muted by the cold drizzle.” This section will draw you in as a reader, and poems like “Devilskin,” “Hinges,” “Lucifer at Health Sciences Emerg,” and “Lucifer at St. Pat’s Mercy Home” are ones that see the devil portrayed as being a bit less drunk and a bit more philosophical in his reflections of humans and their mortality. It’s thought-provoking poetic and philosophical stuff.

Passengers ends with “Departure (11/04/19)” which is a father’s poignant and tender poem for a lost son. It speaks of presences and absences, of how we are all passengers during our lives’ journeys. Who do we meet along the way? When we go, who will miss us, and who might we miss most? It begins: “There you are now. The lost child./In an empty departure lounge without luggage/or companions, your cell phone disabled.” Grief is here in the collection, too, and there are thoughts of how our connection to others cause great pain when we lose the people we love, in times when the world itself seems to be wobbly and so uncertain. The pain of unexpected and deep loss through death and grief is here, too, but the gratitude of having experienced such a deep bond of love is also present and that is what remains with the reader at the end of the collection. Beautifully structured, crafted, and moving, Passengers is a book of poetry that asks the reader to return to its pages over and over again.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her new book of poems, Emptying the Ocean, was just released by Frontenac House in October. She’s a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com