Isabella Wang and Stephen Collis : Two Imperfect Sestinas (for Phyllis Webb's 95th birthday

 

 

1.

for Phyllis

where are we now      hold our loved poets as seas     as oceans    close  
this imperfect sestina choreographs     the perfect
cinematography of six-beat repetitions      musics of this life
our hearts     slow motion not repetition but a moving
forward ephemeral improv    eyes pouring over the stone    in this heart you hear the sound
of a moving toward    her illuminations     that ephemeral thing 

Fred’s music at the heart of thinking
Steve says happens the moment a poem announces
itself as ready to be written    is lost now    perhaps
lost is readiness    of the mind ghost    to unhaunt the living’s
unhomed de-visioned    profiles of movement
bodies / parentheses / being to cohabit with the sound

at the music of sounding
who am i to you    to others    our common loving of mutual things
because if you are lost   how much of myself
that i recognized in you     needed our perennial path
is also lost    Butler writes   when we lose
something we grieve    we i ourselves inseparable    the removal

of selves      a moving
perfect vulnerability    bodies are submerged    such sounds
become the space they inhabit  [— Ahmed]              think now
while Phyllis was here     think heart     journalistic eye
slow pulsing our collective i we recognized in her     our perfect
island congruent counterpart     and friend      compass point and means to a living

with meaning    inseparable the forces of living
are meant to be broken and assembled     composed moving
a reassembled broken body     without her      but surrounding
that ephemeral thing     [— Barad recomposed ]   
Phyllis i say    tell me what words you want to say up close
for the beating hearts    missing you     how to perfect

(if i’m worthy to know in afterlives you sea)     a music    imperfect
for the homeostatic quivering    Elee: of course   every grief is an anchor line
to previous losses    island ferry rituals redefined not gone, Steve   the poet moving
in the cities and homes    and poetries     of her sound
how to feed her ravens red bitter berries of winter and still feed     everything
          else up close we love     Phyllis thinks     we can it seems   

 

Phyllis     music toward the movement of closure
          fill us music 1 2 3 …. 7 movements toward the closed beat of ephemeral things

~ Isabella Wang

 

 

2. 

YOU ARE HERE     west through islands and rain to islands and more rain longing
though not giving in to the fantasy of far-flungness     Conrad’s line

about the outlying islands and continents of the earth     close
the portals of the imperium     lest some forget their undiscovered thinking

we are always already here when we perennially arrive     moving
a reassembled broken body forming     its own heart sounds music sounding

 

Remember those who imagined a direction to the flow of history sounding?
here is our distress and delusion     I listen instead to geological longings

mountains as hands raised upon arrival of immigrant island atolls moving
into late cretaceous sedimentary formations folded and gouged in glacial lines

now weathers of our own atmospheric making     river everywhere     over everything
so I come to ephemeral islands     heart mind music fires washed clean     composing

 

Yet still wondering     why is it so hard to dispel languages of colonial foreclosings?
whatever I I am     seeks to leap out of harbour’s deep soundings

to give what I can to our common love of mutual things
remember there was always resistance     fire after rain     and longing

bass tones of belonging     lifting our treble lives
life under harbours surface      surfacing     creatures creaturely     deeply moving

 

Under this constant rain and mountains that rivers are removing
the slow pulsing of our collective i     we may lose or are currently losing

but empire     Said said     involves all cultures in each other’s living
I wonder what differences are erased in storms raging over linguistic sounds?

everything is rooted in the earth     even the sea has roots and belongings
even here we must think habitation     as we are washed towards the sea thinking

 

I say this even if we are only poets     and don’t know anything
say this to other poets who know they don’t know     but are yet moved to thinking

out along their time-bent paths      leaning and longing
the whole culture leaning from a tower in time     a simultaneous we we compose

on islands     edges     listening to the rain and waterfalls and other water sounds
perfect vulnerability     tenderness of earth’s variable orbit     and the poem’s leaning line

 

You are in this with me too     climbing into curvature     along the living line
words thread through rain from island to island     to me poets are everything

composing we as vertigo vocalizing     send Columbus back to the shot stars resounding
send Columbia back too     let everything but the oldest names be removed

yes we made all that is all melt into an imperium of indifference and closing
so then recompose differences     erased ecotones     homeostatic quivering and longing

 

Are you still here?     repeating lines of a symphony of snapped strings     mountains afire

and seas moving

I Arnaut Daniel still grieving     thinking between imagination and study     trying

to keep you close

Empire follows art     Blake’s voice resounding     so lose it in the ark of the dark    

in our endless longing 

 

~ Stephen Collis

 

 

 

Authors’ Note: Marking PW's 95th birthday. While she left us in 2021, Webb's work and legacy continues to be generative. 'There ARE the poem,' and we continue to read and respond.

 

 

 

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021). Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and three anthologies. Completing a double-major in English and World Literature at SFU, she is a youth mentor with Vancouver Poetry House and an Editor at Room magazine.

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

 

 

 

rob mclennan : Pebble Swing, by Isabella Wang

Pebble Swing, Isabella Wang
Nightwood Editions, 2021

 

 

 

 

Vancouver poet, editor, critic and events organizer Isabella Wang’s eagerly-anticipated full-length poetry debut is Pebble Swing (2021), a collection that is startling for just how damned good it is, although not unexpectedly so. Wang manages to articulate complex emotional force through thoughtful observation and meditation, and a cadence that seem to flow as easily across the page as water. There aren’t many writers in English Canada I’ve been aware of that have had a debut at such a young age (apparently this is more common in French Canadian circles, where little magazine culture isn’t as prevalent, and debuts are often seen as introduction and not as a culmination of publishing across journals), and, even prior to this, her publishing history was already littered with accolade, award shortlists, publication credits and what is clearly a wonderful, engaged enthusiasm. The author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019), Wang’s Pebble Swing engages with, as Jen Sookfong Lee offers as part of her back cover blurb, “the markers of Canadian poetry—landscape, identity and place—but makes them entirely her own.”

Set as four sections—“I remember,” “The last sketch of a retracting spring,” “Rain falls, falling” and “Hindsight”—the collection opens with an exploration of memory and family. Throughout, Wang allows the language to equally propel her lyric narratives, some of which delve into family disconnect, her ongoing attempts to retain cultural touchstones, and a heavy burden of cultural and personal loss. “If I return to my birthplace, Jining,” she writes, to close the poem “ON FORGETTING A LANGUAGE,” “now / I will return as a foreigner / like the time I stepped onto this land ten years ago / as a Chinese immigrant / and realized there was no place / for my language in this new country.”

As has been evident to readers of her work for some time, Wang favours the English-language ghazal (and anti-ghazal), an ancient Urdu form adapted (most likely out of the example of American poet Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich, among others) and championed by Canadian poets over the years such as John Thompson, Phyllis Webb and Douglas Barbour, and utilized since by multiple poets (including myself, as well as other notables including Rob Winger, Catherine Owen and Andy Weaver). Whereas Wang’s acknowledgments mentions, quite specifically, “ghazals and Phyllis Webb,” this is an influence one can see echoes of throughout Pebble Swing, from the handful of single, self-contained poems to multiple ghazal-sequences. And yet, ‘THIRTEEN ANTI-GHAZALS AFTER PHYLLIS WEBB,” which makes up the entirety of the third section of the collection, is a poem that seems to hold as many echoes of Thompson’s lyrics than it does of Webb’s. Writing of sports fans celebrating as part of the eighth poem, she writes: “Fists. Fists. Fists. Fists. Fists. They won’t shut up. / Downstairs, the roar of fans. Blow horns in my studio.” The third poem in the sequence reads:

Sixty-two couplets at sundown
and sixty-two variations of the same couplet.

The last rainfall ‘til September.

I get out of the rose garden
to tend to a less spiky bed of thorns.

The day hasn’t got enough hours
for all the poems. To greet the sun, I assume.

The blackberry bush hides in a throng of blackbirds.
The shovel breaks for a midday beer.

As part of an interview conducted by Manahil Bandukwala for Canthius, prompted by the publication of Wang’s 2019 chapbook, they discussed Wang’s interest in the ghazal:

Canthius: Urdu ghazals by women writers – two of my favourite things! Which women writers are you looking at with the ghazals?

Isabella: I suppose I am not looking exclusively at ghazals written exclusively by women writers, but at the moment, any Canadian poet who has published substantial collection of poetry written in the ghazal, couplet form. That includes Phyllis Webb, John Thompson, Adrienne Rich, Lorna Crozier, Eve Joseph, and Patrick Lane. You will see however, that the majority of this list are women poets.

Each of these poets have done something extraordinary with the traditional, ghazal form. John Thompson, as part of post-modernist movement, lifted the form from its tight, structured regiment of repetition and flow. Eve Joseph, against the conventional theme of love, centered her poems around grief and mourning, while retaining the delicate lightness of the couplets. Likewise, Phyllis Webb is known for writing about small and everyday things. My research interests then, has been to locate a kind of écriture féminine within ghazal form, and accounting for the risk of making the gender binary, as well as the problematics of cultural appropriation when you take a poetic form that has traditionally been used to engage in ceremony, times of sharing, and break it apart. That is not to speak negatively of innovation. Again, many of these poets are writing in a post-modernist style, where we’ve essentially inherited a worldview that is already broken. At the same time, there is a kind of breakage in the translation of these ghazals from Urdu to English, where due to the rigidity of the form, it is impossible to retain the form of the ghazal and ensure that the poetry still makes sense in English. These are not light waters, hence the time, hence my need to study the poetry written by women writers from not just across Canada, but globally, and reinsert the political back into the act of the everyday. I believe it is possible to find wholeheartedly, the joy in these ghazals, while still engaging in dialogue, and the conversation we need to break the silence while addressing these issues.

Wang composes poems that seek to record and articulate her measured days, family conflicts, forest fires and the simplest of simple tasks, attempting to find her own sense of calm and space through the excess. In the end, these poems retain such an optimism, despite whatever considerations of loss, or grief might linger. She writes to acknowledge and record, and works to hold on to what might otherwise just drift away. “I remember,” she writes, as part of the longer “I REMEMBER,” “the land on which / my grandmother / was seized by the Chinese Communist Leader / I remember    her life reclaimed / like water that fed the village children / buried    and lost forever [.]” The structure of the poem, subtitled “after Joe Brainard,” follows a prompt from American poet Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975), which also influenced French writer Georges Perec’s infamous Je Me Souviens (1978) (a book that has since emerged in English translation), George Bowering’s memoir on his late friend, The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993), and possibly even Erín Moure’s memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2017). Wang’s poem utilizes “I remember” as a prompt both rhythmic and grounding, returning to that central point of memory to speak around her own immigration to Canada as a child (“I remember    leaving ours behind / but not the leaving”), and her grandmother, a relative she knows little of but through the memories of others. There is such a lovely pacing to this meditation on some difficult content, spread out across six pages. As the poem continues:

I remember land
as the body    and hug    and whisper    and mother of my father
and grandmother   I never knew 

Therefore I remember    land
as a body of poems   I carved into the ground
with a stick
                             and turned to mud with the tears of my father

I remember      my father who never intended to tell me any of this

Sometimes, as the poem suggests, to remember might simply be enough, and yet, not enough. “On days when the task of translation becomes too great,” she ends, “I remember    forgetting the fact / that the members    of my family have forgotten me [.]” There is such a lovely ease through her meditations, one that emerges through cadences and rhythms that feel deceptively straightforward, managing layers of sound, echo and meaning that resonate throughout the whole of the collection. Wang writes a sense of loss and family, of finding and reclaiming connection, both personal and cultural, and into realms of climate concern and social justice issues. She writes to articulate a world that can make better connections, all the time wondering, exactly, how it got to this place, now. “The body as a vector converges // on multiple neuroses of the city,” she writes, as part of the poem “SUBCURRENT,” to open the fourth and final section of the collection, “where under the Vancouver Public Library // there is a holding cell for immigrant detainees.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his forthcoming poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), is now available for pre-order. You probably don’t need to know much more than that, do you?

Isabella Wang : IX

for John Thompson

Thompson, I catch a great big fish for you;

the trout, unresponsive as stone.

I know you know:

poetry isn’t just in the song of the grieving.

So you are still here: the sky, the stove;

you’ve left me with no good recipe to follow.

When the days grow cold, I’ll be responsible

for lighting my own poem; grove; trees.

After Ghalib,

I write in homage to all the women poets I know.

At 19, Isabella Wang is the author of two poetry collections, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019) and Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions forthcoming 2021). She has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Poetry Contest, The Minola Review’s Inaugural Poetry Contest, and shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over 30 literary journals, and are forthcoming in four anthologies. She is the Web Content Coordinator and Editor for issue 44.2 of Room magazine.