Jeremy Luke Hill : two poems

 

Microchimaerism

Microchimaerism is the presence of genetically distinct cells in one body. In nature, it occurs only through the transfer of cells between mother and fetus during pregnancy. The child's cells are carried in the mother’s body for years afterwards, perhaps for life.

We exchange cells with children in our care.
No matter how they come to us, we become 

one creature. You may as well divide soul
from spirit, or joint from marrow, or sense 

from matters of the heart. The mythological
chimaera was composed of lion, goat, 

and dragon. My eldest son is none of these.
He is the wolf, by way of a surname 

passed down through his mother's line.
Chimaeric cells increase immunity 

in mother and foetus, but also cancers.
This is called love coming at a cost. 

The chimaera of myth was slain by arrows
from the safe height of a flying Pegasus. 

My middle son flies too. He is the hawk,
an inheritance from his birth-father, name 

begetting name. We can't discern blood
from blood through human senses. A mother's 

wounds may flow with a child's cells and she
will never know. If she puts her lips to the cut, 

she'll taste only mineral and bitter iron,
never the memory of the child she bore. 

Parenthood guarantees nothing except
that we carry our children in this way. 

My youngest son is the ram, has always been.
No one remembers why. Though he has names 

in plenty, none means ram. The word chimaera
can describe any hybrid of human 

and beast, usually implying monstrosity,
usually when it has no other name. 

It might be used to name a new creature
combining wolf and hawk and ram. 

My foster daughter was not with us long
enough to discover her animal self. 

This has always felt like a metaphor
for what we lost. Cells that are transferred 

early from the fetus to the mother sometimes
combine with the mother's organs, become part 

of her body, so that her heart will beat,
at least in some small way, with her child’s DNA. 

Nature does not care when it falls into cliché.

 

Cuckoo Birds 

Cuckoo birds are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. This behaviour is an evolutionary strategy that benefits the parasitic parents by allowing them to avoid the risk and investment of raising young themselves. This is why the phrase "cuckoo's egg" is sometimes used to describe children who are orphaned or adopted. 

The commonest question: How can you love them
as your own? The shells of cuckoo eggs can be 

thicker and stronger than those of their hosts
and have two distinct layers: the inner thin 

like a chicken egg, the outer thick and chalky
to protect them when being dropped into the nest. 

Adoption and fostering are experienced as trauma,
always. In some stories the cuckoo sucks the eggs 

of other birds before laying its own in the nest.
This is false. Another question: Is it awkward 

that they don't look like you? Female cuckoos
often lay eggs that resemble those of their host. 

I have been mistaken for my kids' coach, teacher,
social worker. I have known concerned citizens 

to call Children's Aid to report child trafficking
when a father picks his adoptive children up 

from school. This is called seeing something
and saying something. And still another question: 

How much do you get paid to take these kids?
Cuckoo chicks encourage the host to feed them 

with begging calls and open mouths. The basis
of attachment is a child's satisfied need. Cuckoo 

eggs hatch earlier than the host's eggs. The chicks
grow faster, evicting the nestlings of the host. 

They have no social model for this behaviour.
It is instinct. Not the last question: Why would you 

do some other parent's job for them? The term
"cuckold" has long been used to mock husbands 

whose wives are having affairs. Similarly, "cuck"
has become an insult among insecure man-babies 

for those they perceive to be weak and sensitive.
Cuckoos have no way to recognize their offspring 

once they are grown. My kids know their birth
and foster parents, more or less. Some traditions 

hold that the cuckoo, if burnt and the ashes eaten,
can cure stomach pains and insomnia. There is 

an association between cuckoos and loneliness.

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan. His latest publication, the chapbook a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, is forthcoming with above/ground press.

Letter : Jeremy Luke Hill responds to Greg Rhyno

 

 

I know it's not common (or even proper?) for authors to respond to their reviewers. Authors are supposed to grin and bear their reviews, no matter what they say. But given that Ordinary Eternal Machinery is about conversation in the first place, and given that Greg Rhyno's review pushes that conversation in a direction it probably needs, I'd like to keep it going at least one step further.

Near the end of his review, Rhyno says this – "What’s missing from this exchange [between myself, Cohen's book, and my interlocutor, John Nyman] are the marginalized voices Cohen co-opts: the survivors of personal and historical horrors. As it is, this chapbook represents one kind of privilege interrogating another. Some external oversight would be welcome."

Yeah. He's so right. Particularly when you consider that the publisher, Aaron Schneider, is also a middle-aged, middle-class, White guy. As is Rhyno himself. As is rob mclennan, the editor posting the review. Aw, shit.

Part of this is due to the nature of the project itself, of course. It's driving question was, "What should privileged people do with the books they love when those books are complicit (more so than usual) with the structures of privilege?" It makes a kind of sense that the people engaged with that question would be the privileged people concerned.

On the other hand, Rhyno's observation is absolutely just. Posing that question in isolation from the people being marginalized only perpetuates that marginalization, not to mention passing over other valuable perspectives on the issue.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to send comp copies to some writers I know who identify with the marginalized in Cohen's novel, and I'll see if they have the time and inclination to respond to the problematic of Ordinary Eternal Machinery.

Jeremy Luke Hill

Greg Rhyno : Ordinary Eternal Machinery, by Jeremy Luke Hill

Ordinary Eternal Machinery, Jeremy Luke Hill
845 Press Chapbooks, 2021

 

 

 

In 1966, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers was a scandalous flop. Critics found it confusing and sexually excessive. Robert Fulford called it “the most revolting book ever written in Canada.” Ultimately, it was the big, wooden horse of Cohen’s music career that smuggled the novel onto Canadian bookshelves and eventually, into the comfortable respectability of the Canadian canon. The fact that the novel succeeded in spite of snobby critics gave it a kind of street cred you just can’t buy.

Reading the novel for the first time in 2021, I was expecting a genre-thrashing work of counter-culture. Certainly, Cohen doesn’t disappoint. His prose is endlessly inventive, and his story is playful and provocative. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but find myself siding—occasionally—with the snobs. At times, the novel’s postmodern chicanery seems to be (in the immortal words of Moe Szyslak) “weird for the sake of weird.” What’s more, while Cohen’s use of bisexual protagonists might centre marginalized people, his portrayal of Indigenous characters is troubling. And even though Cohen’s libertine excesses may have anticipated the Summer of Love, the novel’s sexualization of minors is decidedly ungroovy.

So what do we do with a novel like this? Do we—to use the latest Orwellian parlance —deselect it? Do we drop it into the Aegean Sea? Or, do we engage with it, talk about it, and risk becoming complicit ourselves?

In Ordinary Eternal Machinery, Jeremy Luke Hill revisits Cohen’s novel to address these difficult questions. Hill’s chapbook is an unusual discourse: a collection of found poems culled from the pages of Cohen’s novel, and paired with essays which incorporate additional analysis by Hill’s “friend, poet, and early reader” John Nyman.

At first, the idea of pulling poetry out of Cohen’s already lyrical prose seems a bit like making ice cream out of ice cream cake (Cohen himself cannibalizes an image or two of his own poetry in the novel). But Ordinary Eternal Machinery is more than just a dance floor remix. In the essay “Play Therapy,” Hill posits that his found poetry is a means of processing  language that both impresses and distresses him. He starts “playing with it, copying out passages” as a kind of physical therapy, a working out of what’s not working for him.

Hill’s essays provide further commentary on this process. In “Distance and Complicity,” he explores the critical distance between the novel’s narrative voice and what he calls Cohen’s “most distressing subjects—incest, child abuse, Indigenous genocide, female circumcision.” Hill admits, “I distrust this distance. Even as I’m drawn to the stylistic virtuosity that helps create it.”

John Nyman suggests that Hill’s fascination with the novel is rooted in “a tradition of privilege: that instead of being triggering, these problematic things evoke almost the opposite response.”  Nyman keeps Hill honest throughout the chapbook, and—perhaps most interestingly—allows Hill to reassess his project within the parameters of the project itself. “How do I understand the luxury of artistic and critical distance,” Hill asks, “that accrues to me because of my privileged social location?”

You can’t help but admire Hill’s sincerity throughout Ordinary Eternal Machinery. The poet exposes his conflicted love of Cohen’s novel, and allows Nyman to poke at its underbelly. What’s missing from this exchange, though, are the marginalized voices Cohen co-opts: the survivors of personal and historical horrors. As it is, this chapbook represents one kind of privilege interrogating another. Some external oversight would be welcome.

So, does Hill answer the difficult questions he poses? Is Beautiful Losers still worthy of its place on Canadian bookshelves? In a way, Hill, Nyman, and Cohen mirror the novel’s own love triangle between the narrator, the character ‘F’, and the narrator’s wife, Edith. One trio is fascinated with a body, the other, a body of work. In the end, they all allow themselves to believe in a flawed, impossible tale which—above all else—reveals their stalwart faith in its teller.

 

 

 

Greg Rhyno’s first novel To Me You Seem Giant was nominated for a ReLit Award and an Alberta Book Publishing Award. His writing has appeared in a number of journals including Hobart, Riddle Fence, and Prism International. He completed an MFA at University of Guelph and lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.

Jeremy Luke Hill : on Gordon Hill Press

 

 

 

 

Let this stand as a kind of publishing manifesto –

I publish books because I believe in the moral function of the arts generally and of literature specifically, which is to say, I believe that literature should play a role in producing a just, compassionate, and ethical society.

I don't mean by this that literature should function as propaganda, where it advocates for one particular political or ethical position over another. Books can do that, of course, and sometimes need to do that, and occasionally even do so well, but the moral function of literature that I'm describing is not primarily connected with moral argument.

Neither do I mean that literature is moral in a romantic sense, where "true art" possesses some sort of essential force that morally elevates its audience into a new and higher consciousness. Even much more measured versions of the argument simply end up glorifying one kind of aesthetic appreciation over another, which also has little or nothing to do with the kind of role that literature plays for me.

Rather, what I mean by art's moral function is its capacity to foster different kinds of thinking and conversation than the ones currently dominating a social landscape. In our own world, for example, where political and ethical engagements are conducted at the pace of the twitter-length epithet, literature might offer modes of writing that are deliberately longer and more measured than can appear in social media, gesturing to the lack of subtlety and humanity that characterizes so much of our social discourses today.

But this would only be one technique among many. It might also try to use social media platforms in unusual ways in order to draw attention to the discursive limitations of these media. Or it might appear within social media in very standard ways, but only to direct people outward to other more thoughtful and more personal modes of conversation. The moral function operative here isn't about a specific technique, but in the gesture of fostering thoughtful, creative, informed, reflective, conversation.

My intent is not to pick on social media. I choose it as an example only because it's such a dominant force in our current social environment. I could choose many other examples just as easily, and the relevant examples would differ from historical moment to historical moment, from place to place, from social context to social context. The moral function at work here isn't about holding a particular position or employing a particular technique. It's about maintaining a posture that values thoughtfulness and curiosity and respect in the service of a more just and humane society.

Our time and place requires this moral function of literature as much as any. Our social and political discourses are increasingly polarized. Our mediatized conversations are characterized by disinformation, intolerance, group think, virtue signalling, personal attack, piling on, and outright hatred. In the face of this, I believe literature can and should stimulate better ways of thinking and being and engaging with one another.

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written a collection of poetry and short prose called Island Pieces, along with several chapbooks and broadsheets. His writing has appeared in ARC Poetry, The Bull Calf, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, The Puritan, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.