Jérôme Melançon : Underscore, by Julie Carr

Underscore, Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2024

 

 

 

Reading Julie Carr’s collection Underscore, I found myself inhabiting poem after poem. Picking up the book, reading a bit, each time I would need to step away. As if I had read the whole book. Because I had read a whole, a totality. As if I needed to physically move from one poem to another. With each poem being so different from each of the others, their resonance and repetition of chosen elements gives them force, gravitas, gravity. Perhaps there was, is, something about the moment in which I have been reading the book, placing it back on the shelf, picking it up again – reading out of desire, putting it down out of satisfaction, or lack of readiness and steadiness for the next one. Reading Underscore is a physical act.

I have been struggling with the arrangement of the sections – their meaning, that is, the workings of their relations, for it is so precisely clear that they are related and part of a larger whole. Would it be unfair to the book and its author to say that the four sections relate to each other as four settings might on a microscope, focusing closer and closer? That each poem acts like a different sample, which I had to remove to make way for another? Or would binoculars be the correct analogy, focusing in from a wider field and bringing sharper attention only to some details? Might this movement from one area of closer focus to another explain the feeling that I am dealing with each poem as a totality and feel shaken, seeking focus, as I move from one to another?

I can at least follow Carr’s own through line. She gives a dedication for the book as a whole; she adds a dedication to selected poems to the same two people (among other dedications); she adds a note on these dedications, as well as on the title. “Underscore” refers to an improvisational dance practice – one body, one style, moving in different manners, each movement or series of movements existing as its own moment, breaking stillness. This practice has been brought to the dancer – Carr – by a teacher, Nancy Stark Smith. “Underscore” refers perhaps as well to what a poem can do to an emotional (and, or, comma, slash) spiritual state by centring upon it. This practice has been brought to the poet – Carr – by a teacher, Jean Valentine. Both women died in 2020; the dedications are to both women.

In “The Underscore” (22-23), one of the grandest in the collection, Carr addresses observations to Stark Smith, stretching the limits of materiality through an intertwining of alliteration and assonance in felt images, for instance in: “how the throat beats with blood and voice /     coarsing coarse sore”. The poem finds correspondences in all things, at times too direct to allow sameness, but also held together through the thinnest and most tense of metaphors: “raspberry fingertips    tensed tongues / they test the broken edges    of cups.” So often with space on the page for breath, a movement between other movements. Transforming the “how” of the realization into a question, but by making it into a “who,” Carr interrogates Stark Smith, rendering the mystery of friendly and human presence: “who is missing you today? who turned your camera off?”

In “New Year” (105) our mouth is given beautiful movement: “In whitewashed walls, your hand had curved around its pen. / It was your kitchen where you draw your brows / and the phone rang: your daughter.” A whooshing in one line; a repeated hesitation in another; then a lack of conclusion, all in agitated sharp peaks. Likewise in the poem as a whole, a year passes as the new year whooshes in; Valentine’s memory falters, hesitates; she disappears heading downward, leaving a train or entering a subway station. A movement between moments of presence – just like friendship.

The difference between these two poems is perhaps that of the allusiveness of dance and the depth of expression of language – two different ways of moving in the world, one simply faster and more exuberant than the other.

Alongside Smith and Valentine, we find Gillian, a friend, present throughout; we also find K.J., someone with whom she dances. “Good Morning” (47), one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read as a love poem, is dedicated to Peter – though after reading it over I am not so sure it is a love poem. It might simply be an ode to love, to the openness any kind of love, including friendship, can bring to us once we decide to welcome it. The conclusion of this poem is an instruction how to place oneself in relation to others: “since you are to me what this is / What might seem minimal is really maximal / I position myself toward you for all of it.”

We also find Carolyn Grace, in “1.17.15” (59), or rather we find her missing, disappeared, her death and the solidity of winter leaving a group of friends separated, “torn,” her death a “rift.” And in the undedicated “For friendship” (53), Carr places us gently by a river and its natural quiet, only to tear us away by changing the focus to the wider context, that of the hospital by the river, fully in the city – at the same time as she moves from the inside of the body and what it holds, its desires (“how we buried what we wanted in our bodies”), to the violent unpleasantness of smells as the body moves across the ground (“The soil smelled like shit / as a walked a word into the current”). The speaker here sees herself in the hospital window, or sees herself there, on the soil, by the river, as seen from the window – experiencing the reversals proper to friendship, the closeness and similarity that exist even in distance, even in illness, in the closeness or presence of death.

So many elements run through the collection. The river is one. Five poems titled “River,” numbered 1 through 4, then 10, but not in that order, and not in exact succession, remind us that there are flows that move through what we take to be discrete, separate places. Others appear here, rob mclennan among them. Like a river’s currents and undertows, there is no neat distinction between images and ideas in these poems (as in much of the collection). Human life, animal life, vegetal life, elemental life pass into one another as Carr moves beyond analogical or metaphorical thinking into a deeper sameness she finds in what is shared: “After fat felt markers drew their vapor trails on newsprint, we let them, / uncapped, fall to the earth where the roots, relentless / in their water search, seething, maybe, are.” In these river poems, she is acutely aware of violence, of its presence in an undercurrent in our experiences, so often as a desire – “and to know the sadness is to know the flame / that forms in the hand as if the rodent / beneath the rock broke back into its body / to roam” – and she is aware of the workings of pain and its frightfulness: “the headaches that plague you / flow backward through your skull     to snag the silver maple like / barbed wire at the pant leg of a boy.”

“Night” (97-98) may give us the best statement and illustration of the kind of dance poetry enables within us. In writing “the moss takes my footprint only to release it // back outward to    some blue / heron and some rose //    hips bowing” Carr once again passes through metaphor to what is akin to an elemental language, to move and thus to move us, up, slightly, up, higher, low (with the contradictory movement in “rose”) into what is already downward. In this magnificent flux present in the words and between them (and the placement of these words on the page is worth the effort of finding and holding the book), she ensures that we roll from one part of our feet to others, leap toward other places, and leave nothing of us behind as we pass into other forms of life, floating as if carried by them.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Stan Rogal : river / estuaries, by Julie Carr and rob mclennan

river / estuaries, Julie Carr and rob mclennan
above/ground press, 2023

 

 

 

Another brown envelope arrives from “above/ground press” containing a couple of new chapbooks, one of which has no title on the cover. Flipping pages, I discover that it’s called “river / estuaries” authored by Julie Carr / rob mclennan. I proceed to read a few of the poems, notice that they alternate between a “river” poem and an “estuary” poem, notice that they appear to follow the “open field” form of composition, filling the width of the page with either long lines of words or else gap-filled lines. I was somewhat familiar with Julie Carr’s poetry, though had not witnessed her using this particular form, whereas rob uses it frequently, if not always.                     I should admit, the concept of “open field” composition, and “projective verse” has always baffled me at some level, beyond the knowledge that it was meant as an escape from the “closed form” that entailed a specific rhyme scheme, metrical or stanza pattern, and so on. It was Charles Olson, in a 1950’s essay, who wanted to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem (following the dictum of Robert Creeley that “form is never more than an extension of content”). This form was to be based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance. The content was to consist of (following the dictum of Edward Dahlberg) "one perception immediately and directly (leading) to a further perception". Olson’s essay was to become a kind of de facto manifesto for the Black Mountain poets. One of the effects of narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an utterance was that the Black Mountain poets developed a distinctive style of poetic diction (e.g. "yr" for "your").

          “There it is,” said Olson, sitting there, for USE.”

          Well, it may have seemed obvious to him, but if you judge by the differences in style and approach between the Black Mountain poets themselves: Larry Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, et al, there was a lot of room for interpretation and downright deviation, especially when Olson prescribes that “each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance.” Whose breath and utterance? The poet’s? Olson was a heavy smoker, which not only affected his breath, but his delivery. Plus, he was in the habit of re-writing his poems as he read them aloud to an audience. How is this consistent with one perception directly following another if it’s subject to change on a whim?

          Anyway, putting the thorny theory aside, I wondered whether the volume in my possession was a collaborative work, and if yes, what was the process employed? 

I referred to the back of the book hoping to find some sort of explanation or description or author’s statement. There was nothing. I decided, might as well go to the source, and sent an email to rob, asking him for clarification. Having noticed that the “estuaries” poems contained an abundant use of commas and semi-colons (a practice I’ve noted in rob’s previous work, and something I’ll have to ask him about at a later date, as: method or madness?), I also asked whether he was responsible for these poems and Julie for the “river” poems. He told me that this was indeed the case and that the collection was a collaboration in that he wrote a response to a poem of Julie’s, then she wrote a response to his poem, and so on.

Ah, I replied, thanking him for the info and telling him that I would begin the collection again with this in mind. Then, I was suddenly struck by a further revelation that might serve as an impediment to my reading and/or appreciation of the poems. As much as I assumed that I knew what an estuary was, I was, in fact, at a loss, the word buried somewhere back in my grade ten geography class, circa 1960’s, Vancouver. I reached for my Merriam-Webster and found: “a water passage where the tide meets a river current; especially an arm of the sea at the lower end of a river. A partly enclosed coastal body of water in which river water is mixed with seawater is called an estuary. An estuary is thus defined by salinity rather than geography. Many coastal features designated by other names are in fact estuaries (for instance, Chesapeake Bay). Some of the oldest continuous civilizations have flourished in estuarine environments (for example, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Nile delta, and the Ganges delta). Cities such as London (Thames River), New York (Hudson River), and Montreal (St. Lawrence River) developed on estuaries and became important commercial centers.”

Interesting, I thought, but would this further piece of information serve me in approaching the work at hand, or only confuse matters? I confess, the reason I considered the “open field” theory and its historical context, and sought clarification of the book’s genesis in the first place, was because I was already intrigued and enjoying the poems — the movement; the ebb and flow; the shift; the accumulation and casting off of flotsam and jetsam — to stick with the images, themes, and metaphors that are explicit (and implicit) with entities such as “river” and “estuary.”

I needn’t have worried myself. A quick study of the opening two poems has me charmed and delighted, as I search where convergence and divergence serve to illuminate the collaborative process of their individual voices. Julie writes:

& the headaches that plague you
         flow backward out your skull    to snag the silver maple like
barbed wire at the pantleg of a boy.

rob responds to this in his own manner, picking up on certain images, such as: “slowly, out the left temple,” “barbed wire; a nascent clause,” “a spin of plagues        ,a pantleg”, though putting these images in a different context and scattering them throughout his poem as if they’re caught in a fast-moving current.

But don’t take my word for it. Dive in. And — with respect to Charles Olson — don’t forget to breathe.       

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs and their pet jackabee. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks (some with above/ground press). Currently seeking a new publisher: anyone??? Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.