Jérôme Melançon : tentatives, by Ellen Dillon

tentatives, Ellen Dillon
Pamenar Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Reflection can be fascinating. Never mind the Greek myth's cautionary tale against staring at oneself in a pond for too long, and the unending cry (still?) against selfies. Never mind the long theses which now sit in electronic repositories, and the monologues of slightly inebriated or high and very deep people. We know the draw of the image and of the word from experience, their incantatory power, the movement into self and around self they draw us into – a draw with which readers of poetry may be too familiar already.

In her incisive book tentatives, Ellen Dillon interrupts a reflection that goes too far in its treatment of… reflection. The premise is delicate: Fernand Deligny, a very influential French educator, writes a movie, Ce gamin, là, about his attempt to create an idyllic setting for the lives of autistic children and adults. In this setting, he maintains silence in order to keep them away from nothingness. The self of these nonverbal children is, to him, absent. As they follow circular lines, they circle nothing, remaining lost.

Dillon's poems cut through Deligny’s reflection – and its pretense at saving people from reflection by keeping them away from language: “In the years since first watching that film,” she writes in her opening note, “I’ve never been able to come to terms with a grammatical sleight-of-hand that whips the reflexive pronoun se/ oneself away from a non-verbal autistic child. These poems are my first tentatives, attempts to bridge or find a way around this abyss.”

This premise is vital to those who are so often still seen and treated as below humanity and kept outside of language or conversation. Rejecting the possibility of any absence of reflection, Dillon wanders around herself and through her surroundings, and around Deligny, responding to him. She explores the grounds of the film and of her own immediate settings to find a way back to ideas and work that remain important to her.

Deligny’s fascination with the reflexivity of certain verbs in French leads him to think about selfhood, le soi, the self of the reflexive pronoun se, the self of Dillon’s oneself. Because Dillon watches the movie in French, with captions, she is able to find these distortions of reality through language; distortions of language through ideas; and distortions of spoken language through automatic captioning. Although she confronts the problem directly, she also uses the inadequation between French and English to highlight it and destabilize it.

The first section, or first tentative, is fully bilingual, with the same poems existing in French and English versions side by side. Dillon opens on the affirmation that reflection is never completely developed or attained, nor complete. A title already indicates this lack of limit: “I Reflec.” The French title is even more generous: “Je réfléchi” is missing the ‘s’ that would make it into the present indicative; this lack also places grammatical meaning on the phrase, where “je” becomes a noun rather than a pronoun, a “je” that is “réfléchi,” an “I” that is “reflected,” like Rimbaud's “Je est un autre.”

We find allusions to “nouning” throughout the book. While Dillon generally gives close translations between her versions, she changes “nouning” to “adjectivation” in French (pages 20-21): “it’s this kind of nouning that’s got us where we are wherever that is & really we should stop” / “ce genre d’adjectiver nous a mal servi en quoi que ce soit et il est bien temps qu’on en arrête.” Nouns give way to adjectives, and this transfer changes the operation that poetry leads upon language, makes the operation more total through its different actions in the two languages. Loss gives way to uselessness, bringing us back to her hesitation and opposition to Deligny’s supposition that nonverbal autistic children are lost, perhaps because in many relationships, language is of no use to understand many aspects of one another.

Movement is also a common point for Dillon’s reflection: “L’eau qui coule rafraîchit / mais ne réfléchit pas” / “Flowing water refreshes / but doesn’t reflect” (pages 26-27). Small differences in sound here do the work of displacement, the a and aî for the é, the fresh for the flect, an r swapped for an l in both languages. Even in singing like water, in repeating the sounds water makes, we find ourselves closer to ourselves than we might think: “on dit qu’on est ce qu’on dit” / “they say you are what you say” (26-27). There is a chiasmic structure in the proximities between to say to one self “water” and to say oneself water, opening the possibility of making oneself water. In refusing to settle, Dillon opposes what she feels most intimately, that which Deligny inherits from a Lacanian philosophical formation (despite his uneasy relationship with Lacan’s ideas) – that is, the position that language makes us say things, that we are said by language, that “ça parle;” that the unconscious, it, speaks.

Even as – or perhaps because – she places the two languages side by side to undo the equivocations proper to one language through the other, Dillon is aware of the inability of either language to fully hold the other to account. Staying with the idea and equivocity of reflection in English, she writes (page 18/19): “je réfléchis / je reflète // comme l’eau // ces phénomènes” and “I reflect / I reflect // like water // these phenomena.” Here, by insisting on the difference between the two meanings by using the word “reflect” twice in English, she states clear;y that she does not only give a reflection of phenomena like water does (without precision, with movement), but also reflects upon phenomena like water does, leaving it up to the reader to decide how water might lead a reflection (perhaps throw light on what is above it?).

The second section, which is mostly in English, features poems in prose whose development is logical in a more traditional fashion, and where we find a commentary and a response to Deligny – but also a response to her own poems, as in: “I know that réfléchir and refléter are not the same / yet here I insist / on trying to make them / do the same work / to fold them / into English / on reflection.” (41) In this section prose poems can be found side by side, or facing poems in verse reassembled to make them look like prose, as in the quotation above. The prose poems tend to be hurried by a staccato, where commas and periods doing the work of the slash, thrusting the reader forward while interrupting the absorption into reading.

Short bursts of words and meaning take hold of the page, creating parallels everywhere. “Kingdom of things” becomes “thingdom” and “we never pace it out / each installed / in a stall of our own / stalling for time.” (47) And even then, Dillon interrupts this rhythm before it achieves its own hypnotic effect, giving us “Words that shake the kaleidoscope and unsettle scarlet and emerald paillettes to form a dazzling fractal mirage, a place that time will make for us if we can just keep up the tiring and the holding up.” (50) She refuses any set pattern, stops repetition before it becomes regular, granting a measure of freedom from the hold of the gestures that impose themselves on us from within, from our obsessions and difficulties of fitting within the world – but also those gestures that others impose upon us, failing to recognize what exists before their gaze and words. This section, titled “a cloud of eyes,” deepens a spiral of repetitions and lateral shifts to attain an emancipatory activity through language. It is truly beautiful in its destruction of expectations.

The third and final section, also in English, mixes stills of Deligny’s film and words. In presenting fragments of sentences, it shows that reflection is always broken, to be pieced together, mended – without either state (broken or full) being natural or pure. Dillon builds around slightly different repetitions of words in regular type (“Noting will come of nothing” … “Trying again” … “Gaining nothing” … “Noting gains” … and so on) to let revolve around them clouds of words in italics associated with these words, but without a thread, containing their own repetitions as well, which challenge and compete with those that drive the poem along (68). She thus recreates with words and their disposition and rhythm the effect of someone spinning on themselves, moving in irregular spirals, undoing the regularization of language and motion brought by Deligny’s practice – but really only pushing this practice further than he did, or could. She remains fully aware of the limits of her own undertaking, acting solely on herself and her readers, against the direct effects of Deligny’s practice on those in his care, and against the side effects of his film and writings on their viewers and readers.

Dillon brings the imperfections of reflection into Deligny’s fall back into the search for purity even as he argued for the impossibility of purity. The book is named after Deligny’s attempts or experiments, which he named “tentatives” instead of taking on the scientific language of educational psychology. Dillon uses many modalities of reflection to distort, elongate, complexify, reframe, and add to Deligny’s words and images, without ever losing sight of the presence of Deligny’s film and being. And she shows that that critique, rather than destroying its object, can only move our focus so close to it that we will have no choice but to look elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi

 

 

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based poet, writer, and translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, the 2022 Arc Poem of the year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry, and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript G is out with Palimpsest press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems Daffod*ls is out with Pamenar Press. Their translation of Ghazal Mosadeq’s Andarzname is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse Fall 2025. Their fifth poetry manuscript Book of Interruptions is forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn Fall 2025.

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi reads collaboratively with Klara du Plessis in Ottawa on Sunday, March 24, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

rm: You describe your latest collection, Daffod*ls, as a work of “experimental dream-poems,” an extended, book-length poem that does seem quite different in tone and structure than what I’ve seen of your work prior. How did this book come about?

KM: I met The Publisher of Daffod*ls, Ghazal Mosadeq mid November 2022. A few weeks later she asked me if I had a manuscript sitting for consideration. I actually DID have a 110 page manuscript, but it was mostly frankensteined poems left out of other projects, and though I loved the poems, I didn’t like it as a book. I sent it to her, with the caveat that I had a new project in mind. The 110 page book I had sent ended with a 13 pages rough draft of the beginning of Daffod*ls. Ghazal was happy with the book as it was, but I asked if she’d wait until I finished the final “Long Poem” and make that the book Pamenar will publish. That Long Poem was the result of a few consecutive sleepless nights where I lay down in bed, speaking into my Zoom recorder, which I’d later make into poems during the first few hours of waking life. I simply continued the process with another 63 night recordings. I composed a 140 page long poem which I cut down into the book you see with the help of phenomenal Toronto poet Zoe Imani Sharpe.

rm: Apart from the, as you say, “mostly frankensteined poems” manuscript, do you see poetry manuscripts as individual projects? How do you see Daffod*ls differing from what you’ve worked on prior?

KM: Not usually no! I consider myself a “Chapbook writer”, which is why I produce so many chapbooks. Most of my “projects” are 20-30 pages long and perfect for a chapbook format. If you look at my first two books, you can clearly see that each are basically a collection of 3-5 chapbooks. Daffod*ls was different because I already had the momentum and wanted to try my hand at a “book” as opposed to writing “Poems” and letting them accumulate. Daffod*ls works so well as a book but I couldn’t get a single piece from it published anywhere!

rm: Well, arguably that can often become the drawback when attempting something book-length: the inability to excerpt something that appears self-contained. So then: if you were working chapbooks as your units of composition prior to this, how were your book manuscripts put together? Were you attempting to find chapbook-length sections that spoke to each other in a particular manner? Have you chapbook-length works that haven’t fallen into a book-length manuscript yet because it doesn’t seem to fit with anything else?

KM: Well my first book was basically the entirety of my first two chapbooks plus all the best writing I had produced after. My second book WJD, had a chapbook embedded within that I never published, but it started as a chapbook (it was called the Naive sufi). I’d say my first two books with Gordon Hill Press were mostly put together by accumulating my best work up to the editorial deadline. I write every day and every 2-3 months I tend to change style/substance into a different direction, it used to be a simple matter of time. Now I compose with the same vigor, but don’t rush the poems out the door like I used to, whether it be in journals or chapbook/book length projects.

rm: You said you see yourself as a chapbook writer, but how do you see where your structure might lead, now that you’ve the experience of composing something full-length? Are you still feeling more comfortable with shorter projects? Do your projects connect in any sort of way with each other?

KM: I’d say I’m willing and able to do book-length projects, but most of the time the projects I come up with end up spanning a maximum of 30ish pages. I could’ve pushed any of those projects into longer ones, but sometimes the project has a very clear ending. I’d say I love dedicating myself to a book, but whether or not I end up consistently doing that depends on how far a project can stretch organically.

rm: The collaborative G, a book you composed with Klara du Plessis, recently appeared with Palimpsest Press. How did this collaboration come about?

KM: It came about as a simple curiosity into a fricative both our languages shared: The voiceless velar fricative X. It began in the beginning of the pandemic when we both had much time to spare. we wrote the entirety of the book in 2.5 months.

rm: Can you explain what you mean when you say that “voiceless velar frictive X”?

KM: I can’t really explain it, its a consonant/fricative that the English language does not possess. “voiceless velar fricative X” is the way it is explained in the international phonetic alphabet.

rm: I found it interesting that both of you approached each other from and into what du Plessis recently referred to as a “translingual poetics,” which is something you are both deeply engaged with. How do you find your engagement with translation, or even two languages with divergent histories of poetry and poetic language, affecting the way you approach your own writing?

KM: Something that has been central to both our approaches to poetics generally, and to this book specifically has been Sarah Dowling’s Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism. I won’t get too deep into the contents of the book, but the fact that North American psyche has normalized the “monolingual” is deeply detrimental to linguistic curiosity, and something that both me and Klara profoundly rage against.

rm: You’ve translated numerous works from Persian into English, but have you done much much writing in Persian? Would you ever be interested in publishing a full-length collection of pieces composed in Persian?

KM: The only poem I ever wrote in Persian, was to impress my grandfathers. They both read it and were highly impressed by it. Sadly they both passed away a month or so after that Persian poem, and I felt a certain disconnect between me and Persian writing afterwards. My Grandfathers were my only audience for my Persian language poems, and after their passing I never felt like writing in Persian ever again.

rm: How important is sound on the page as you work?

KM: It depends project to project. For Example, Daffod*ls is entirely reliant on sound, since I did not “Write” the poems, I spoke them into a recorder and wrote them down afterwards. BUT I do also sometimes enjoy writing convoluted poems that may not be the most pleasant poems to read out loud. In general however, I’d say sound is incredibly important to me. The trajectory of vowels guide every poem of mine.

rm: The way you describe the composition of Daffod*ls seems comparable to the late Jack Spicer, who claimed himself as a “receiver” that simply wrote down what he was sent from the “Martians” into poems, or Jack Kerouac writing out his dreams each morning into prose. Is that how you saw working this particular manuscript?

KM: Definitely. While launching this book online with Pamenar press I realized that the Winter 2023 season of Pamenar Press’s offerings (J.R. Carpenter’s The Pleasure of the Coast, Rhys Trimble’s KOR, Sally-Shakti Willow’s Rite and my book) are all eerily united in their work with “received language.” I guess that’s where the “Experimental” part of the “experimental dream poems” comes from? As you know better than I do, “Experimental” is such an unbelievably opaque term. It’s perhaps harder to approach “experimental poetry” as a topic, than it is to approach it as actual poetry hah.

Something that comes to mind very clearly here, is that in the beginning, the writings sounded very A.I. Generated. This method (experimental or not!) was language that I’d personally claim to be “receiving” from my “subconscious” in the first layers of pre R.E.M. sleep. Therefore it made me at the same time realize that perhaps A.I. is not fully conscious, but sub-conscious.

rm: So do you consider this process to be one that creates work less “composed” by you than your consciously-written work?

KM: well there’s a great deal of editing at play, but I’d say the editing is mostly omission. I don’t change words or even their chronology. The phrases you see have been spoken with the exact same chronology, just that sometimes they have been compressed. Cutting is my personal favorite tool when editing (I even consider it a “writing tool” if that can even make any sense?). but in short, I’d say yes. Its much less “Conscious” than my past work.

rm: I would suspect that considering yourself simply receiving the poem from an outside or unconscious source might allow you to be more receptive to the accident or the unexpected. What do you consider your relationship to the accident?

KM: Hmm... I’m going to perhaps show a certain lack of linguistic knowledge here, but to me personally, an “Accident” implies that every participant has entered the accident without intent. I’m not going to call “received language” an accident, since I entered with every single bit of intent. I’d perhaps say its more a “ritual of truth-making” akin to Tarot, Astrology or Bibliomancy. One side is an unchanging, unwavering constant that can create infinite possibilities based on the receiver. When it comes to such rituals, I always enter willing to recieve.

rm: Fair. I’m curious about your approach to the poem. What is it that first brought you to the poem, and what do you think the form allows you that might not have been possible otherwise?

KM: Its interesting because even though I’m a poet, I don't like writing “poems” much, simply because I tend not to like reading stand-alone poems. I like reading books, so I keep trying (and often failing) in making books. Daffod*ls is perhaps my first... success if we can call it that. But your question is definitely aimed at something else. I’d say I like the expanse that poetry gives me. I like how it breaks down narrative, how it breaks down linear grammar often, how it fragments. I feel like that’s exactly how my mind works. I actually have trouble reading novels. I don’t do well with narratives. In that way poetry really serves me.

rm: I wanted to loop back to your work in translation. How does your work in translation interact with your own writing, or vice versa, if at all? What is it that your work with translation allows?

KM: Translation plays a very important part in my writing cycle. I guess every writer has at least a 2 part routine of 1. reading and 2. writing. Every time I translate it creates a 3rd step in the cycle, which is strangely BOTH reading and writing, but also neither at the same time. I consider it like a prompt: there’s something already there that I need to create work UPON and ONTO. It gets me going!

rm: You’ve already another book, Book of Interruptions, forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn for 2025. What was the composition process like for that manuscript, and where does it fit within the chronology of your two recent titles?

KM: Book Of Interruptions is a project I started immediately after my book WJD with Gordon HIll, and its a book deeply entrenched in the political intricacies of the middle-eastern psyche. I began the project briefly after reading my dear friend Anahita Jamali Rad’s Still, which interacted heavily with the Iranian-American Scholar Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s works. In the process of writing “Book of Interruptions” I read every single book by Mohaghegh, took 3 online classes with him and listened to tens of hours of lectures by him through the centre for research and practice. I’d say Jason Mohaghegh is the heart of “Book of Interruptions” and his analyses on the intersections (and interruptions) of Western modernity and Eastern past, present and future, are seminal to my work in that book.

 

 

 

 

 

The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. He is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s annual international poetry festival.

rob mclennan : Letters Inscribed in Snow, Practice Has No Sequel and Intaglio Daughters, by Laynie Browne

Letters Inscribed in Snow, Laynie Browne
Tinderbox Editions, 2023

Practice Has No Sequel, Laynie Browne
Pamenar Press, 2023

Intaglio Daughters, Laynie Browne
Ornithopter Press, 2023

 

 

It isn’t that often that anyone has three new poetry titles in the same season (barring Dennis Cooley, I suppose, who had same not that long ago), so I was curious to see this trio of new titles by Los Angeles-born Philadelphia-based poet, editor and fiction writer Laynie Browne. The author of more than a dozen full-length poetry titles and works of fiction prior to these—very little of which I’ve seen, admittedly, having only encountered and reviewed Translation of the lilies back into lists (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022) and You Envelop Me (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2017), as well as the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), co-edited between her and Caroline Bergvall, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place—these three new poetry collections serve as a curious cluster of 2023 titles: Letters Inscribed in Snow (Red Wing MN: Tinderbox Editions), Practice Has No Sequel (London UK/Toronto ON: Pamenar Press) and Intaglio Daughters (Princeton NJ: Ornithopter Press). Browne’s work gives the sense of her approach to writing as a practice of ongoing study, seeking to expand the possibilities of language, literature and lyric. Given the near-simultaneous appearance of three separate collections, it also becomes curious to wonder about the potential compositional order: if there was overlap between these three collections, or if they were composed consecutively; how she might have approached working more than one collection at a time, or even if there are even further projects happening alongside but as yet to see final publication. Throughout these collections, Browne writes out declaratives and lyric fragments, approaching the lyric down to the structure of the interior; and of the sentence, offering writing that simultaneously examines writing. Within these works one can see echoes and even lineages, whether deliberate or simply a shared/common aesthetic, of works by Nicole Brossard, Rosmarie Waldrop, Anne Carson and Margaret Christakos, and most likely far more than that.

Letters Inscribed in Snow is composed as a pentaptych, or suite of five numbered sections—“An Opening,” “Letters Inscribed in Snow,” “The Book of Separating from One’s Skin,” “An Endless Chain of Persons Who Are Not You” and “Instantaneous Book of Silence”—of epistolary prose-poem response to an artwork/text and with its corresponding anonymous author. In certain ways, Letters Inscribed in Snow is simultaneously a book that describes the book and is the book, a meta separation akin to Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), a poetry collection that wrote the archivist Raymond sitting as the collector and questioner of a pseudonymous (and lost) poet and her work (found). Or perhaps a better comparison might be Bobby “Boris” Pickett and The Crypt Kickers’ 1962 song “Monster Mash,” being a song about an entirely different song that we don’t actually hear. As the first section opens:

We are standing in a gallery looking at the floor. Embedded, sunken, is a four-foot by four-foot square slab of ice, opaque white. Around the slab is a rope, officially cordoning off the area. A plaque on the wall upon entering the small room reads, “A Book Inscribed in Snow.” The ice is blank, bare. The artist did not show up for the opening. We find out later that the artist used a pseudonym. An agent installed the piece and departed. Failed to answer questions. The artist clearly intended an unwritten and therefore open book. Surely the real author or the artist would come forward. But where does that mean—the real author—of snow, of the found, of letters, of invisibility? Bodies standing on frozen ground in winter. Trying to divine what is written beneath. Upon which inscription do you stand?

As she writes on the page following: “How will the book begin?” Letters Inscribed in Snow offers a conversation of letters and lyric on how we self-construct, which includes the very act of writing, writing on which writing is. “That version of me on paper is too mild,” one of the letters offers, “flat, sentimental. I don’t recognize myself. Now I’ve stopped writing entirely. It is so tiresome not knowing how to begin. What to call myself.” There is something interesting in both sides of the conversation, each with the sheen of the one-sided missive sent off into silence, or even as private diary or journal entries, as opposed to a more straightforward conversation through letters. The back-and-forth epistolary of a shifting binary via the prose poem is striking, offering a lyric that explores identity as well as the very act of writing, something very much in the Rosmarie Waldrop vein. How are we built, offered or self-created? How do we write? Or, as a further letter asks:

What I really want to know (that is, what the character in the book will want to know) why am I writing this fiction when I have a perfectly reliable life? I have a perfectly remarkable problem I cannot solve. A dream is transparent only to me and is the safety of that which cannot be taken. I must reverse. It takes a very potent illusion. Why now, I am addicted to abandonment, hidden to my motives? Where is the one who walks into the light, across a frozen letter, wearing only a smile? And that is enough.

Practice Has No Sequel is a curious book of between, of lingering; of internal narrative and discordant lyric, one that generates a space far more expansive than these words on the page. This is a book held amid thought, and one that, as the title suggests, is something akin to that ongoing, life-long practice-as-study. There may be a myriad of beginnings, but there is only one end. This collection is composed as a triptych, three sections of short fragments that accumulate across the length and breadth of the open space of the page: “Practice Has No Sequel,” “A Weaving” and “Ceremonies for Words.” The collection exists as a threaded sequence of prose-pools of thought, such as this piece from the third section, that writes: “Everything is made up. Momentarily alarmed, even her children were figments. No, none of this was true. Every photo torn, every person in some configuration of private or public torment. No perfect inscription exists, not even paper.” It is through this collection alone that Browne may have emerged as one of my favourite contemporary poets, and I felt an immediate kinship to what she is doing here. Browne offers a lyric of hesitation and ongoingness, flow and a sequential, perpetual and singular present, one that utilizes a concreteness of thought, presenting an abstract constructed out of the building blocks of language and experience. Or, as she writes deep into the second section:

She implores—me to linger. And now from middle—distance remembering—as if time were a seamless loop one could twirl like a lock—on the beloved—crown of one—the way my father cuts—a lock of her hair just after she died.

To leave is to cut. Why would I want to rush away from the one missed every living day—and here she stands before me—between selves and other moons—her body a threshold. No I don’t want to run boldly into any untold future—yet every future is unspoken—and I will not be permitted to stay.

Why not be inside—meeting—unceasingly—in the way each—moment may open accordion-like—the way any person is infinity. Your opposite pushes like a wave—back toward solidity. Grief—ebb tide—mirage.

Intaglio Daughters is a collection that responds directly to and riffs off a particular work by American Lyn Heijinian, specifically her The Unfollowing (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2016), a collection of “anti-sonnets” composed as “a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss.” I haven’t seen that particular Hejinian title, but Browne offers a note on her text at the end of the collection:

Intaglio Daughters is an homage text for the poet Lyn Heijinian. All titles (in italics above teach poem) are taken from her book The Unfollowing. In the preface to her book she writes “I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive—a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the sequence of poems I’m calling ‘The Unfollowing’ was to compose a set of elegies.” In considering a form for Intaglio Daughters I wondered—what follows loss and rupture? What follows unfollowing? The mourning process often involves a non-sequential experience of time—and many returns, wavelike, in spirals or contradictions. In keeping with this idea of rounds, sinuous or labyrinth-time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, my book is a series of rondels, with the final line in each poem returning to, and resounding Hejinian’s language.

As in the first two collections, the poems in Intaglio Daughters are propelled by language, sound and meaning, offering a way through and beyond the possibilities of what language offers. These poems exist in response to a specific work, and riffing off into further directions. Hers is a gestured lyric, one that sweeps a hand or arm across narrative, almost akin to a monologue or performative speech, but one deeply attuned to the shape and sound of words. “We have entered the opposite / side of each minute.” she writes, early on in the collection. Further on in the book, offering: “Once upon a time the unhappened / spoke: Bake a loaf of bread—to keep tongue brave / Give your beloved: twins with molten hours / Bury yourself in earth up to your neck. You, thief of beauty / will have no rest even in your grave [.]” There is something fascinating through the way Browne works these individual book-length projects prompted as response works, whether responding to an external prompt (ie: Heijinian’s The Unfollowing) or epistolary, as though her writing requires a point through which to counter. If one can hold that the multiple books that made bpNichol’s “The Martyrology,” Robert Kroetsch’s “Field Notes” or Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest (University of California Press, 2006) each as “life works,” then one might also suggest that Laynie Browne is engaged in a similar kind of ongoing, lyric study, one we’ve yet to fully see the larger shape of. “I held the two words in my mouth,” Browne writes, mid-point through Intaglio Daughters, “Not names or actions yet they signaled new relations [.]” Further on, as the same poem offers: “Because I didn’t know how to make your absence / disappear I strung shell around my neck [.]”

 

 

 

 

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 most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. The writer E. Annie Proulx once told him to take his feet down off a chair. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com