R. Kolewe, Nate Logan, Katie Naughton, Sue Bracken + Catherine Hunter : virtual reading series #28

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

R. Kolewe : “Four Scatters from a notebook with the word Breeze on the cover”

R. Kolewe has published three collections of poetry, Afterletters (Book*hug 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Book*hug 2021) as well as several chapbooks. He lives in Toronto.

Nate Logan : “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “Diner,” and “Laura Described Poetry”

Nate Logan is the author of Small Town (The Magnificent Field, 2021) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He teaches at Franklin College and Marian University.

Katie Naughton : “Study,” “debt ritual: drift” and “debt ritual: grain”

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbook Study (above/ground press, 2021). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and Autumn House Press Book Prize. She is the publicity editor for Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

Sue Bracken : “Little Victories,” “The Evolution of Feathers” and “Frequent Flyer”

Sue Bracken’s work has appeared in GUEST [a journal of guest editors], Hart House Review (forthcoming 2022), Dusie (forthcoming 2022), Touch the Donkey, WEIMAG, The New Quarterly, Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology (Mansfield Press), The Totally Unknown Writer’s Festival 2015: Stories (Life Rattle Press) and other publications. Her first collection of poems When Centipedes Dream was published by Tightrope Books in 2018.

Sue lives and writes in Toronto in a home overthrown by artists and animals.

Catherine Hunter : two poems from St. Boniface Elegies (2019): “Submission” and “Irish Studies”

Catherine Hunter is a poet and fiction writer who teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Her most recent book, St. Boniface Elegies (Signature, 2019), won Manitoba’s Lansdowne Poetry Prize and was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her short story “Calling You” (Prairie Fire, Spring, 2020) won gold in the National Magazine Awards. Her books are Latent Heat, Lunar Wake, and Necessary Crimes (poems) and After Light, In the First Early Days of My Death, Queen of Diamonds, The Dead of Midnight, and Where Shadows Burn (fiction).

rob mclennan : the Absence of Zero, by R. Kolewe

The Absence of Zero, R. Kolewe
Book*hug Press, 2021

conversations on the long poem

 

 

 

 

Toronto poet R. Kolewe’s third full-length poetry title, following Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014) and Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017), is the expansive long poem, The Absence of Zero (Book*hug, 2021), a book self-described on the back cover as a “triumphantly executed celebration of the long-poem tradition. Consisting of 256 16-line quartets and 34 free-form interruptions, this slow-moving, haunting work is a beautiful example of thinking in language, a meditation that explores time and memory in both content and form.” There is something of the text that sits as both fixed and fluid document, composing a long, continuous, book-length thread. The poems are numbered, as are the sections, set both in sequence and groupings, all of which allow for a particular kind of temporal erasure (akin to, for example, the Julian Day Calendar numbering of Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence). “reminding myself that I can delete this rewrite substantially—,” he writes, as part of “0.0.0.1,” but one of a series of layers of strata that loop, repeat and recombine. Nearly three hundred pages later, as part of “2.1.0.0,” he offers: “In the including topology a map, a proper map, / reminding myself that I can delete this rewrite substantially— [.]”

This is a long poem structured, in part, as he offers himself, from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), a text equally cited by Renée Sarojini Saklikar as a prompt and model for her own long poem project, the life-long multiple-book project, The Heart Of This Journey Bears All Patterns (a title she regularly shortens to THOT-J-BAP). As well, The Absence of Zero is a long poem built upon mathematical structure, carefully placed and pieced and held together through attention and patience, as Kolewe offers at the back of the collection:

The structure of the 256 16-line poems is based on the Riemann curvature tensor in 4 dimensions, a mathematical object that describes the curvature of spacetime in Einstein’s general relativity. The Riemann curvature tensor is a 4-index tensor with 256 components in 4 dimensions, but various identities result in some of those components always having the value zero; other components are related in various ways so that there are actually only 20 independent components.

The mathematical structure might hold the collection as something contained, with particular and specific boundaries, even while the text itself simultaneously maintains and denys such deliberately-drawn lines. The poem cycles, loops and ripples, providing threads and tethers throughout, with possibilities that could easily extend beyond the pages of this particular work. “At this table scraps of the 20^th century measured out.” he writes, to open “1.1.3.3.,” “The problem that words mean something / alone. Without remembering or acting on memory […]” The echo of phrases repeating, shifted into different contexts, allow for a shifting, and even fluid, perception. Whereas McElroy’s ongoing sequence moves in a forward direction, and Margaret Christakos’ multiple recombinative projects employ variants on repetition or the loop/cycle, Kolewe’s The Absence of Zero appears to play with all of these ideas in turn and simultaneously, allowing the mathematical structure as the skeleton of the poem he wraps his lyric across. This really is a remarkable book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 latest collection, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), is (as you might already know) available for pre-order. He has never, to his knowledge, had any of his books on anyone’s “most anticipated” list.

 

R. Kolewe :

folio : Paul Celan/100

 

Perhaps, at the end, reading Celan

we are still the same.
Read together, read & read.
Perhaps the word is invisible,
the depths deepen
the wind, unbounded now.
I read that, but it’s wrong.

The years the words ever since.
The stone demands it, the stone ordains it
written in your eye or behind your eye.
What opens unending?
I read that but it’s wrong. 

*

The sky descends, darkhoured & nightstrong.
We are still the same.
Vinegrowers, vintagers, late mouths
mute now, after
you read, read together, read & read. 

How many voices once,
once in the silence of answers
I read that but it’s wrong.
We are still the same.

Perhaps you didn’t recognize them,
the words, the depths, deepening &
we are still the same.
Perhaps there was no Sabbath
at knifepoint like Isaac
no wall, no stone
gone dark & sunk down.
Perhaps I read that but it’s wrong

 

 

R. Kolewe. 2020-10-13

—

 

Notes on “Perhaps, at the end, reading Celan”

This poem mainly draws on three poems of Celan’s. First, there is Celan’s last poem, written April 1-13 1970, in Paris, finished a week before his death, eventually published in Zeitgehöft (1976)

 

Vinegrowers dig up
the dark-houred clock,
deep upon deep,

you read,

the Invisible
summons the wind
into bounds,

you read,

the Open ones carry
the stone behind their eye,
it knows you,
come the Sabbath.

[John Felstiner’s translation]

There are also translations of this poem by Pierre Joris, and Katherine Washburn and Margret Guillemin.

Barbara Wiedemann’s commentary on this poem compares line 3 with a poem in Die Niemandsrose (1963)

The word of going-to-the-depth
which we once read.
The years, the words ever since.
We are still the same.

You know, space is unending,
you know, you don’t have to fly,
you know, what wrote itself into your eye
deepens the depth for us.

[Joachim Neugroschel’s translation]

 

According to Wiedemann’s commentary, this poem was originally written for Celan’s wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange on her 32nd birthday in March 1959. It was originally titled “La leçon d’allemand” and refers to a poem by Georg Heym which Paul and Gisèle studied and translated from German together. The phrase “Wir sind es noch immer” became a motif in Celan’s letters to his wife Gisèle, and was last used by him in 1965, when he was a patient at Le Vésinet. See letter 106 and the notes thereon in the correspondence of Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.

I don’t know of any other translation of this poem.

Then there’s an earlier poem from Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955)

 

The Vintagers
For Nani and Klaus Demus

They autumn the wine of their eyes,
they press all the wept, this too:
so night will have it,
the night, they lean against, wall,
so the stone demands,
the stone, over which their crutch talks away
into the answer’s silence —
their crutch, that once,
once only in autumn,
when the year swells to death, as a bunch of grapes,
that once only speaks through the dumbness, down
into the shaft of the merely thought.

They autumn, they press the wine,
they press time as they press their eyes,
they press the trickles in, the wept,
in the sun’s grave they prepare
with hands made strong by night:
so that a mouth will thirst for it, later —
a late mouth, resembling theirs:
skewed towards blind things and maimed —
a mouth to which drink foams up from the depth while
the sky descends to a waxen seas,
to gleam from afar as a candlestump
when at last the lip moistens.

[Michael Hamburger’s translation.]

 

There are other translations of this poem by John Felstiner, and Joachim Neugroschel.

There’s also the well-known fact that after Celan’s death, a biography of Hölderlin was found open on his desk, with the underlined passage: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart.” See John Felstiner’s biography of Celan, p.287.

And finally, there’s Celan’s delusion that he would be required to reenact Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, alluded to in one of his last letters his wife on January 14 1970. See letter 668 and the notes thereon in the correspondence of Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.

 

References

Paul Celan. Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe. Edited with commentary by Barbara Wiedemann. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.

Paul Celan. Speech-Grille and Selected Poems. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. E.P. Dutton and Co. 1971.

Paul Celan. Last Poems. Translated by Katherine Washburn and Margret Guillemin. North Point Press, 1986.

Paul Celan. Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Books, 2002.

Paul Celan. Breathturn Into Timestead. Translated by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014.

Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970). Edited with commentary by Bertrand Badiou, with the assistance of Eric Celan. Le Seuil, 2001.

John Felstner. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, Jew. Yale University Press, 1995.

 

 

 

 

R. Kolewe (Toronto) has published two collections of poetry, Afterletters (BookThug 2014), which is inspired by Celan’s correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann, and Inspecting Nostalgia (TalonBooks 2017), as well as several chapbooks, most recently Silence, then (Knife | Fork | Book 2019) and Like the noises alive people wear (above/ground 2019). A book-length poem, The Absence of Zero, is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2021. (kolewe.net)