Janice Lee, Dan Rosenberg, Randy Lundy, Aaron Kreuter + Alison Calder : virtual reading series #29

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,

Janice Lee : 3 untitled poems from Separation Anxiety (forthcoming August 2022, CLASH Books)

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is also forthcoming in 2022 from Meekling Press. An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, she teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the medicine tradition of the Q’ero, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), plant & animal medicine, and Korean shamanic ritual (Muism). She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Dan Rosenberg : “Cause and Effect,” “Is It Astronomy or Astrology” and “The Stapler”

Dan Rosenberg’s most recent book, Bassinet, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2022. His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Conduit, and Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Rosenberg teaches literature, creative writing, and translation theory at Wells College in Aurora, NY. Find him at DanRosenberg.us

Randy Lundy : “Thinking of Nothing,” Field Notes for the Self (2020)

Randy Lundy is an Irish, Norwegian, and Cree member of the Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba. He is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, most recently Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018), both from the University of Regina Press. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough and is Series Editor of the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series at University of Regina Press.

Aaron Kreuter : “Shifting Baseline Syndrome,” “Catasrophists Anonymous,” and “Bonetown”

Aaron Kreuter is the author of the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (2018) and the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs (2016). His writing has appeared in places such as Grain Magazine, The Puritan, The Temz Review, and The Rusty Toque. Kreuter lives in Toronto and is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is his second book of poems.

Alison Calder : “At 50,” “In the ‘70s” and “The Future”

Alison Calder grew up in Saskatoon. Her poetry has won two Manitoba Book Awards and been a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Synaptic is her third collection. She now lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba.

Jérôme Melançon : Field Notes for the Self, by Randy Lundy

Field Notes for the Self, Randy Lundy

University of Regina Press, 2020

The poem “Field Notes for the Self” appears near the end of the book and, like most other poems, it is written in prose and interweaves bits of stories. It is a microcosm of the rest of the book. It brings together Buddhism, country music, Plato. Early morning dissociation and ceremonies of coffee making and cigarette smoking, moments of patience and strength-building, moments of stillness. Dogs and their ability to sense and live things more clearly, and further, than humans. An ill-defined woman with whom communication is impossible – in this instance a poet. A haunting by a father, forgotten practices from an Irish grandmother. Named places and elements of the land, named animals, insects, flowers, trees. The People and their language – nêhiyawak, nêhiyawewin.

And a self that enunciates itself in the second person. An interpellation of itself; an interpellation of the reader. A longing to be the point of connection between present surroundings and kin from the past.

There are passages where selves are elided – a woman, unnamed except for her location, Kluane, the Ruby Range, the Yukon, whose book of poetry is being read by the man (the third person self) seen in the mirror who left you (the second person self) standing there while he busies himself and reads; a woman to whom you/he want/s to respond, to tell things she already knows. The poem answers hers, his own, your own: “Years of writing the same poem, over and over, like a round-rolled stone in the shoreline palm of a glacial lake. The archetypal poem. Not the archetype in our minds but the one in our DNA. The perfect one that corresponds to this world, not the haze of some Platonic form.” (83)

Through this elision, retraction of selves, in their dissolution, Lundy achieves a concreteness of feeling and sensation. There are passages of immense beauty: “Right now, outside the back door, the wild roses bloom. The bees gather. This is the northern-prairie June’s brief, pink-fleeting flirtation with eternity.” (85)

The prose poems in this book allow for that unbroken flow through which the self can slip out – but there are verse poems here and there throughout the book, that speak to a different experience, that speak of oppositions, of irreconcilable realities: “And while you, too, have been dreaming, / you cannot even name the things you have seen: black horse, meteorites like a necklace of fire // across the midnight horizon. No stars.” (3)

Line breaks that speak to reversals and metamorphoses: “You move the snow / shovel from the front / deck to the back.” (23)

Isolated lines that speak of certainties that do not bear to be associated, surrounded, qualified: “When are the times we tell nothing but the truth?” (70)

Ghazals and their breathless chanting, stripped here of much of their form perhaps in order to better maintain secret connections among their elements, as among the last words of each line: peas, sun; sink, her (a carp); Christmas, branches; heat, altar; power pole, wind (36).

And line breaks that carry impact, transform one violence, destructive, into another, regenerative – a violence that asks for the end of violence, for a transformation of the self of those who practice it:

I will ask you to remember

the rotten corpses of bison,

the rotting corpses of

my missing and murdered sisters,

and aunties and kohkums and lovers,

and the rotting teeth of the children

fed fat on McDonald’s.

This stanza is from “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which I first heard Lundy read in January at a Matriarchs on Duty/Idle No More gathering in opposition to the University where I do my own work, an institution where many thought that anyone could speak about any kind of violence, that violence can be spoken about without recreating violence - that just anyone can speak about missing and murdered Indigenous women in any way they please, without regard for those who are potential and actual targets of violence. The poem by itself already counters violence by speaking to what is known to all but has led to no action. The setting and quiet anger of that reading only made it more obvious, and urgent.

Perhaps that is the function of the book in general – not to stand against colonial violence, or rather not only that, since this violence can be read throughout –, to tie together certainties and truth and attach them to a renewal of action, a different way of relating, a different view of the self.  So while the search for an uninterrupted flow between memories, people, nonhuman lives, and places dominates the book, Lundy interrupts this search where obstacles exist for this flow.

Against them, truths must be affirmed and limitations recognized: “No fight left in you. If other seasons are possible, it’s only the stones who remember.” (61)

And questions must be asked: “And does saying that, the irreverence of it, move you closer to where you want to be?” (55)

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the author of two books of poetry, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018), and has a bilingual chapbook out above/ground press, Coup.