Kim Fahner : Wait, What? by Richard-Yves Sitoski

Wait, What?, Richard-Yves Sitoski
Wet Ink Books, 2022

 

 

 

 

Richard-Yves Sitoski’s new book, Wait, What?, is a collection of memoir poetry that documents the poet’s struggle with mental health issues. Sitoski is adept at crafting sharp, witty turns of phrase, and has fashioned a book-length epigram that gets at the core challenges of living with mental health concerns. The collection is divided into three parts—Fundament, Employment, and Derangement. These are short pieces, with the longest length of poem in the book being just seven lines. With few lines and strong imagery, Owen Sound’s Poet Laureate (2019-23) has stylistically created a book that holds weight, that presses down, and that makes the reader consider how often mental health concerns are swept under rugs, referencing how poorly patients are treated within our health care system. You can’t turn your head and look away because each poem demands that you pay close attention. Avoidance is something that causes problems rather than solves them, and Sitoski aptly skews the notion that ‘ignorance is bliss’ in a society that still stigmatizes mental health issues. In many ways, Wait, What? is a way to document a difficult journey, but is also a passionate call to action.

The book begins with a trigger warning for self-harm, so that the reader is made aware that the material will be difficult to handle in places, but it starts chronologically (and logically) with “Conception,” as the poet writes: “Does it not make sense that I remember/the moment of conception? I was there.” Sitoski establishes a quirky, storytelling tone that carries on with poems like “God,” as he imagines God living in a space station: “God’s been in orbit so long/he’s lost all bone mass.//Look at him, floating there./So small I could put him in a jar.” While the first section of the book, “Fundament,” deals with childhood and youth, the second section of the book, “Employment,” records the trials of working people. As the speaker ages, the focus of the collection shifts. In “Rot,” Sitoski uses evocative imagery, writing of tomatoes that “expire of melancholy,//onions of senescence, avocadoes in a hospice,/and pears, like you,//contused by self-deprecation.” In “Essential,” there is a reflection on what jobs do to people, sometimes making us feel “necessary but ignored,” something a bit like “the text/on a fire extinguisher.”

The most challenging section of Wait, What? is the last one, “Derangement,” which depicts a journey through a broken mental health system. As things begin to unravel, the imagery sharpens. In “Book,” Sitoski writes: “I was trying to read/when a robin crashed into my window.//Only by robin I mean my voice/and by window I mean the sea.” Boundaries between worlds begin to dissolve. The emotional back and forth of trying to heal as a mental health patient is clearly depicted in “Feelings” when the poet writes: “Yesterday I felt like confetti, the day before/like a cinder block.” In poems like “Diagnosis,” “Waiting,” and “Problems,” Sitoski captures what it’s like to be in a psychiatric ward. In “Eating,” there are patients who “eat looking down/because, in their mute way, they are saying//they’ve forgotten what type of music/once made them happiest.”

Afterwards, shifting into a life outside of the hospital, there is the sense of a teeter-totter as the newly released patient tries to deal with follow up counselling and finding employment. The last poem in the book is titled, “Freedom,” but it doesn’t promise continual freedom: “I am free, if by freedom you mean/a million tons of snow cascading down a mountain//and covering your cabin.” Those who have dealt with mental health struggles will recognize the balancing act of healing and getting stronger.

A Don Gutteridge Poetry Award winner, Richard-Yves Sitoski’s Wait, What? is a collection of poems that will unsettle the reader, and rightfully so. These are clear-voiced and well-crafted poems, and the poet is adept at turning phrases with quick wit and intelligence, and with compassion for self and others, too. The fragments and memories of a life become poems filled with surreal and sometimes visceral imagery. Wait, What? suggests that the journey of a life isn’t ever easily mapped or documented, but also reminds the reader that it’s crucial to reflect on the passages through darker spaces in life, to become more aware of the places where light lives.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Gregory Betts : Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, eds. Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski

Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, eds. Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski
Laughing Raven Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

At some point, I knew the war would call me forth, out of myself, and hold me, my poetry, my writing, my voice to account. The immersive experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (now in its one hundredth day at the time of this writing) has pushed well beyond the television screen, overwhelmingly filling up all the information networks I traverse, including neighbourhood flags, t-shirts, profile pics, bus top advertising, and so on. There was a moment, before the most recent wave of American mass shootings, when the Canada-sized Ukraine loomed as large in the global imagination as any nation. My local’s imagination certainly engaged heavily with the story. It was, I believe, on the same day that I saw the third yellow and blue cupcake sale in my neighbourhood that my friends posted clips of Ukrainian refugees doing TikTok videos about Tim Hortons in my Twitter Feed. The boundaries of this conflict had moved far beyond the abstraction of being over there. Its presence here, though, remained couched in the parameters of augmented reality. It was as if we (and by we I mean all those not there who were yet pulled into the vortex) had a layer of total destruction added on top of our reality, providing glimpses of shared precarity. This is a story for all underdogs who feel surrounded by wolves. Canadians have always whispered musings on the cause of the next American invasion, but this conflict, this imagined precarity, was not a musing,—even while Facebook videos of farmers stealing tanks was deeply amusing. It was an identification of a shared peril. This was Benedict Anderson’s imagined community writ large across all information platforms, and I felt within myself a peril from which I was, by all practical measures, entirely safe.

From a similar vantage and desire to engage despite the distance, Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski have collected a range of poets writing in response to this peril. 48 poets in all appear in Poems in Response to Peril, writing from outside the war, struggling to make sense of our simultaneous proximity and distance from the conflict. In the poems, the predictable, heavily-mediated symbols of the conflict appear, such as the sunflower, the soldier cursing out a Russian warship, heroic moments of resistance, the detritus of urban architecture destroyed, and moments or echoes of the Ukrainian flag in various landscapes. The few poems of patriotic bravado and Calls to Arms (see, for instance, Jay Yair Brodbar’s call for more “ammo ammo ammo” instead of thoughts & prayers (27), or Celeste Nazeli Snowber’s poems celebrating “Captain Ukraine” and Putin’s anticipated death (94-5)) are also, in their way, predictable responses to conflict. “Right over might! / This is our land!” writes Canadian prairie born and raised Shelly Siskind (90). What strikes me about this book more than vicarious patriotism is the apperception by which this conflict becomes recognized as “our” fight, as simultaneously also occurring in Canada – whether by proxy, mediation, internalization, parasocial interaction, or some other mechanism. Many of the 61 poems in the collection wrestle with this paradox, the obvious distance and intense feeling of involvement. Some even claim poetry as the empathic bridge through which the association is made. Thus, R L Raymond concludes his entry, called “Apathetic Fallacy,” with an immersive image: “All around the fire ate the world / smug in its inevitability” (76). Is this smug inevitability through which we are drawn into association and involuntary involvement a fallacy, though? Or is it a condition of something else, 21^st century media saturation, for instance? Peril, then, spreads from the initial conflict over there to the mechanisms of the vortex that pulls us into its violence.

Antoinette Voute Roeder draws a line between the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine and the anti-vax invasion and occupation of Ottawa (83). It’s an exaggerated if not insensitive comparison but her poem, “No Words”, ultimately addresses the failure of poetry, of rationale discourse, to stop a parallel descent into the unmitigated calumny of democracy. Armand Garnet Ruffo reaches a similar conclusion about the ineffectiveness of prayer (85). Kate Braid, too, laments the feeling of powerlessness: “What can any one person do?” (26). Her poem effects a turn, though, and declares “the force of our love” as a legitimate “power” to help “survivors”. Poetry is a vehicle for this love. This is a recurring theme of the book—not necessarily such declarative statements about poetry’s “power” but, in fact, the more pointed question of what power Canadian poetry might offer those in conflict zones. Katerina Vaughan Fretwell begins her poem “I can’t imagine” the atrocities over there before, well, proceeding to imagine them (35). Robert Girvan offers “13ish Ways Poems Make Something Happen”, as if poetry were a blackbird. In fact, by his logic, poetry might as well be a blackbird, as the vague, warbling creature he describes is “rarely surprised” yet feels “useless” against physical violence (36-7). His one concrete “something” is that “poetry shows the pity / and the horror of war.” The recurrent note across the collection is of poets seeking a role for themselves and their art in the conflict. Tanis MacDonald seems almost in despair at the disconnect between the affect of the war and its negligible impact on her daily life (54-5).

There is a particularly gripping sequence in the middle of the book that takes this discordance as its subject, starting with Karl Jirgens’ sketch of the passivity and distortions of the moment: “We read words, listen to reports, wonder. / Recognize. Blunder through half-truths. / Broken syllables.” (43). The anxiety of the conflict over there smashes the public discourse over here in a way that leaves his speaker gasping for what remains of a broken language. The anxiety of the conflict over there elevates the pre-existing anxieties of here: “frailties within our frailties, / echoing who/what we are” (44). Patricia Keeney attends to the fraught mediation of the war, and the “nullifying screen” that “compromises us” as we “cuddle” and “watch war” (45). She instructs her readers to turn off the screen and “listen to words”, offering poetry as some kind of remedy (against what, exactly, remains unclear as the violence persists). Editor Penn Kemp’s two poems draw out the absurdity of poems against war (“As / if words could work” (47)) while meditating on the intimacy of mediated participation: “What could be more intimate than / constant streaming on our screens” (49). The screen becomes a troubling extension of our bodies, an in-tension that internalizes the war and scars the body from the inside. She calls this “intimate intimidation”, a lovely play on words that highlights simultaneous passivity and participation of over-mediated environments. What is left to do? “Send money,” she shrugs.

The Dreadful haunts these poems. Images of violence and brutality speckle the lines, but the reluctance of these images reveals that, ultimately, this collection is not a series of poems by poets against the war, nor poets necessarily against war. Various poems draw lines between other conflicts from pogroms to Afghanistan, Sarajevo to Byzantium, recognizing Ukraine within the folds of personal and global histories, almost fable like as Gary Barwin’s contribution suggests. It is an inconstant meditation on what poetry has to do with war, particularly this war. Poetry is, as many of the writers remind, the moment between action, the bond of silence between cries. That bond, however intangible, is both a force and a bedrock of relation between distant people which language can bridge. This is, in the end, a book written, irrespective of war, “to the poets of Ukraine” (xiv), and a reminder of a wider community of creativity that assembles around the opposite of The Dreadful, which may or may not be the poem, itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Gregory Betts is an experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), the world’s first collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150. His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics. He has performed these works hundreds of times in many countries, including at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the “Cultural Olympiad.” He is a professor of Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013—shortlisted finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2021—winner of the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize and the 2021 Gabrielle Roy Prize), both with University of Toronto Press. His most recent book is Foundry (2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a 15th century poet. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Richard-Yves Sitoski : Confessions of a Small-Town Laureate

 

 

 

First, a snapshot of my community, because Owen Sound is a complicated place that not too many know about. It is a small city of just over 20,000 inhabitants, situated on southwestern Georgian Bay, in an area heavily reliant on tourism that some consider more a stop along the way to tourist areas than a destination in its own right. We’re about three hours north of any major metropolitan areas, but not on any major routes. We’re feeling the results of globalism and of processes that started generations ago: we’re a former marine and rail transport hub aware that everything is moving at the speed of Peterbilts on the 401, and a factory town rendered redundant by offshore manufacturing. With the COVID-era housing bubble provoked by an influx of new money coming in from the city, housing has become thoroughly unaffordable for increasing numbers of residents. As in many rural places, opiate use is high and fentanyl deaths are on the rise. And inevitably, as is the pattern in small brownfield cities, in our efforts at reinvention, we’re kind of making it up as we go along. On the other hand, we’re plucky, with a strong sense of identity and a lot of local pride in our thriving arts community. We have more topnotch musicians in this town than in any city twice its size, we are a haven for visual artists who are inspired by the breathtaking scenery, and we are gradually beginning to attract filmmakers and digital media artists. Finally, and most pertinent to me, we are the home of a dynamic independent press, The Ginger Press, that has served as the nexus of publishing and literary activity for both Grey and Bruce counties for over 30 years.

So, far from a list of complaints, this is a list of challenges, and thus what I consider to be my raw materials as poet laureate. I don’t just have an obligation to a constituency, I have an obligation to my art, and to fulfill both requires that I be aware of my surroundings and be prepared to present an unvarnished portrait of what I see. It is an unofficial mandate that I take just as seriously than my official one, which is to focus on environmental issues. I have that liberty because as perhaps the only privately-slash-community funded laureate in Canada (to my knowledge), I am not employed by council as a civic booster. (To be clear, I’m not the [Insert Corporate Name Here ®] Poet Laureate; my position is funded by local arts patrons, and as such is as community-driven as any publicly supported program. In addition, before I am accountable to my sponsors, I am accountable to our Poet Laureate Advisory Committee and to the Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library, which oversees the laureate program.)

For a variety of reasons, my tenure has included very few of the customary occasional pieces laureates are expected to deliver. Rather, I’ve had to use my own initiative to seek out topics and opportunities to present poetry. These reasons start with the old chestnut, that many residents have never even heard of a poet laureate; include the pandemic, which has put the kybosh on most public appearances; and end with the fact that poetry is a tough sell in an area that’s predominantly red meat and blue politics.

I’ve been most successful in compensating for the effects of the pandemic. The onset of COVID-19, of course, sent us all scurrying to our computers. As an artist whose obligation is to make poetry visible, this made me wonder how I could leverage the opportunities presented by digital media. And so I started an online open mic series that has been well received not only locally but internationally. When it was clear that we were beginning to get Zoomed-out, I added A-list headline performers and changed the name to the Oh!Sound Reading Series and Open Mic. I have held online poetry workshops, and became associated with Sheatre as creative mentor in their Sparkin’ Art youth digital studio. I began to publish my poems in online journals. I held a virtual launch of my legacy project collection of poems. I have been participating as an open mic’er and feature performer in as many online venues as possible. I have been making use of social media, employing the Owen Sound Poet Laureate Facebook page, for example, to present Black poets every day during Black History Month, or to post a Poem of the Week. I created a series of 12 introduction to poetry videos for the library YouTube channel. And so on.

But as for the problems of defining the role of the laureate and establishing its relevance, things were difficult here long before the pandemic. I try to hit open mics regularly and am amazed at the differences in the reception I get. In wealthier neighbouring towns with higher concentrations of recently moved city dwellers, my spoken word goes down like gangbusters. But in Owen Sound, with its shaky economy and singer-songwriter performance scene, the best way to get anyone to pay attention is to recite poems on top of conventional rock music, and only one local poet has managed to make a decent go of this. I attribute a lot of what success I enjoy to my origins in the songwriting community and at coffeehouses in which music predominated. I built up a crossover audience early on that unfortunately I have barely been able to increase despite shifting to print poetry. It also doesn’t help that most events, from Remembrance Day ceremonies to civic commemorations and inaugurations by way of major public holidays and climate change rallies, are organized by people who have never heard of a poet laureate and don’t realize that it is customary for one to be present with a poem.

So what is a poet to do? This poet, at least, took matters into his own hands. I didn’t let COVID-19 sidetrack my primary mandate of exploring environmental issues: my legacy project, No Sleep ‘til Eden, is of a book of augmented reality poems on the environment (while not the first book of AR poetry in this country, I do believe it to be the first trade book of AR poetry in Canada). I also contributed poems to Fridays for Future, created Snowetry (an activist poetic landscape intervention in response to when a vibrant piece of urban parkland was sought by a developer for a subdivision), and wrote WormWords (an art piece on the theme of vermicomposting, in which shredded poems were used as bedding for red wigglers, making them co-authors as they ingested, digested, and excreted my words to turn something important to the human spirit—poetry—into something vital for our planet—compost). I also had the chance to write a further book of poetry, which is making the rounds of publishers, and two chapbooks, one of which will be published by Bywords as part of the prize for winning the 2021 John Newlove Award.

I have been fortunate, blessed even. My efforts have been appreciated by my sponsors and the overseeing bodies to the extent that my term has been lengthened by a third year, in order that as (if?) society begins to re-open, I might make up for the prior lack of public visibility. Recently I have begun to perform again, mostly at private functions. I have made connections in the poetry community throughout the province and beyond. I am working with Ontario’s Poet Laureate Randell Adjei and have developed a creative partnership with Penn Kemp. I have succeeded in raising the profile of the laureateship, though I would like to get our print broadsheet daily to take as much of an interest in the position as our digital community paper does. I’ve been so busy, in fact, that when it’s over next fall I’ll probably settle into a Now what? funk for a few weeks as I plot my next move. I am also very much looking forward to seeing my successor in action as they confront Owen Sound’s unique issues and work to weave poetry into the community’s cultural fabric. It’s a tall order, but the job wouldn’t be rewarding if it were easy.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard-Yves Sitoski (he/him) is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario, on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. He is also the Interim Artistic Director of the Words Aloud festival. With croc E. moses he is part of the spoken word duo O P E N Sound. He has released a spoken word CD, Word Salad, and three books of verse with the Ginger Press: brownfields, Downmarket Oldies FM Station Blues, and No Sleep 'til Eden, an augmented reality multimedia collection of poems on the environment. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Prairie Fire, Bywords.ca, in the League of Canadian Poets' Poetry Pause, and as part of Brick Books' Brickyard spoken word video series. In 2018 he was a finalist in the International Songwriting Competition, and he is a 2021 Best of the Net nominee and 2021 John Newlove Award winner. rsitoski.com   FB: OSPoetLaureate2019to2022  Twitter: @r_sitoski