rob mclennan : WJD, by Khashayar Mohammadi / The OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. From the Farsi by Khashayar Mohammadi

WJD, Khashayar Mohammadi / The OceanDweller, Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. From the Farsi by Khashayar Mohammadi
Gordon Hill Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

I’m fascinated by the pairing of WJD, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer and translator Khashayar Mohammadi’s second full-length collection, with The OceanDweller by Mashhad-born poet and translator Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, translated into English from the Farsi by Mohammadi. With two separate collections paired in such a way, one immediately wonders: how are these two texts in conversation, if at all? Is this a pairing of logic, or of opportunity? How do the poems of one impact the poems of the other? Or is it akin to bpNichol’s suggestion of the poems (his argument for elements of his multiple-volume epic, The Martyrology) connecting through all being composed by the same hand, both sides seen through the lens of poet and translator Khashayar Mohammadi’s ongoing poetic?

Mohammadi’s WJD is a follow-up to the full-length debut, Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021), a book of lyric compassion, epistolary gestures, film references and porn stars, and first-person explorations of memory, dreams, desire and personal histories. Leaning further into the lyric of meditation and song, the poems of WJD are set as a triptych of poem-suites: “The Naïve Sufi,” “Hafez Displeased” and “Ravaan.” Extending the lyric examinations of Me, You, Then Snow, the poems in this new collection seem to attempt a wider perception and deeper clarity, stretching across the landscape while seeking the possibility of deeper spiritual wisdom and security.  “death means / new vision,” Mohammadi offers, as part of the opening section, “word came: / The mystic as child // same city with / newfound eyes / new shades of red [.]” Seeking new ways to see what may already be familiar, Mohammadi offers the lyric as a meditative form, seeking solace and a path through a landscape populated with trauma, personal history, adulthood and the collisions of language and culture, between points of origin and where they currently reside. “I was miserable / in a different tongue,” Mohammadi writes, as part of the poem “Kooshk” in the second section, “I feel it on cloudy days / am hungry in a different tongue / a spoonful of medicine                                 delirious / past midnight                         and moonlit chests / watched for each breath [.]”

There feels a considerable weight that the narrator of these poems is seeking to work through. “I’m here writing in split-screen,” Mohammadi writes, as part of the poem “Psychotic’s Prayer or the Sufi Path to Synthetic Nihilo,” “right hand in childhood / picking orange blossoms / for thickets of memory / left hand typing / what is there to keep me from reliving childhood / cheating time to relive and relive and relive [.]” Or the following poem, titled “Two Centuries of Silence, / or How I Became a Reliable Narrator.” Offering a trajectory begun in the prior collection, these poems seek to navigate a path forward throug the lyric meditation and conflicts of personal and cultural history, language, culture and experience. How might one easily find clarity through such seeming-complication? Through seeking the correct questions, one might suppose, which this collection certainly manages, despite or even through the struggle. As a selection from the opening section offers:

word came:
        Who are you?

an entangled presence
a mirror grown into a body

word came:
        It has been said before

words scramble on the page
are mere scribbles

word came:
          -Illegible-

an interruption
a cough
a child’s question

word came:
        Theater only exists
        without an audience

Almost as counterpoint, the seventeen poems that make up Saeed Tavanee Marvi’s OceanDweller offer a particular kind of charming, almost wistful, certainty. “it’s comforting to roam the empty metal / chambers of the OceanCruiser past midnight,” he writes, as part of “Endless Corridors of Memory.” He threads through a fantastical narrative, writing across the “OceanDweller” and “OceanCruiser,” even against harsher threads through a poem such as “Southwest Iran, by the Iraq Border,” that includes: “once upon a time / if memory serves / my life was a celebration / filled with joy and goblets of wine / alas the Bible ran its course / as if salvation had abandoned me / that’s how I buoy atop a sea of poetry [.]” The poems offer commentary on memory and dreams, spiritual truths as well as a backdrop of history, war and mysticism, as well as the possibilities that poetry might allow. “war had dried up all ink on the pages,” he writes, mid-way through the three page poem “The Open Tome,” “every day the scripture grew pale / the man had come to once again / overwrite the chronicles of light / so light can remain / since it was only in light / that humanity was possible [.]” There are moments where one can work through these pieces and see each author, each book, as a different side of the same, or at least a similar, coin, watching how each author responds to the difficulties and complications of history, religion, war and the salve of both spirituality and the immense history of poetry, both of which hold the simultaneous possibilities of salvation and failure. Working through difficult times, the poems in these paired collections reveal much, and it is only through such explorations that wisdom arrives, or provides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, he now has a substack at https://robmclennan.substack.com/, through which he is attempting to work through a book-length essay, and a couple of other prose projects.

Amanda Earl : what poems do in a few above/ground press 2021 chapbooks

 

 

 

 

1. evoke dreams

The Northerners by Benjamin Niespodziany is “an ekphrastic sequence written while  watching the Dutch film De Noorderlingen (1992)  directed  by  Alex  van  Warmerdam.” I haven’t seen the film, but I enjoyed this sequence very much. I did the same sort of thing while watching Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and it’s published in Kiki, my poetry book with Chaudiere Books (now with Invisible Publishing). I love the minimalism of this sequence, the fragments, and the fact that some of the poems “appeared as daydreams written on post-it notes.” There’s a fairy tale quality to the sequence. There are evocative lines, such as “He houses the dark” when writing about someone called “the forester” from the film I would think. You know how your dreams seem completely logical while you’re dreaming? I felt that here. Like I was dreaming too.

2. mesmerize through accumulatory sentences

In Yesterday’s Tigers by Mayan Godmaire, the sentences start out small and build into complex images and structures. I delighted in these poems, some were haibun, I believe. I loved the call to the senses. I don’t know about you but since the pandemic, my world has been increasingly reduced to screens, so I welcome any opportunity to engage with the senses. I enjoyed the way occasional sentences in French appeared. Switching languages in a poem changes its rhythm and pace. I love the way Persephone is linked throughout and to the land. The lines in italics come from Jim Morrison songs and Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and work well with the text. I’d like to read more of Godmaire’s writing.

3. play with geometry

Andrew Brenza Geometric Mantra is intriguing. Brenza works with and against the grid  in these digital visual poems. Some of the words are readable and some are not. He begins with a maze at the start of a sentence, followed by mirages and mirror images. The work shifts into distortions and breakages as the mirror breaks into shards of reflections becoming kaleidoscopic and fading. There is an error to remember, darkness and snow, letters that meander and link or bunch together like magnetic fuzzy iron filings in a magnetic field experiment. There is a sad sea. I can read each one of these poems and my mind begins to wander too, taking me all over the place from Eurydice’s broken mirror (once more a Cocteau reference) to the suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, to this odd little toy I had as a child that used a magnet to collect filings beneath a plastic sheet…None of this was the author’s intent, but as a writer, I always want my work to lead outward and inward. So it’s a compliment. I know these were probably great fun to make.

Katie O’Brien’s Micro Moonlights plays with musical notation in a similar way. Some of the titles come from or were inspired by Beethoven. This work also plays with the grid, here the sheet of music, sometimes horizontal or vertical or at a slant, and the notes, sometimes repeated, sometimes dancing off the sheet, sometimes layered into a tower of song, to reference Leonard Cohen for my own entertainment, or a big tangled up pile of cacophony. I would like to hear these played on a piano.  

4. make me ache with envy

In Less Dream N.W. Lea makes poems that ripple across my lake of loneliness, as his work always does for me. They quietly sing flaw. Everything at Once is a mantra that I’ll keep on my wall. There’s something so humble about this work, yet it also astonishes with these unique lines that feel like truths for me. “the blackbirds in the bare maple/are little adorable portals/into Void. [from Void].

Jason Christie’s Bridges and burn is a thoughtful, humorous and sometimes wry sequence that plays with the contradictions between the natural world and the human world as we try to survive  late capitalism. It’s been the subject of much of Christie’s work especially his most recent and brilliant collection, Cursed Objects (Coach House Books, 2019. “In the meantime, the tree grows like a graphic expression of a kind of rough music performed by the ants.” Hell yeah.

THE OCEANDWELLER by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi and translated by Khashayar Mohammadi is a gorgeous work. “bitter nights had sedimented underneath our nails”

There is acacia entering a kitchen window, white like a bride. There is a downpour, two telephone conversations mingled. There is pain: “its strange / how pain resembles words / if inspected from close range / its as if words are constructed by pain” – “hide your wings”

I love that above/ground press publishes translations, not something I’ve seen too often in the micropress universe. I appreciated being introduced to Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s work, which I would likely never have read because I don’t speak Farsi.

5. have me leaping around

JoAnna Novak’s Knife with Oral Greed opens with an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem, Hansel and Gretel from Sexton’s Transformations, which I hadn’t heard about before and will now read.

Knife with Oral Greed is a great title, by the way, and perhaps refers to an ancient Finnish tale, Kullervo, based on a very shallow Google search. Makes me think of Freudian analysis – orality.

This is a minimal sequence, spare of colour (white, red, silver), with unusual words like “tessarae,”: tessarae are small, cut stones used in mosaics as early as the third or fourth century. A “cuchillo” is a Spanish word for knife. I do not know what a “peach leo” is but I like it.

I am enamored by all the textures in this sequence: wax, silk, silver, oil, foam, white flowers, cake, snakes, wine, flypaper…

There’s a small American perfumery called “For Strange Women,” I have only learned about this month. The descriptions of the perfumes were so enticing, I had to purchase a solid perfume called Fireside Story. This work is well-written and strange, and that is a compliment. It feels like a dream. There are some reversals where objects perform actions that I’ve seen in some Canadian contemporary surrealist-ish poetry.

Looking at Novak’s site, I notice Noirmania, a poetry collection that is described by Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book describes as “part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama.” I’m intrigued. I feel like this intensity that is described is restrained in Knife with Oral Greed, but it’s there, beneath the skin, in the veins…

And of course, I have to look up Göransson, who is a poet, translator, professor and editor. I immediately follow him on Twitter. I liked his use of “necroglamorous.” This leads me to this fantastic poem published on Poetry Daily, “Summer (excerpt) which blends English with another language that I don’t know so I can’t name it and is heavy with texture and intense too. Then I go to his site and read a bit from an interview he did where he’s quoted as saying he wants to drown in poetry. I adore this. That’s what I’m here for.

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a polyamorous pansexual feminist cis-gendered poetesse, the fallen angel of AngelHousePress and the managing editor of Bywords.ca, and that’s all she wants to mention in her bio right now. More info: AmandEarl.com; Adoring fans: https://linktr.ee/amandaearl.

 

 

Saeed Tavanaee Marvi : The Ocean-Dweller’s Manifesto: translated by Khashayar Mohammadi

 

 

 

The Ocean-Dweller is a thousand and one poems.
The Ocean-Dweller is closely related to music.
The Ocean-Dweller is in perpetual motion.
The Ocean-Dweller is an epic in four life chapters.
The Ocean-Dweller is in constant struggle with time.
The Ocean-Dweller is the only true lover.
Comprehending the chronicles of The Ocean-Dweller is only possible through profound
cognition of the narrative. The complexity in narrative is the same exact complexity as the human psyche.
The Ocean-Dweller is a revolutionary.
The Ocean-Dweller is a monster.
Every line of The Ocean-Dweller is a portal to another universe.
The Ocean-Dweller is incomprehensible like a human.
The Ocean-Dweller is the profound comprehension of solitude.
The Ocean-Dweller is endless days.
The Ocean-Dweller is disinterested in beings without memory.
The Ocean-Dweller battles oblivion.
The Ocean-Dweller is nostalgic for the glorious age of eternal lovers.
The Ocean-Dweller is a heretic and a theist.
The Ocean-Dweller’s head is in the clouds, his feet planted in the ocean. 

The Ocean-Dweller does not like cheese.

 

 

 

Saeed Tavanaee Marvi is a poet and translator born in the city of Mashhad in 1983. His books include The Woman With Chlorophylic eyes, Verses of Death: An Anthology of American Poetry and a translation of Richard Brautigan’s Tokyo Montana Express.

Khashayar Mohammadi is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer, Translator and Photographer. He is the author of poetry chapbooks Moe’s Skin by ZED press 2018, Dear Kestrel by knife | fork | book 2019 and Solitude is an Acrobatic Act by above/ground press 2020, and translator of OCEANDWELLER, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, newly published by above/ground press. His debut poetry collection Me, You, Then Snow is forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press in Spring 2021

 

cover image: Babak Tavanaee Marvi