rob mclennan : Immune To The Sacred, by Stephen Brockwell

Immune To The Sacred, Stephen Brockwell
Mansfield Press, 2022

 

 

 

The latest from Ottawa poet and editor Stephen Brockwell is the full-length Immune To The Sacred (Mansfield Press, 2022), his seventh full-length poetry collection overall, following The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Poetry Series, 1988), Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), Fruitfly Geographic (ECW Press, 2004), The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007), Complete Surprising Fragments of Impossible Books (Mansfield Press, 2013) and All of Us, Reticent, Here, Together (Mansfield Press, 2016), as well as numerous chapbooks. Composed as contained bursts of passionate deduction, Brockwell’s lyric theses offer a scientific approach, one that seeks out the promise of pure facts, yet hold a high regard for the possibility of wonder. “Look,” he writes, to open the poem “MIRACLES OF THE SACRED REPLACEMENTS,” “my terrier puppy bears wings. / Each morning, my tabby sings arias for kibble.” His is a lyric simultaneously aware of both the lyric complexities and possibilities of corporate-speak, and how, as his late mentor, the poet Peter Van Toorn once wrote (Brockwell offers a dedication to Van Toorn at the end of the book’s acknowledgments), “you can smell the poem in a thing for miles.” Despite this, Brockwell’s lyric holds a discomfort, one fully self-aware, as though he ponders this unique placement and perspective, with a foot each in two worlds of perceived separate thinking, each of which consider the other utterly foreign. Instead, through Brockwell, the two sides appear intricately connected: if one is to think through language, after all, there will always be an opening into and through poetry. As he writes to open the poem “CEILING”:

For corporate folk with experience
it was like a call on a bond that had maxed,
or, for yokels you aren’t familiar with such parlance,
a doghouse ceiling for the dog that won’t hunt,

or, maybe, the inside top of a can of beans
that a living thing briefly tried to leave.

His attempts at folksy parlance don’t necessarily present themselves with the ease of tone required, but there’s a way Brockwell offers a directness that turns expectation slightly askew, almost a way of turning a line into or away from the light, allowing poems to sparkle, seemingly suddenly, and out of the blue. “If you think the clouds are water,” he offers, to open the poem “INCOMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF CLOUDS,” “it’s been too long since you / sprawled on the summer grass // and called to them, as you watched / seagulls fly under their beards— / or sun-cloud skirts if you prefer.” Through Immune To The Sacred, as with much of his prior work, his is an unironic earnestness, something his work shares with the late Kingston, Ontario poet Steven Heighton, or Houston, Texas-based poet Hayan Charara, offering genuine empathy amid his ongoing study of human effects and natural beauty, even as he plays with and against such expectation. “No ice cream on this planet,” the poem “NO SOLICITING” ends, “is as delicious as privacy.”

Whereas his prior few collections leaned further into explorations of voice and character, Immune To The Sacred leans into a kind of observational wonder paired with humanity’s increasing amplitude toward self-destruction, offering poems composed around investigation and response, anxiety and grief, while ever seeking to find a light through the dark that might otherwise be missed. As he writes to end the poem “VINTNER IN SPRINGTIME,” offering a description of clay cups and the farming of grapes, and the intimate purity of working with one’s hands: “Soiled human hands / make beautiful things.” His is a carved and considered beauty, one often sparked through the ability to remain open to new ways of thinking, seeing and observing.

Through Immune To The Sacred, Brockwell’s poems have shifted from one seeking to articulate the artifice, as well as the shaped perceptions, of cultural and intellectual constructions, into a lyric engaged with attempting to get, finally, at and into the root of a lived engagement with the world as it is. To open the poem “WHY YOU CAN’T HAVE BEAUTIFUL THINGS,” he offers: “Here is a beautiful thing: a cuttlefish tattoos itself the mottle / sepia of the reef. // Here is a beautiful thing: the tardigrade clambers up a / ladder of algae.” As he spoke of the project, then still in-progress, in a recent interview at Touch the Donkey:

Maybe one more thing. I find it dispiriting (I am overusing that word these days) that we—many of the members of our species—are immune to certain sacred, essential things (the bodies and spirits of others, this delicate planet) and simultaneously too easily infected by ideas and beliefs our culture makes sacred: evangelical faith and the faith in human instrumental reason. That’s the orbit the book has gravitated into.

The deceptive straightforwardness of his lyric belies an awareness itself of its own construction, as Brockwell offers his thoughts on border crossings, trees and social media, the work of Cobourg poet Stuart Ross and even declassified nuclear tests. Set as a thread through the collection, this new work includes eight poems in his “STILL FROM DECLASSIFIED NUCLEAR TEST FILM” series, connecting this collection to concerns around human-prompted ecological disaster he offered through his chapbook Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films (above/ground press, 2014), the poems from which subsequently appeared into the collection prior to this current volume, All of Us, Reticent, Here, Together. “And of the trees, / what survives?” he asks, to close out “STILL FROM DECLASSIFIED NUCLEAR TEST FILM: / LET’S FACE IT,” “Matchsticks can’t make / survival / as beautiful as a sunset. // There are no creams / for alpha particles.” He writes on nuclear tests and migrant children, commenting on social justice and the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that rolled into downtown Ottawa earlier this year, mere blocks away from his front door, attempting to hold on to the beauty of small moments despite the brutality of self-deluded human self-destruction. “Tell me,” he writes, to close the poem “LASER SCANNING PSALM,” “before I drink myself to death, if the sky is falling.” And yet, throughout Brockwell’s clear view of the world as it currently stands, it would be difficult to not see this collection as an optimistic one, offering the contemporary state of the world through a Schrödinger’s perspective: simultaneously alive and dead, until the possibility of the open door.

SCHRÖDINGER PSALM

O bosons, fermions, and quantum fields
that brought into being this habitable world
by chance—help me understand the loaded die
of high finance our landlords cooked up
by design to cheat your inexorable chaos.
Those who turn improbability into profit thrive.
Help me thrive. Deal me an ace after this jack-
shit so I can pay my taxes and my daughter’s tuition.
Lock our cats out of Schrödinger’s box in a single state
of purring ecstasy so their fur may comfort me
when my daily coin toss lands spinning on its edge.
Give these felines, incapable of evil,
independent trials of mercy at your craps table
of chaotic cellular division. Let me suffer for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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). He is is currently pushing to complete (or at least further) a novel this summer (as his household allows). 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

Stephen Brockwell : Heard, Unseen Poems of Monty Reid

 from Report from the Reid Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

1/

Skip the biography: remember the voice,

visceral words

packaged by the mouth

(like bubble-wrapped ceramic cups from a Gatineau artisan)

dispatched on the air, measured, weighed,

said, as they must have been written,

with cadence and the musical clarity

of a well-tuned mandolin.

2/

The poems of Monty Reid I most admire may not have seen print. I recall sitting in the basement of the Royal Oak on a Tuesday evening more than ten years ago. Monty was probably the featured reader at the Tree Reading Series—I can’t recall the details. At the time, Monty had published The Luskville Reductions, poems about the end of a marriage and the inevitable role of place in our recollections of such dissolutions. It’s a book I would like to return to these days for wisdom, comfort, insight, and verbal music. Unfortunately, too many of my books are in storage after the failure of a marriage.

Quoted in a review by one of this peers and mentors, Doug Barbour, Monty writes,

The rain is finished

but there is always something

 

in the lid of the body

that resists

 

and something with bigger holes in it

than the holes in rain.

The body. It’s something many of us have difficulty writing about beyond abstractions, vindications, and naïve celebrations.

3/

I was sitting in a chair at the Royal Oak listening to Monty Reid read new poems about the partners in our life: the parasites in our bodies we sometimes depend on, sometimes suffer from, the microscopic creatures that call our bodies home. I recall a line about a midnight itch being, perhaps, the head of a pinworm. I recall—or imagine—more benign arthropods feeding on dead epithelial cells. It struck me that these poems were beyond the merely subversive: they were matter-of-fact but deeply unsettling for me—in the best possible way. Imagine something so visceral delivered in disarmingly simple language. There was neither revulsion nor wonder: I heard the cadences of the earthly reality of one of the planet’s most complex ecosystems: the human body over which we have far less mastery than we would like. We are inhabited by the unseen. Our lives depend on it.

4/

Monty Reid gardens naked.

The ghost of William Blake stands, arms crossed,

naked on a heap of mushroom compost.

Monty plants a seedling tomato.

William contemplates an eternal truth,

imagines his burin engraving it.

Monty mumbles the truth about the soil

lining his hands and feet.

William eats a ghost tomato without pleasure.

5/

Monty Reid appears to have unlearned the cultural shame and embarrassment of the body many of us have inherited from the western Christian tradition. It could be he never really learned it. He writes with ruthless clarity about the body’s wonders, joys, depredations. In Meditatio Placentae—a book it’s difficult for me to quote from because it’s in a box in storage (I found an e-book version)—Monty writes,

The body always retains something that it gives up,

 

a trace of what’s gone. But of course the body has also been given up

by something with different audio. I came out with a kind of plop

 

and then there was another but less emphatic plop when they

dropped me in the yoghurt tub, so the angels can carry me back home.

Here even the most sacred elements of the body are bifurcated. At birth, the body and the body’s partner container have irreconcilable dispositions: loving arms, a container for fermented milk. Is there a stark truth of existence more fundamental?

6/

I would never garden naked

the shears less terrifying

than the embarrassment

of being

seen.

7/

Which number is larger: the number of poems published by Monty Reid or the number of poets Monty Reid has cultivated via the journal Arc or as the artistic director of Verse Fest? I don’t know.

Which number is larger: the number of human cells in a human body, or the number of microbial cells in the human body? I’m uncertain.

These numbers may unknowable. The proportions may be unknowable. The latest research on the human microbiome suggests we host more non-human cells than our own. Monty Reid is one of those writers whose impact is complex: in its deceptive simplicity and musical cadences, Monty’s poetry activates certain pathways that enable new kinds of poetry in fellow poets; in his tireless exploration and cultivation of the work of poets on a global scale, Monty has created opportunities for countless poets to be heard, seen, and enter into conversation.

So Monty’s work—the poems and the life of poetry—is a garden, one full of the teaming life of material, living things, and a sense of wonder at the diversity the planet puts before us if we attend to it.

8/

Swaths of our life are unseen.

We sleep.

We work sometimes alone, see

our hands, belly, knees, feet.

We have a lover once in a lifetime

that sees us—sees

us. We appear to be

never more than

partially grasped, stood upon.

A mirror is the flat

window for our

awakening and soon-to-be

sleeping selves

cut off at the belt or the knees.

Seldom

full-bodied.

Those other moments,

the vast

hours of breath,

unremarked

by the living being

sustaining

its squirming,

invisible trillions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Brockwell grew up in Montreal and will likely shrink down in Ottawa. He helps run one of Canada’s oldest poetry reading series, Tree, with Brandon Wint and Avonlea Fotheringham. Immune to the Sacred is scheduled for publication in 2022. He hosts more parasites than open mics.