I am sitting here
looking
out the window.
Someone walks by
who is not me,
doesn’t even look
like me.
A few moments
later,
another person
who is
not me walks by!
What are the
chances of
that
happening?
(Stuart Ross, “I
Am Sitting Here”)
March 30, 2022.
I sit at a moment of culmination.
After six-and-a-half years at New York University, I am a month away from
defending my dissertation, which focuses on how poets in Canada and Mexico connected
across the borders between them in the 1960s and 1970s —an effort to trace
lines of contact, poetry of travel and migration, networks of ephemera, and to
rethink how we understand the history of Canadian poetry within a broader
transnational context that predates the trade agreements that now connect our
economies. I am also a week away from the publication date of my first
full-length collection of poetry, Harbour Grids, which tries to
understand my position in the complex web of social and economic relations that
is Sunset Park, the gentrifying neighbourhood in Brooklyn that I called home
for five years.
Over the past year, as these accomplishments
shifted from possibility to probability, and, now, certainty, I have found
myself returning to a pair of lines from near the end of William Carlos
Williams’s poem “The Desert Music,” published in a 1954 volume that shares its
title. The poem, which takes place during a one-day visit Williams undertook across
the U.S.-Mexico border, from El Paso to Juárez, dramatizes Williams’s
self-doubts about his stature as a poet. Ironically, Williams was already in
his late sixties and an internationally recognized literary figure by the time
he wrote the poem, closer in 1951 to the series of strokes that would
effectively end his career as a writer in the early sixties and lead to his
death in 1963 than to either his poetic debut in 1909 or his elevation as a
major Modernist poet in the early 1920s. That Williams continued to experience
such doubts so late in his career adds a layer of humanizing pathos to “The
Desert Music.” Williams closes the poem, nonetheless, with a note of guarded
triumph that appears as much directed at himself as at the interlocutors that
prompt his response: “I am a poet! I / am. I am.
I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed” (Collected II, 284).
Williams’s poem represents something
of a starting point for the journey that will shortly conclude with the defense
of my dissertation. Williams had been a major influence on the Canadian poets
of the 1950s and 1960s that I became interested in during research for my
master’s degree. Like Williams, these poets also produced poems that tracked
their contact with Mexico. I began to notice a literary historical phenomenon:
a flowering of poets of the 1950s and 1960s in Canada and the United States who
were invested in thinking about their relation to Mexico. My effort to
understand and contextualize this confluence of poets’ interest in Mexico at
mid-century eventually became my doctoral dissertation.
*
Yet my interest in Williams’s poetry and
his influence on Canadian poetry in the sixties stems from another beginning.
Long before I signed a publishing contract for Harbour Grids, long
before I decided to dedicate over a decade of my life—including bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctoral degrees—to the study of literature, I was a precocious
student in my first year of high school who had been recommended Williams,
Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac by my high school English teacher, Kate Reston.
Somehow, I acquired used copies of their books. I seem to recall being invited
into Mrs. Reston’s office to receive a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl and
Williams’s Selected Poems, though it’s possible I have invented the
memory, or that the gift came from my other high school English teacher,
Shelley Little. Possibly, I managed to find copies in the single used bookstore
in my small hometown. In any case, the simple, understated beauty and air of
mystery in Williams’s poems, like “Pastoral” or “To a Dog Injured in the
Street,” left an indelible mark on my young mind. He used language in ways I
had not known were possible, and that created a desire in me to imitate.
Williams made music from the overlooked fragments of both language—a pause
between two words, say—and the world—a broken shard of glass in the empty yard
of a hospital.
The following year, having enrolled in
Mrs. Reston’s Creative Writing class, I participated in the class trip to
WordFest at the Banff Center for the Arts. We slept in sleeping bags on gym
mats in the hall of an Anglican church and were given the option of various
workshops and readings. I elected to take the poetry workshop with Stuart Ross.
I can remember the layout of the room and at least two of the exercises: the
first, to write an interlineal poem between the lines of a poem that Ross had
written between the lines of another poem; and second, to produce a phonetic
translation of a poem in German, which we completed back in the rec room of the
Anglican church. I recall the reading that evening, in which Lorna Crozier (if
I am not mistaken) described the sound of two aging bodies making love as the
sound mud makes when dropped into a puddle: splat, splat, splat. I remember the
feeling of liberation and possibility that accompanies any overnight class
trip. I do not recall a single word I wrote.
What I remember most of all, however,
are two things. The first, Stuart Ross recounting how he would stand on Toronto
streetcorners selling his poetry in hand-made folded paper chapbooks and
broadsides with a sign around his neck that simply stated “Canadian poet going
to hell. Buy my poems.” The second, is the inscription that Ross left in my
copy of his Hey, Crumbling Balcony!: Poodles Poems New and Selected,
the message “Thanks for YOUR poems.” The latter is a gesture that I imagine he
has repeated thousands of times, at the uncountable public events and classroom
visits he’s undertaken in his storied career as a poet, publisher, and
educator.
But I had met a poet—I had met a real
poet. A poet of flesh and bone, a poet who had struggled to have his poetry
read, a poet that was more than a black-and-white photo on the cover of a used
book. A poet who believed that poetry could be made in unconventional ways. And
a poet who believed that I was a poet. (“I am a poet.”)
*
Immersed in the social world of
academia and hovering around the edges of both the New York and Canadian poetry
scenes, I have needed to remind myself, often, over the past year, how neither
of my two impending accomplishments had to happen. It’s easy to assume, with
friends, peers, and mentors who have publishing resumés and scholarly CVs that
dwarf my own, that of course I would publish a book, of course I would graduate
with a doctorate in poetry, of course I would be a poet. (“I am a poet.
I am. I am.”) But in reality, none of this was the obvious outcome. While,
unlike friends and peers on the little league baseball team that my dad
coached, my family never needed to rely on social services, and my father was
never absent or incarcerated, we were never that far, geographically, socially,
or financially, from those who did. Within my world, culture was something that
happened elsewhere—in Toronto or Vancouver, Hollywood or New York—and which you
were lucky to glimpse through the staticky transmissions our tv antenna would
scrape from the air.
There’s something foundational to my
ethics about the first of the two things I recall about meeting Stuart Ross—the
idea that you could make and distribute your own poems—that has stayed with me.
Something about that punk ethos captured my attention as a teenager and stayed
with me. My master’s thesis revolved around the work of Montreal poet Louis
Dudek, who, in founding Contact Press with his peers and rivals Raymond Souster
and Irving Layton in 1952, emphasized the necessity of keeping the means of
publication in the hands of the poets. His mission has been taken up, over the
years, by poets including bpNichol and bill bissett, Nelson Ball and George
Bowering, rob mclennan and Amanda Earl, Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa, Kyle
Flemmer and Sacha Archer.
And Stuart Ross, of course.
Urayoán Noel, the chair of my
dissertation committee, who has supervised my research and guided my growth as
a scholar—and a poet-scholar—reports having had a similar experience. Growing
up in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel, a poet, scholar, and translator like
myself, had grown up next to an experimental preschool where the canonical Puerto
Rican poet (and former political prisoner) Francisco Matos Paoli could be
glimpsed writing through a top-floor window. But Noel reports that his first real
encounter with a poet, at age 14, had been meeting Roberto Net Carlo (aka
Roberto Ncar), walking down the street around the corner from the experimental
preschool, selling copies of his book out of a shopping bag. Noel bought the
book, Al borde de un silencio [At the edge of a silence], with all the
money he had on him. Poetry was something sold in the street, something you
hustled for, something connected to the world. The punk rock ethos embodied in
these gestures—both Ross’s and Ncar’s—captured our imaginations as young people
and helped shape us into the poets we are. I see it in everything Noel does as
a writer and teacher.
*
Poets (and poetry scholars) like to
talk about the “world-making” capacity of poetry. That attending to language
with intention, exploring its materiality, or pushing the limits of the
expressible allows us to glimpse other configurations of the world not
determined by our current modes of seeing and understanding. It’s a capacity
that is both true and yet grows more false as expressions of the sentiment
become rote (or merely an alibi for the absence of politics in a scholarly
argument).
Nonetheless, the fact that I am about
to become a Doctor of Philosophy in twentieth-century poetry and publish a book
of poems with my name on the cover feels like it would have been inconceivable
prior to meeting Stuart Ross. It is impossible to know the shape my life may
have taken without it, but I know that since that moment I have always thought
of myself as a poet, even through periods in which I have drifted away from
poetry. (“I am. I am. I reaffirmed.”)
Whatever can be claimed about poetry’s
capacity to act in the world, I know at least that it has enabled me to make a
world for myself. (If I were a journalist, I might trot out some data here
about participation in creative writing workshops and statistical differences
in life outcomes.) None of this would be possible with the opportunity as a young
person to meet that first “real” poet. Not just in a book but in person—in classrooms
and at literary festivals and on reading tours—not just in Toronto and
Vancouver and Manhattan, but in Banff and Río Piedras and Kimberley (where in
twelfth grade my friends drove to see the legendary bill bissett spill his
papers all over the stage mid-word, pick up a random leaf, and continue reading
as if nothing). Not just any poets, but poets like Ross and Ncar, poets whose
ethical engagement with poetry allows young people to imagine themselves, too,
as poets. Real poets’ poets.
(I am a poet.)
Zane Koss is a poet, scholar, translator, and
resident alien currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of harbour
grids (Invisible, 2022) and co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s The
Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) with Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz and
Whitney DeVos. He has published two chapbooks with above/ground press, Invermere
Grids (2019) and The Odes (incomplete) (2020), which was shortlisted
for the Nelson Ball Prize.
.jpg)
.jpg)
