kevin mcpherson eckhoff : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

statement: the p rose

The p rose. On the up and up. The letter P. Rose. Or pee. I’m a nation, urination. Nationalism is peepee. Rising up is for prose. And cons. A p rose is a rose made from a host of interlacing Ps. A fractal of peepeepee. Urea. Eureka. The pros offer density and destiny. In the garden, “prose” is short for primrose. And “primrose” is short for preliminary neurosecretion. The p defies gravity. The p rose is past tense; the imperative is the prise. Usurp rise. Razed. Prized. The rising p greets the day with thoughts of relief. P-shaped petals and leaves. Belief. The B is a double P. “Pelief” is just “Belief” with one-twelfth less meaning; “Pclicf” means even less. The p also sinks. It’s sinking about life and death. In sync with peepee. The p defies levity. Down the drain. D rain. A d is a p that’s fallen on its head, and so is a b. And q is a p that is looking into the past. So that prose and brose and qrose and drose are all enantiomers of the same idea. The peer owes is another way of it. Indubitable and indebted. Owes the pee-er. Hose the pier. The p rows away into the sunset. Or back to the garden. Oh snap, the pea rows grow along lattice. Let us go up and up. The p rises. And in the fall, the p rose. 

 

 

 

 

 

dragonfruit Sermon

 

mock orange blossom joy sleep-in joy 1980 Suzuki 400cc joy giving the perfect gift joy freshly cut yellow cedar smell joy feeling a fetus kick joy Rick Moranis joy sprouting mulberry seeds joy remembering that nothing really matters joy first scoop of honey from the bucket joy sarcasm joy watching a movie after midnight joy froth in the milking bucket joy playing the drums joy watching someone else playing the drums joy alder cones joy first-ever leap off the diving board into the deep-end joy finishing a poem (either writing or reading) joy community joy in vain joy dragonfruit joy first snow joy last snow joy making up words for things that should have words like “gutch” for the region between gut and crotch or “rejubilification” for the particular glee of seeing an old friend joy

 

 

 

 

 

Cucumber Sermon

 

I wake up in the morning for coffee and already a chicken is missing, my students try to convince me that, biologically, cucumbers are fruit, but that culinarily, they’re vegetables, and our fridge fills with lemon and kirby cukes from someone else’s garden, and my kid is asking me to facilitate a carry for him through voidgloom tier 4, the difference between what feels good and what feels right is sometimes a dry August hiking trail turning back on itself, diuretics and death threats, and I question whether a Rubrik’s cube is, in and of itself, moral or immoral, and what of the geometry of bananas, and when Frigga tells her son “Everyone fails at who they're supposed to be, Thor…”  the article says it’s ethical to kick over certain cairns but also to leave trails as you find them, and the temptation to flourish here is omnipresent, 50 things you can make with cucumbers: garlic dill pickles, tropical smoothie with kale, mojito mocktail, greek yogurt tzatziki, hydrating smoothie with mango, homemade cucumber and summer berry popsicles, irresistible finger sandwiches with crushed mint, roasted with parmesan and scallions… “the measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are,” The Recombobulator 3000, I don’t know, another clutch of chicks has hatched, probably half are roosters, naturally doomed, and what feels good isn’t always easy, but neither is what feels right, or maybe the problem is feeling, and goodness and rightness has nothing to do with it

 

 

 

 

apricot Sermon

 

dip my finger into the morning bowl of dog water to lift out a soggy sod webworm, its wings spread across the wet surface like a George Harrison song, and our ten-year-old will use only Cottonelle® Ultra Clean Toilet Paper with Active CleaningRipples™ (he’d be mortified to know I mentioned it, so please don’t say anything), while the four apricots that Laurel brought home soften on the counter until our mouths are ripe enough to accept them, growing up my mom always said my name means “gentle,” but when I Google it now the only meaning that comes up is “handsome,” which feels kinda gross, and I get texts that say “there’s already plenty of peepee in the pool” and “wish you were here”, an ember that is neither dying nor kindling, all these small, brief, gentlenesses, mini infinities, and sometimes my anger is indistinguishable from sadness, how the dog’s cheeks and muzzle lift into a slight, false snarl with each lap of water, and turns out the light switch we thought was broken for months was just a burnt out bulb—we are proud to be FSC certified and use fibers that are 100% plant-based and no harsh chemicals or dyes—and I confess to having looked up a specific moth species so that this poem would sound smarter than me, but I have no idea if it was a sod webworm or a beech moth or a brown house moth or whether it survived or not

 

 

 

 

 

kevin mcpherson eckhoff's most recent book is a translation of poems by Andrés Urzúa do la Sotta titled The Language of Stones available from Hardscrabble Press. He spends his time teaching, moping, milking goats, and reading other people's books to his two boy-os. Oh, and he has a very quote-comedy-unquote album called Joke Killer. Mwah.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff : Three poems

 

 

 

 

 

Longingliness

fold triple into the longingly dive-like once moreoverness
move ever liveringly, unfoldingly, ripple-like trip and wince
diversifying evermore rippingly, like-like, loneliness fooled

 

 

severism

the night nights cuttingness purely alone and shadely gone
along puerile goons cutely showful, weddish then allfully
cultish belongers nighing prudely in noggy shadowfuls

 

 

unnothingly

a chicken feathers gulpishly below the eggness voidly
eagerest bellows avoid a feathing neck, chuckful and plug
voidments feareth checking vaguesque low-blows: filther

 

 

 

 

 

kevin mcpherson eckhoff is a multi-disciplinary goofball. His most recent chapbook—I Haven't Written a Poem in a Long Time, But if I Had It Might've Looked Something Like This—is available from broke press and his pretend comedy album, Joke Killer, can be found on Spotify and bandcamp.

rob mclennan : The Pain Itself, by kevin mcpherson eckhoff

The Pain Itself, kevin mcpherson eckhoff
Insert Blanc Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

In certain ways, one could see the whole of British Columbia poet and editor kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s ongoing work as a series of explorations into refreshing perspective through language, seeking new ways to explore how language shapes, distorts, refreshes and recreates meaning. Working through very much an engagement with what the late Toronto poet bpNichol referred to as “serious play,” he’s produced an enormous amount of oddball works over the past fifteen years, including the full-length collections rhapsodomancy (Coach House Books, 2010), easy peasy (Snare Books, 2011), Forge (Invisible Publishing, 2013) and Their Biography: an organism of relationships (Book*hug, 2015), as well as a wealth of chapbooks, including Document One (Martian Press, 2006), Channeling Voices (ungovernable press, 2008), Game Show Reversed (Book*hug, 2010), dissections from their biography (above/ground press, 2012), faux foe (above/ground press, 2018), Circadia (Gaspereau Press, 2018), an excerpt from BABYLON AD PROPHECY (serif of Nottingham, 2019) and dieting Herb Wit (above/ground press, 2020). His latest work is The Pain Itself, a book composed as a translation into a placeholder language as an experiment in translated meaning, as he writes of the compositional process at the end of the collection, “THE PROCESS ITSELF”:

Lorem ipsum is a placeholder used by graphic designers to develop a project’s visual layout without being distracted by any particular semantic content. The origins of lorem ipsum have been traced to sections 1.10.32-3 of Cicero’s thesis on the existence of pain, De finibus honorum et malorum (The Purposes of Good and Evil). This manuscript recreates Cicero’s 5 volume tome using lorem ipsum in place of Latin, which was then translated into English using QuickLatin 1.2.9e and Google Translate, followed by a thorough spellcheck courtesy of Open Office and MS Word 2007, according to the conventions of Canadian English. The source text for this book originates from eight online placeholder generators [.]

In five sections—corresponding with the five books of Cicero’s original work in Latin—eckhoff performs a translation game of telephone, translating the Cicero’s Latin into lorem ipsum through online generators, and that new text, subsequently, into standard English. Although eckhoff’s project is clearly far more ambitious (and grander in scale), there is something reminiscent to the structure of bpNichol’s infamous Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Membrane Press, 1979), a collection that Gregory Betts, as part of the bpNichol Digital Archive, describes as “A series of poems based on experimental translations of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire. […] With contributions from Hart Broudy, Dick Higgins, Steve McCaffery, Richard Truhlar, Karl Young, Douglas Barbour, Cavan McCarthy, and John Pepper.” Both projects examined the curious shifts and reflections of what retained and what shifted, moving beyond the source material to a second round of subsequent translation. One should note, also, that there are multiple version of Nichol’s piece, including one translated into Klingon, as part of Darren Wershler’s (then Wershler-Henry) Nicholodeon: A Book of Lowerglyphs (Coach House Books, 1997).

eckhoff has long been engaged in the possibilities of meaning that emerge through manipulated texts, composing works through unexpected turns, gyrations and inexplicable connections, and The Pain Itself pushes the collision of words and phrases into an area that not only allows for but is purposely constructed to embrace the unexpected, and even nonsensical. Call this, perhaps, a “Translating translating Cicero,” if you will, as a project entirely centred around play and surprise, and a new way of phrasing and other possibilities of meaning. A new way of phrasing, one could argue, leads into new possibilities of perception, and of thinking, all of which is entirely dependent upon meaning, as opposed to simply dismantling it. To paraphrase Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain, words can’t help but mean.

          To the fugitive, pregnant, the grief. And also, to the great or vast justice, the fermentation, not to amputate the life. To the arrows of the solitude, I free. We may be alive? The carriages, the mass and the god of the underworlds: The ill-advising modernism. Maecenas, to he/she/it is read, the Ides, the spice nor. But Aulus, of the disgrace which he/she/it needs, the avenging goddess. But some of the disgrace to the niche, the accusation requiring to be drank. Into the advertising, namely. To now the shovel, to he/she/it undertakes the ugly frizzling. The dark solicitation, if not. He/She/It may seek the lives. He/She/It flatters to the aught, itself, soft. Read: Even he/she/it is the tempter, namely. Into I free and also, he/she/it needs to the dislike and he/she/it is the temper, the temper! But, but by the bow. Moral, itself, the pain he/she/it may be. He/She/It may love he/she/it. May the advertising seek my god. Tomorrow, he/she/it will bestow beating, the sea different, soft. No. But the rib which, to the sugar of the incidentals, always, the spice, the temple, the cats. Into Aulus, the lore. But Aulus, the advertising requiring to be drank even needs the tank. For the god of the underworlds, huge, the feudalism nor the price to beating, but if not, Anneal, the Ides. I am tortured, but ugly. The voluptuous need, too, and the god of the underworlds. Dark, he/she/it was not. The cats consecrate the dignity, but not I. Free the Moors, the dignity. My god, the Ides, the lore, the corpuscular different. While and the pot to before to the javelins, the fermentations, the advertising, and read.

There is something, as well, of this project reminiscent to what Hugh Thomas has been doing through his mis-translations, translating poems into English from languages he neither reads nor speaks, or even Derek Beaulieu’s project of translating a single day’s newspaper content into colour form by subject. The exercise, in certain ways, becomes the project, and the final product an exploration into particulars of reading, seeing and experiencing. “Lately, I’ve been trying to train my retina to ignore the foreground.” he responded, as part of an interview around the then work-in-progress for Touch the Donkey, posted in December 2016. I would think it well past time that kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s oddball works start receiving far more serious attention. In the same interview, as he continued:

I think the relationship between foreground and background for me is political, insincere, deceptive, religious, embodimental. Foreground might mean “what wants to be seen” or “what wants to be seen as singular”, while background might mean “whatever is surrendered in the service of foregrounding”. Fig. 1. The stem only exists for the petals to be noticed. However, most writing—if it means to mean—reduces everything to foreground: in the flower example, a penlight shines on both stem and petals. Perhaps one way to think about it in language would be to focus on the more posterior parts of speech, like pronouns and prepositions. I feel this is, in part, how Stein’s writing generates an amplified background, by crafting densities of less tangible vocabulary. Another way might be found in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life or David Markson’s later novels, like Reader’s Block, which never really settle on a subject long enough for it to dominate the page, so that a sequence of diminutive foregrounds accumulate into some kind of total background.

I dunno. The purpose of placeholder text is to eliminate any semantic foreground in order to illuminate something that’s not always easy to perceive—design elements like margins, leading, gutter, etc.—and once the design is finished, the placeholder gets replaced. So, I guess the book’s original incitement involved shoving a background forward. And because standard lorem ipsum has a limited lexicon, something like 69 words, over the course of its 140 pages, The Pain Itself quickly begins to read like a cartoon backdrop that keeps repeating as it horizontally scrolls along.

I wonder if a text without foreground allows for apophenia: inventing/hallucinating a signal (subject) in the noise (scenery). Not sure why I value apophenia; perhaps I feel like it insists upon a reader’s agency or demands that comprehension becomes a collaboration. And I know this sort of reading usually feels uncomfortable, useless, and/or exhausting, but so does running on a treadmill or eating carrots everyday. Likewise, aiming my pupils beyond centre stage for more than a moment feels unnatural, which is why I trust it as meaningful action. It reminds me that looking is an active choice that can lend a kind of power to disregarded objects/ideas/people. It sort of reminds me, too, of John Cage’s 4’33. While the literary transposition of that score might seem best represented by a blank page, I suspect any writing void of anteriority would invite a like-spirited attentiveness to that which is easily taken for granted or surrendered in the service of foregrounding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. His latest poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), a collection of prose poems, is now available, and he recently completed the final draft of his suite of pandemic-era essays, essays in the face of uncertainties. Originally composed during the first three months of original lockdown, this title is scheduled to appear this fall with Mansfield Press.