Gordon Phinn : Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, by Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin

Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin
Exile Editions, 2025

    

 

 

In Muttertongue, a collaborative effulgence by Lillian Allen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, the inchoate life of words and the spaces between them fearlessly explores alternative modalities to destabilize the manufactured consent of our language gatekeepers.  A mouthful one might add, a paradigm shift, a semantic reshuffle,  an ungracious scouring of the politically correct:  all and more, in deed and word. Indeed.  He said saying, he wrote writing.  He resembled, looking.  

     Making its presence felt in print and audio and subtitled ‘what is a word in utter space’, it mines the established areas of concrete and visual poetry, that hard fought for territory in the empire of English Literature, where anthologies gathering and professors professing cobbled together the kingdom of approved stanzas over time, book and college.  Who gains admittance and who gets shifted or shafted.  These riotous rebels, rich in education and cultural roots, revel in their joyous attack on the rational, that castle of purity held in high regard by the cultural mavens that make up the honour guard of our civilized exchanges.

     Liz Howard calls it ‘a sacred ceremony, a joyous and radical cacophony of words of images’, and in this she is more than accurate.  The print contains dialogue and trialogue, provocative and kicking against perceived pricks, poems both linear & visual, and some of what one might term typewriter torment.   The audio (available as digital download and vinyl) calls up earlier expressions such as the Four Horsemen, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the original Dadaists from 1917, whose mad jabber  onstage at the Cabaret Voltaire challenged the chaos left in the wake of WW1, attempting to upend all norms.  As Hans Arp later confessed, t’was in many art forms, - “poetry, dance, song and painting, we were searching for a new order that would expose an elementary art and new order that would lead humanity from the disorder of the era and create a new balance of heaven and hell”.  Hugo Ball, in a published diary, stated that by delving into “the mystical and mythological depths of human consciousness one could uncover that which the enlightenment had buried by “disregarding the importance of human beings, had made reason to be our mortal enemy” Dada would bring “irrationality, fantasy and speculation to transcend the distinction between art and life, reigniting the magical side that had been lost in the process”.

     In the performances at the Cabaret Voltaire it was reported that all seven instigators were caught by ‘an indefinable intoxication’, such were the frenzies of expression.  Also a mystical climax took place in  June 23rd 1916 when Hugo Ball, dressed as a magical bishop dressed in a cubist costume read his verses without words, after having recited his first two sound poems, he wondered how he should end his performance: “When I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation that style of liturgical singing everywhere from east to west, for a moment it seemed as if there were a pale bewildered face in my cubist mask, a curious image of ten year old boy trembling and hanging on to the priest’s words in his parish…Then the lights went out as I had ordered and bathed in sweat I was carried down off the stage like magical bishop.’”  While the actual content of these two sound poems seems not to have come down to us, one suspects some systematic derangememnt of cadence and grammar grafted onto staccato rhythms.  Or perhaps whispers and murmurs surfing the audience’s expectations.     But in the earlier reference to ‘indefinable intoxication’ one feels the cacophonous yet calculated climaxes of the Four Horsemen  and the Muttertongue collective.  Of course, as in all cultural revolutions something is lost in the refining fires of transformation.  Some traditions are gladly scuttled while others are carefully saved and stashed in safe places to be exhumed by later generations.  Thus we yet have Hugo Ball’s ‘Three Propositions of Dada: (1) How does one achieve eternal bliss?  By saying DADA. (2) How does one become famous? By saying DADA.  (3) With a noble gesture and delicate propriety one goes crazy until one loses consciousness.’

     Was Alfred Jarry’s Theatre Of The Absurd, his infamous play Ubu Roi, the scandal it created pushing him into that ‘first prophet of the avant-garde’ and his embrace of Pataphysics another offshoot of the irrational?  In a banquet there can be many courses.  Even going backwards in time, which for the irrational is easy-peasy, we hear that the Zurich Dada group read his play out loud at their first gig.  Myself, I came of age in the sixties’ upending of cultural norms, where the surreal visions of psychedelic substances made pop music makers and fans susceptible to the fantastic and surreal, readymade pretzels that later had to forcibly realign themselves for family and career.  “Semolina pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower”.  Another case of the more you look the more you see.  And inevitably the more you listen the more you hear.  And that is exactly what Muttertongue is all about: listening more & hearing more.

     That Dada soon morphed into the more refined, and some would say disciplined, movement of Surrealism, where the dreamworld and all measure of irrationality and fantasy were slowly but surely dragged into the cultural mainstream to be stamped with the respectability of galleries, museums and university courses, was as perhaps as predictable as the earlier institutionalization of Impressionism.  Innovation has a habit of being ignored, mocked, knocked on the head, defanged and then quietly resuscitated when the initial dangers have been properly packaged as the next big thing, shelves spilling over with coasters, posters and t-shirts.  Cultural expression is a continuous circus.  Performative, as we say, whether category confirming or expanding.

     As Warhol predicted, In the future everyone (and everything) will be famous for fifteen minutes.  That future, something of a fizzle in the 60’s, has now been endlessly extended. How one times out that fifteen is a matter of choice, and in our age of planetary digital display, any iconoclastic expression can find its niche and audience, to then mutate that fifteen into years and decades.  As Allen, Barwin and Betts  make their case for the continued joyous consumption of the irrational and revelatory, we hear the voices of their individual cultural inheritances as they strip the accretions of colonialism and approved culture from the ancient roots they suspect have been packaged for respectability and profit, and if we allow ourselves, participate in the audible presence of chant and chorus as they reverberate around the room we have chosen for consumption.  Their carnival of mad celebration certainly makes a respectful nod to the Four Horsemen (bp Nicoll, Steve McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera & Paul Dutton) whose performances, particularly the classic CANADADA, are yet available on the net, and unapologetically extends the tradition of ‘sounds assembling’ from some mystery source into their own cacophony of carefree contempt.

     One can only hope they will continue to perform their boundary burning to reveal that all limits are actually invisible, that the rational and irrational, fantasy and reality, order and chaos, conscious and unconscious, rhythm and stasis, the approved and the shadow banned, are in fact, dance partners in the giddy whirl of life as they waltz and shimmy in disreputable indulgence.

 

 

 

 

Gordon Phinn is a poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, editor and videoblogger, a relic who can remember when manuscripts had to be posted with SAE’s in manila envelopes.  Recently, he has been preoccupied with several video projects, - Gord’sPoetryShow (Youtube), Poet Of The Moment (#84 at last count, Facebook) and Poem Of The Day (Instagram).  Since the demise of WordCity, where he was reviewer for four years, the collection soon to be published as Joy in All Genres, he has found a new home in The Miramichi Reader and other hospitable harbours such as the Asemana substack  His older critical work for BooksInCanada and Paragraph has been collected in It’s All About Me and Bowering and McFadden, while his memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions seems to be still shaking the odd tree here and there.  He lives and breathes by the shore of Lake Ontario in Oakville.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, by Sayaka Araniva-Yanez

Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, SayakaAraniva-Yanez
Triptyque, 2024

 

 

 

Quite simply, it’s fun to open a book titled I look at porn when I’m sad to a reproduction of an early 16th century painting of Mary, holding Baby Jesus with one arm, alleviating suffering in purgatory by extracting her milk with the other. It’s especially fun when the book in question offers poems the author has written around phrases produced by a chatbot who had been “trained” on poetry, in a historical moment during which we are promised the alleviating of our suffering by all forms of algorithms.

The beauty of this book is that it is about this false promise and moves through it, toward fleshful encounters. The bot appears in the book as “La machine,” always in conversation with “Vous.” Its language-like productions are short and carefully chosen; they highlight the uncanny dreaminess of the process and the wonders of our own capacity for speech and creativity in “our” responses. In other words, Araniva-Yanez did not rely on any kind of statistical linguistic algorithm to write their poems. Indeed, the machine’s productions are the result of their selections of poetry, and some of the words attributed to it are in fact simply invented by them. Araniva-Yanez thus turns the logic of LLMs on its head, attributing to a chatbot the hallucinations they imagined as part of their writing. The book is full of short poems in verse and a few prose poems that interrogate our relationship to machines, but also our body, language, and above all desire. Sexual pleasure and attraction to other people, to be more specific – and notably as they are mediated and oriented by machines, through pornography and forms of direct communication.

One element that surely contributes to the success of these poems is their rejection of religion. Araniva-Yanez removes both the poet/programmer and the chatbot from the position of the divine which they tend to take in contemporary culture, all the while bringing the divine within the reach of both human and machine. God is sometimes an automaton, lifeless in comparison to everything we can feel, fed content like machines are. In other moments the speaker reaches the divine in pleasure. And the speaker addresses us readers as “Vous,” as if they were able to speak our thoughts, balancing between omniscience and input, making us a reading machine, stepping aside to let us in the poems: the speaker takes themself out of the primary position in these exchanges without allowing anyone to fully occupy it.

These wonderfully executed displacements can serve the aspirations and desires of the speaker’s self because they relativize their position and find ways to interact that avoid the naked vulnerability of the face-to-face encounter. Instead, we are placed before the vulnerability of a turned back, of the pause between words during which emotions are larger than any human action: “i turn my back / and dream of being // shame is / more fertile than us” (“je tourne le dos / et rêve d’être // la honte est / plus fertile que nous,” 43).

Such displacements help the reader focus on the relationship to the machine as instrument and as mediation, back to oneself:

“the machine believes what we tell it

it inhabits secrecy,
the spraining, and the storming 

i tamper with its giftedness when my head at large goes astray”

“la machine croit ce qu’on lui dit 

elle habite le secret,
la fêlure et l’orage 

je trafique sa douance quand ma tête s’égare au large” (50)

Here Araniva-Yanez does more than describe their poetic intermingling with the machine: they place us before the operations we impose on machines even as we delude ourselves that they may have any agency, that they may in any way respond to us. And they make us feel our bodily connections to computers, at the same time as our awareness of their inhumanity: “it has never had the gift of seeing me reborn. the proof is in what flows from its leg to mine: wires, pearly, humid, and shimmering” (“elle n’a jamais possédé le don de me voir renaître. la preuve est dans ce qui ruisselle de sa jambe à la mienne: des fils nacrés, humides et brillants,” 54). We touch (or used to touch) mouse and keyboard wires with our legs, we place(d) our leg beside the humming box, in a kind of intimacy that makes us want to see a simulacrum of flesh in the machine. Yet it remains cold or warm, devoid of any capacity beyond our instructions. Much of the poems develop this chiasm between flesh and desired flesh, using bodily functions ascribed to the machine as descriptions of its effect on the speaker, rather than as metaphors.

As the collection advances, the speaker becomes closer with the machine – though perhaps mostly with themself, through the machine. Yet although their thoughts seem to move from one into the other, the speaker retains their melancholy and their sexual desire, the latter becoming more pressing in its search for an outside object, intensifying their relationship to the machine:

“the machine holds me in its jugular, it loves me. within, i often cascade down between the roots, the sap, and the lichen. at snack time, i take pleasure in eating my knuckles and the fruit that are handed to me. in the evening, i lick its organs and the machine metamorphoses into a house of skin.”

“la machine me prend dans sa jugulaire, elle m’aime. à l’intérieur, je dévale souvent entre les racines, la sève et le lichen. au goûter, je me plais à manger mes jointures et les fruits qu’on me tend. le soir, je lèche ses organes et la machine se métamorphose en maison de peau.” (79)

The collection crashes through its title to give us a sharp description of the desires we harbour for machines – desires for what they could be to us, for what they could do to us; desires we already have for the other people who are absent from these poems. Araniva-Yanez helps us work through desire, the proximity of hope and lust, of sexual excitement and intellectual curiosity, of the purest language and the touching of organic matter. And perhaps my continued reliance on the register of helping and guiding (much of which I’ve now rephrased) is one way for me to acknowledge just to what degree this collection has helped me think about the reality of our emotional investment in machines, and more broadly in what we create and animate, and thus make real.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon does not like large language models or any technology labeled “artificial intelligence”, and feels this dislike ought to be shared seeing as it so clearly gave direction to this review. He does love poetry. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Kim Fahner : Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, by Paula Eisenstein

Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, Paula Eisenstein
Pinhole Poetry Chapbook Press, 2024

 

 

 

To begin with, a confession: I have always been transfixed by the story of Amelia Earhart. That she was so much a woman who came before her time, in terms of the life she chose to live, and that she just disappeared without a trace, is a mystery that begs to be explored. My friend, Matt Heiti, has written a play about Earhart called Ever Falling Flight, and I loved Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s novel, Letters to Amelia. Before I even saw Heiti’s play, or read Zier-Vogel’s novel, or Paula Eisenstein’s Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, I remember doing curious Google searches on her when I was much younger, wondering if recent photographic ‘finds’ over the years would pan out to become ‘the real deal’ when it came to finding her last resting place and that of her beloved plane, a Lockheed Electra.

Eisenstein begins her chapbook collection not with Amelia Earhart’s youth, but with a poem that conjures the time of her celebrity and fame—a time filled with flashbulbs and public appearances across North America. In “Winter of ’33,” the poet crafts a poem that moves across the page, writing about how Earhart’s “primary source of income/[was] coming from lecturing,” and how she “drove over seven thousand miles in six weeks/mostly alone/giving at least one interview at each stop/as well as the lecture.” At the end of such a harrowing and exhausting tour, Earhart “rented a modest house/in North Hollywood near Toluca Lake,” telling the media “she was on vacation.” Throughout the poem, Eisenstein braids in the image of “a butterfly pupa/going through a phase of life/to activate transformation.” The end of the piece is haunting, as the poet leaves the reader with the idea that “The pupal stage/lasts weeks, months, or even years/depending on the climate and insect species.” In contrast to today’s media (over)exposure of celebrities, Earhart’s encounters with the press and public seem tame, but—for her—were likely rather intense.

The poems that populate the early part of the collection refer to Earhart’s childhood—of how she moved between her parents’ Kansas City home and her maternal grandparents’ home in Atchison,  Kansas, a place where “Gauzy bedsheets/the dead once crept in/bloom in the wind/on the clothesline.” They also refer to her father’s struggle with alcoholism, and to her parents’ very rocky relationship. What is solid throughout this cluster of poems (and her life) is Amelia’s relationship with her beloved sister, Muriel. They “run worm races” together, making “a harness from a grass//blade, a sulky/of a small leaf.” In playing these imaginative games, young Amelia feels able to fashion some sense of control over her life.  

Eisenstein touches upon Earhart’s time as a nurse in the poem, “Toronto nurse succumbs,” writing of images that include open and decaying wounds, “bleeding stumps,” “bedpan chores,” as well as references to “the surgeon’s path” and “A cure that torments/and does not work.” When Amelia’s mother returns to her husband, in California, Muriel and Amelia follow, but, in “California,” Amelia (as the speaker) says, “Me,/I too am free like the black-capped chickadee//chick, that set off in fall to join a new flock,/about which studies show//no evidence of parental recognition/after the first year.” From there, Flight Problems moves into the flying poems. In “Opportunistic Cuckoo Egg,” Amelia’s voice speaks to the reader through time and space. She decries the addition of a man to her flight, saying “the reason: I/am a girl: I/am a nervous/lady: I might throw//myself out.” The man is just someone who’s been added to the flight to be sure that Earhart is protected, simply because women weren’t often pilots in the 1930s.

The poems recollect, and almost dovetail, the upset and struggle within Amelia’s family life. In “Preening,” the idea of Amelia purposefully creating an image or illusion is pointed to as including “riding breeches, lace up boots,//a well-tailored/jacket.” To complete the image, a “library book/on practical/aeronautics” is tucked under her arm. Cloudy skies in “Fly days” are compared to “our parents’/dog sick marriage,” and in “Mother leaves father, returns to Boston. So do I,” the reader begins to understand that Earhart was not impressed by the idea of marriage: “The doctor says that scientifically/he can make me/fall in//love. I don’t want to./There’s something wrong with me.” That doctor compares Earhart to a “caged mynah bird,” but what she feels to be, to this modern reader, is someone who was simply born before her time. She had a dream, a wish, and she set out to make it real.

A series of creatures with wings—both birds and insects—make their way through the poems in Flight Problems, further drawing a connection to Amelia Earhart’s own love for flying. In “Satin Moths,” “the spring lock of the cabin door breaks./The door hangs open like a mouth.” The people who are struggling to close the door, then, are referred to as clinging “like the satin moths//that swarm around the willow trees at dusk/in June July and August.” In “Passenger Pigeon,” the voice of AE (Amelia Earhart) speaks to her fiance, George Putnam: “your protective nature…reminds me/of an African Wild Dog.” She concludes, firmly: “know this:/I would rather dream./I would rather do. I would rather fly.” On the day of her wedding, in “Cowbird (Feb 7 1931),” the poet writes: “She kept her own/name though did not mind Mrs. Putnam/socially.” In “Black Swan,” there is, again, the recognition of how feminist Earhart was during a time when feminism was derided: “A girl can be/any one/she wants to be.” To fight against the cult of domesticity in the 1930s, to be the exception to the rule, would have been difficult, and sometimes I think maybe Earhart found freedom from the too strict conventions of a patriarchal society while she was flying her plane and breaking aviation records.

I reached out to Paula Eisenstein to ask her about her fascination with exploring Amelia Earhart’s story through the poetic form, mostly because of my own interest in the mysterious tale. She responded by telling me that she wanted “to have a heart-to-heart conversation with an imaginary Amelia” in her mind. That ‘imaginary Amelia,’ as Eisenstein calls her, “had no qualms with the kind of energy I wanted to bring to this project. She wasn’t fazed by my desire to investigate the less seemly parts of her life.” There’s so much of the element of ekphrasis in this poetic undertaking that Eisenstein calls Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, as the poet explores a very well-known woman’s life. Given the scope of Earhart’s accomplishments, and the fascinating way in which Paula Eisenstein approaches it poetically, it would be lovely to see this chapbook evolve into a larger poetic project in the future. In the meantime, avid poetry readers should be sure to check out Pinhole Poetry’s chapbooks, published by Erin Bedford. They’re beautifully crafted and full of excellent poems.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website at Kim Fahner - Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Teacher.

Jérôme Melançon : On the Gaza Poets Society

 

 

 

 

Even now, at the height of Israel’s attack through containment, military means, and the weaponization or withholding of aid, Palestinian poets are meeting in Gaza to read their poems, do spoken word poetry, and find a respite from the loss, pain, and fear that makes up everyday life as a target of genocide. Young poets, specifically, meet as the Gaza Poets Society, escaping the futurelessness the state of Israel is imposing on Palestinians. They have been doing so since 2018, though their situation has changed considerably over the last two years. They have published two anthologies so far: Love and Loss (2019) and My Death is Not a Song for You to Sing (2024). They are available on the Society’s Buy Me A Coffee page, and buying them is a way to support not just individual lives, or poetry, but a part of humanity as well. Their poems also regularly appear on their Facebook and Instagram pages, easily shareable. And very recently they have launched the poetry journal Gaza Verse.

The Gaza Poets Society is Mohammed Moussa’s vehicle – meaning both that his poetry is a central aspect of what it publishes, with many of his poems featured in the anthologies, but also and much more importantly that he selflessly spends a great amount of time driving others to places for which they yearn, or only had thought possible. This poet from Jabalia Camp, in the north of the Gaza strip, works to share the young poets’ writing, helping weave a thread between them and us by translating them and inserting his own poems. It is he who warns us with the title of the 2024 anthology: the Gaza Poets Society asks that we share voices and songs, that we support them – and, through the Creative Allies page, to join them with our own poets and songs – all this without waiting for their deaths and bemoaning their departure. His poem “My Death Is Not a Song” asks that we remember the children who are still alive and the land that is being turned into a site of destruction in this very moment. To do this, Moussa destabilizes the forgetting of attention and memory that comes so easily and addresses a you that forces the reader to decide whether they have belonged to those who kill children and whether they will continue to do so.

The first anthology includes Basman Elderawi’s love letter to a drone, which is a reflection on and onto the obsession of those who track Palestinians. Amal Saqer shows the continuation of patriarchy and love all at once, adding further contradictions and forms of violence to the tally. Hanin Alholy speaks of the permanence of death installed by its repetition. And Moussa describes his attitude and writes of his efforts, which are those of countless Gazans and other Palestinians: “I still wait to shade you / so I don’t have to write another lament.” These are poems of ash, dust, pieces, fragments; of cages and walls; but also of sea and sky and land, always greater than the narrowing that colonialism imposes. They show us a world that is now in shambles, though still they keep it together in part by reaching out for others. They were written before 2019, at a time when standing together to read poems, for spoken poetry events, still made it possible to outrun pursuers, for a while, when poetry could still act as a refuge.

Since 2023, that world had changed considerably (as has that of the West Bank). In the second anthology, published in 2024, poetry serves to chronicle sorrows. As Bara’ah and Fatimah al-Kilani write:

We write to quiet the rush of anger burning our souls.
We write so that we may thaw the silence that thwarts our uprising. 

We write so that we may stay,
so we may leave memories behind when we inevitably pass through you. 

We are annihilated and we live despite our death.
We remain despite our disappearance. We dream of being read even if in eternal silence.
[...]
We write because happiness has become a forlorn emotion in this city,
my city, where love is a feeling constrained underneath layers of morbid dreams.

With the complementary binaries like thaw/thwart, stay/leave/pass, live/death, remain/disappearance, read/silence, the speakers refuse to pretend that death is absent and to accept it as inevitable, as entirely present. They push against what remains avoidable. They move through the barriers emotions like guilt and helplessness create. They make present themselves as fully human even as they are being starved and regularly in danger.

As we can see in this part of a longer poem, there is much happening in this anthology beyond chronicling. There are attempts here to find words for what seeks to annihilate Gazans, not as a reflection or a look back, not to learn lessons or contain memories, but as death is directed at the poets, at their families, at their neighbours, and as the occupying force continues its genocide. Moussa’s own reflections on writing highlight the imminence of death, the brief character of words and life that burst out in these poems.

And so time is woven into the poems – and especially its splicing. Nadin Murtaja’s “Here” accompanies the slowing down of time, the end of night spreading past the arrival of morning: “time changes, hours pass, / and the darkness grows / until the morning arrives, the sky sheds dimness.” Raneen Azzazi’s speaker instead lives in the short present of repetition and refuses a temporality where bombs are forever falling: “But fear does not mature with age / to the voices that sound the coming of bombs / For the bombs sound different to my ears // every time / And the nerves in my body feel them anew / every time / reacting as though they are hearing the bombs for the first time / every time // I will not let myself get used to the sound of bombs” – the future is claimed as a new present, already contained in the present decision.

Just as remarkable is Murtaja’s “Besieged Sadness.” In long breaths, the poem is exhaled peacefully, even in its grasping and throwing the worst moments at us: “You scream and hit the face of the wall with your tendons and then your voice returns, disappointed because your walls isolate your voice.” Here too, the experience of writing is a matter of attention to the acute present, even as the self becomes ever thinner: “Your write poems and then you burn them, fearful that their letters will fly and be revealed. / You play the tune of your sadness on your thin body, with the broken shards of your mirror on the floor of your room.”

Beyond the chronicle, beyond the telling of stories, on the thin path that allows the poets to maintain their presence what can be cut out and either appropriated and taken away or isolated and left behind, we find love for a people and a land. Hana Hazaim’s “Love of an Olive Tree” wraps the reader not in love for the land, but in the love of the land, the love the land extends to the people who know where to sit, how to look, how to align their body with a place – even if they are cut away from it: “There is a stillness in my back / garden as I lie here drying clothes / swaying to eastern breeze gentle / humming of machine cut grass // There is a similar stillness / amidst the rubble of a Palestinian / home. The loud thunderous drone overhead of machine killed souls.”

The same project carries on through social media posts, where poems live as literary objects and as propaganda (in the best sense of the word) meant to agitate, meant to awaken and move us, as in this poem that interrogates the act of writing through its political intentions:

In “Free Bird,” Taqwa Al Wawi deploys oppositions in couplets to underline the distance between the life of a bird and life in Gaza, making avian life seem the most human of the two: “You eat what grows. / You eat what resists rot.” The speaker envies the bird’s capacity to sing, given the stories they hold back and the words the world will not speak.

In the careful and devastating images of “The Night Refused to Fade” – "screaming dust,” “half-buried in fear” – Ruba Khalid gives part of the feeling that comes with getting bombed, and above all a shattered relationship with space and home.

Affirming life and possibility against a permanently unsettled, hope-crushing present, Hala Al-Khatib narrates the many reversals of the immediate future in “A Half-Hour in Gaza.” The poems maintains and elongates the steadfastness of a moment, the refusal to feel guilt or disappointment, and the love for self and family that make them possible.

In three poems, Mariam Al Khateeb describes precise locations, holding them up as lived places and sites of life against their transformation into targets. Here she threads a series of weary similes; there she names the boredom of heat and survival; elsewhere she writes that “The sea is there as if it doesn’t know that a war has passed; that the world cracked open at night without its knowledge.”

The repetition of knowing, added to an entity that at the very least cognates outside of human ways of knowing, is a reminder of the desire for connection, for the very world and its elements to be more than aware of the reality of life in Gaza.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon wants Palestine to be free and Palestinians to stay alive, thrive, self-determine, and return to their land. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Underscore, by Julie Carr

Underscore, Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2024

 

 

 

Reading Julie Carr’s collection Underscore, I found myself inhabiting poem after poem. Picking up the book, reading a bit, each time I would need to step away. As if I had read the whole book. Because I had read a whole, a totality. As if I needed to physically move from one poem to another. With each poem being so different from each of the others, their resonance and repetition of chosen elements gives them force, gravitas, gravity. Perhaps there was, is, something about the moment in which I have been reading the book, placing it back on the shelf, picking it up again – reading out of desire, putting it down out of satisfaction, or lack of readiness and steadiness for the next one. Reading Underscore is a physical act.

I have been struggling with the arrangement of the sections – their meaning, that is, the workings of their relations, for it is so precisely clear that they are related and part of a larger whole. Would it be unfair to the book and its author to say that the four sections relate to each other as four settings might on a microscope, focusing closer and closer? That each poem acts like a different sample, which I had to remove to make way for another? Or would binoculars be the correct analogy, focusing in from a wider field and bringing sharper attention only to some details? Might this movement from one area of closer focus to another explain the feeling that I am dealing with each poem as a totality and feel shaken, seeking focus, as I move from one to another?

I can at least follow Carr’s own through line. She gives a dedication for the book as a whole; she adds a dedication to selected poems to the same two people (among other dedications); she adds a note on these dedications, as well as on the title. “Underscore” refers to an improvisational dance practice – one body, one style, moving in different manners, each movement or series of movements existing as its own moment, breaking stillness. This practice has been brought to the dancer – Carr – by a teacher, Nancy Stark Smith. “Underscore” refers perhaps as well to what a poem can do to an emotional (and, or, comma, slash) spiritual state by centring upon it. This practice has been brought to the poet – Carr – by a teacher, Jean Valentine. Both women died in 2020; the dedications are to both women.

In “The Underscore” (22-23), one of the grandest in the collection, Carr addresses observations to Stark Smith, stretching the limits of materiality through an intertwining of alliteration and assonance in felt images, for instance in: “how the throat beats with blood and voice /     coarsing coarse sore”. The poem finds correspondences in all things, at times too direct to allow sameness, but also held together through the thinnest and most tense of metaphors: “raspberry fingertips    tensed tongues / they test the broken edges    of cups.” So often with space on the page for breath, a movement between other movements. Transforming the “how” of the realization into a question, but by making it into a “who,” Carr interrogates Stark Smith, rendering the mystery of friendly and human presence: “who is missing you today? who turned your camera off?”

In “New Year” (105) our mouth is given beautiful movement: “In whitewashed walls, your hand had curved around its pen. / It was your kitchen where you draw your brows / and the phone rang: your daughter.” A whooshing in one line; a repeated hesitation in another; then a lack of conclusion, all in agitated sharp peaks. Likewise in the poem as a whole, a year passes as the new year whooshes in; Valentine’s memory falters, hesitates; she disappears heading downward, leaving a train or entering a subway station. A movement between moments of presence – just like friendship.

The difference between these two poems is perhaps that of the allusiveness of dance and the depth of expression of language – two different ways of moving in the world, one simply faster and more exuberant than the other.

Alongside Smith and Valentine, we find Gillian, a friend, present throughout; we also find K.J., someone with whom she dances. “Good Morning” (47), one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read as a love poem, is dedicated to Peter – though after reading it over I am not so sure it is a love poem. It might simply be an ode to love, to the openness any kind of love, including friendship, can bring to us once we decide to welcome it. The conclusion of this poem is an instruction how to place oneself in relation to others: “since you are to me what this is / What might seem minimal is really maximal / I position myself toward you for all of it.”

We also find Carolyn Grace, in “1.17.15” (59), or rather we find her missing, disappeared, her death and the solidity of winter leaving a group of friends separated, “torn,” her death a “rift.” And in the undedicated “For friendship” (53), Carr places us gently by a river and its natural quiet, only to tear us away by changing the focus to the wider context, that of the hospital by the river, fully in the city – at the same time as she moves from the inside of the body and what it holds, its desires (“how we buried what we wanted in our bodies”), to the violent unpleasantness of smells as the body moves across the ground (“The soil smelled like shit / as a walked a word into the current”). The speaker here sees herself in the hospital window, or sees herself there, on the soil, by the river, as seen from the window – experiencing the reversals proper to friendship, the closeness and similarity that exist even in distance, even in illness, in the closeness or presence of death.

So many elements run through the collection. The river is one. Five poems titled “River,” numbered 1 through 4, then 10, but not in that order, and not in exact succession, remind us that there are flows that move through what we take to be discrete, separate places. Others appear here, rob mclennan among them. Like a river’s currents and undertows, there is no neat distinction between images and ideas in these poems (as in much of the collection). Human life, animal life, vegetal life, elemental life pass into one another as Carr moves beyond analogical or metaphorical thinking into a deeper sameness she finds in what is shared: “After fat felt markers drew their vapor trails on newsprint, we let them, / uncapped, fall to the earth where the roots, relentless / in their water search, seething, maybe, are.” In these river poems, she is acutely aware of violence, of its presence in an undercurrent in our experiences, so often as a desire – “and to know the sadness is to know the flame / that forms in the hand as if the rodent / beneath the rock broke back into its body / to roam” – and she is aware of the workings of pain and its frightfulness: “the headaches that plague you / flow backward through your skull     to snag the silver maple like / barbed wire at the pant leg of a boy.”

“Night” (97-98) may give us the best statement and illustration of the kind of dance poetry enables within us. In writing “the moss takes my footprint only to release it // back outward to    some blue / heron and some rose //    hips bowing” Carr once again passes through metaphor to what is akin to an elemental language, to move and thus to move us, up, slightly, up, higher, low (with the contradictory movement in “rose”) into what is already downward. In this magnificent flux present in the words and between them (and the placement of these words on the page is worth the effort of finding and holding the book), she ensures that we roll from one part of our feet to others, leap toward other places, and leave nothing of us behind as we pass into other forms of life, floating as if carried by them.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.