periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics

Friday, June 4, 2021

rob mclennan : il virus, by Lillian Nećakov

il virus, Lillian Nećakov
Anvil Press, 2021

Produced as part of Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor and publisher Stuart Ross’ “A Feed Dog Book” imprint at Vancouver’s Anvil Press is Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (2021). As the press release offers: “il virus brings together 113 poems written over seventy-eight days during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown in Toronto. These responses to daily news and eclectic media posts encompass dogs (lots of them), Zambonis, jazz and blues, Jackie Gleason, mathematics, thermodynamics, and geography (real and imagined). These miniatures are Lillian Nećakov’s most spare poems, but each is jam-packed with explosives: anger, grief, love, need, and a foraging for ink.” I’m curious at the suggestion of these as “miniatures,” as the interconnectedness of this suite of one hundred and thirteen numbered poems suggest them less as miniatures than individual points across a far wider expanse; the ongoingness of what, across seventy-eight days, developed from individual pieces posted to social media into a book-length response to those uncertain and unsettling early days of pandemic and lockdown.

I woke to the sound of birds whispering about
the humans
and I couldn’t tell any of you yet
because you were all
including the dog
sound asleep and the peace that filled the house
was like a giant breath
and the sun draped itself over every germ
and there was no need for anyone
to pray
even those of us who were awake
carrying the arrogance of stupid nations on our shoulders
as if a war was coming
as if no one would ever wake again.

Nećakov is the author of numerous books and chapbooks over the years, including and CRUNCH (Toronto ON: Proper Tales Press, 1982), Sickbed of Dogs (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn 1989), Polaroids (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1997), Hat Trick (Toronto ON: Exile Editions 1998), The Bone Broker (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press 2007), Hooligans (Mansfield Press, 2011) and The Lake Contains an Emergency Room (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. It will be interesting to look back, years from now, and the wealth and range of pandemic-response across the literature composed over these past fourteen months. These are still early days, publication-wise, although I would discuss Nećakov’s il virus in the same breath as I would mention Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield's a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) and Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020). And then, of course, there was my own pandemic-suite of essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties,” composed across lockdown’s first hundred days, written simultaneously to British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020). There aren’t too many events that connect across such a length and breadth of contemporary living: across geographic and economic possibility. The same storm, certainly, but far from the same boat. Culture acknowledges shared events such as the day American President John F. Kennedy was shot, when the Beatles came to America, the first moon landing or the day Elvis Presley died. In various pockets and corners of the globe, questions might arise of “What were you doing that day,” and the simultaneous experience of the same event would offer a shared connection, even across great distances. The Challenger disaster, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. How many anthologies of poetry emerged in response to 9/11? The scale and scope of this event, obviously, is far different, which might also provide an equal scale and scope of response.

Reading Revolutionary Letters
on the front steps
waiting for
the drag queens
Dudley Do-Right
Sir David Attenborough
Cripple Creek
Pinetop Perkins
Muddy Waters
Paul Butterfield
Bobby Charles
Ronnie Hawkins
the sky turns all
tubular bells
suddenly I am gripped
by fresh fear
and retreat
through the corridors
to a peace on the verge
of extinction.

il virus does offer a kind of poetic diary of occasion and ongoingness, composed as an accumulation of meditations that move through the narrative points of those early weeks of lockdown. Known predominantly for her short, carved, surreal narrative lyrics, Nećakov instead employs a stretch of anxious meditation, contemplating the length of time almost exclusively spent at home amid family, attempts at distraction and the constant news cycle, as well as the echoes of the past, including the 1917 Influenza pandemic, and familial nodes of memory. She works her way through daily activities, some of which have been shifted due to the isolation, from listening to music or reading, to grocery store options and homeschooling. A low nervousness might have occasionally poked through the layers of her previous works, but il virus offers anxiety as an underlying, and entirely reasonable, response. As the seventh poem in her cycle opens: “After ten days of news, shouting, unbearable silence / we dust off the Grunow model 520 / turn the dial in search of / Radio Luxembourg / yes / we are old enough to remember / yes / we are old enough to die [.]” Opening her sequence referencing the initial echoes of lockdown, she soon shifts to the more intimate matters of domestic as the reality of isolation begins to set in, such as in the fourteenth poem in il virus, that writes:

The doctor’s name reminds me of an opera
my son lives 850 metres away
may as well be a hallucination
we are running out of dish soap
I am afraid to kiss my husband
the world looks like a broken roller coaster
I haven’t touched money in weeks
there may be funerals
I won’t be able to attend.

il virus moves through history, dreams and abandoned buildings, references to Buzz Aldrin and Lyle Lovett, David W. McFadden, K-pop, cholera, daily walks with her dog and other domestic matters, all of which become heightened, clouded and shift, all existing within the shadow of an uncertain period of time, at the onset of a global pandemic, the likes of which hadn’t been felt on this scale in more than a century. She references some of those earlier events and locations, such as Ottawa’s Porter Island, locally known as a site where typhoid and smallpox patients were kept in isolation:

There is a city there
just across the virus bridge
of 1893
the other side
of the Rideau River
burning
to be loved
beckoning hearts
to pump along her streets
to squeeze themselves
into her narrows
poco a poco
to trespass into
her own sinewy days
to flee Porter’s Island
into the enigma
of her veil.

This is a powerful collection, one that does present more of an urgency, beyond her prior collections: an urgency, as well as a particular kind of formal coherence, writing out the bones of her poetic journal: “Home schooling / read from right to left, love / no,” she writes, to open the twenty-first poem in the collection, “this is not maths / or Shakespeare / this is how the world ends [.]” Later on, to open the eighty-ninth poem, she writes:

I am reading Huttel, lightheartedly at first, then I’m reminded of this war we’ve been in. And how he’s gone and McFadden is gone and Fred too, and it’ll never be April in my heart or ole buttermilk sky. It’ll always be somewhere down the crazy river, it’ll always be translating Americans into Canadians, floundering on the shores of Ontario lake with a broken ukulele, willing the snarl of this fire in the belly to flame itself out.

There is an anxiety in these poems, threaded together with both an urgency and an exhaustion, as one might think appropriate during such a period, with the ongoing global crisis providing an attention wide enough for Nećakov to compose her first, specifically book-length poem. As she writes to open her acknowledgments: “During the most terrifying seventy-eight days of my life, I sat at my dining room table in Toronto and knocked off poem after poem. What else was I supposed to do during the spring 2020 pandemic lockdown? I began posting the poems on Facebook; soon, the encouragement and support tempered the dread I was feeling and gave me hope.” And perhaps that, in the end, is what these poems offer: a documentary poetic through one corner, one particular stretch, of a stressful period, but one that offers hope, even beyond itself—the very thought that such will be eventually read.

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, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press in April 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, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Gil McElroy : I’d Wanted: A Brief Poetics of the Occasionless Occasion (Writing The Julian Days)

I’d wanted to write a poem without end, without beginning. Open-ended, you see. Wanted to write a poem of time, but stripped of the accoutrements and expectations that have become part of how we typically measure its passage via the conventions of our calendar.

I’d wanted to write “occasional” poems, but wanted, too, to write poems of the non-occasion. Each day can be one or the other – though usually the latter – or both simultaneously.

I’d wanted to write (and not write of) the occasionlessness of days. To write, too, the occasion of days (and not of it, as well). And to yet somehow stay clear of the cloud of significations that the particulars of time passing, the stuff that inevitably gathers around the specifics of a day, a month, a year – you know, the manifestations we’ve grown accustomed to courtesy the regularity of our year-long trips around the sun…

I’d wanted to write a (not of a) lifetime. To write the cumulative occasions of the occasionless.

So to do that:

I’d played around with several approaches through the 1980s, all of which were wanting and thusly failed. The penultimate was a piece entitled dd/mm/yy, and it came close. But no cigar. Those damn clouds...

I was, I discovered, using the wrong kind of calendar.

I’d a longstanding interest in astronomy and cosmology, and it was amidst the measurements of time and space that I found what I needed: the Julian Day system, a simple, cumulative count of the days elapsed since the chosen Day 1 of January 1, 4713 BCE (Wikipedia can tell you all about it).

I was delighted to discover the potential open-endedness it suggested, both in moving forward in time and in working backwards into it, allowing me to mine material from my notebooks and journals. The use of a conventional calendar would have still provided me that opportunity, of course, but encountering Julian Days made me think anew of time, afforded me permission to work more freely backwards as well as forwards, and anyway I was anxious to get out from under the baggage of the conventional calendar.

Another way of putting it:

I’d wanted to escape from the gravitational tug of a poem inextricably linked to a certain point in the planet’s journey around our sun (or the accumulation thereof). The days added upon one another arithmetically (+1, +1, +1…) as the Julian Days are argued a form of linear progression akin, in my mind anyway, to that of one line impinging upon another within the contextual structure of the poem, within the contextual structure of an open-ended series…

Too, I’d wanted (still do) to attempt to stop time from becoming fixed and fixated, from becoming firmly lodged and rooted. I didn’t want my texts to be held for a kind of ransom that way, by a system (the conventional calendar) that would grasp the order of words by the neck and end up choking and trivializing it. The texts would not be reduced to contextualization within sunny summer days, chill winter nights, the newnesses of spring, nor the fecund decay of autumn. They might be of, but they would not (necessarily) be about. And they would not be delimited by.

So a simple titular integer denotes sequence, linear time, and under the sign of the integer there is the accommodation of texts that have stood alone, separated from the containment of other dedicated poem sequences and seriality. The lyric misfits and runaways find a home (indeed, even the visuality of a concrete poem finds inclusion). More importantly, perhaps, there will be no formal, set beginning, no formal, set ending. The Julian Days just starts and it will, at some point denoted by either death or disinterest, just stop. There is nothing immutable about it, fore or aft.

Gil McElroy
May 2021

Gil McElroy is a poet and visual artist currently living in Colborne, Ontario. A number of the Julian Days poems were collected in the 1999 above/ground press chapbook Some Julian Days, reprinted in 2019. Stand-alone sequences from the ongoing series also comprised above/ground press chapbooks The Doxologies (2014), and LAOS (2018). Selections from the series have appeared in four volumes of poetry published by Talonbooks, and in his most recent work, Long Division (University of Calgary Press, 2020).

Jérôme Melançon : Rien du tout, by Olivia Tapiero

Rien du tout, Olivia Tapiero
Mémoire d’encrier, 2021

Everything is related in Olivia Tapiero’s grand, immense book Rien du tout (Nothing At All). Mummified children, assimilation, Québécois nationalism, urchins, misogyny, colonialism, war, family, the sea, the body. Violence is everywhere: the destruction of marine life for the sake of human comfort; insanity placed within people so they may be taken away; bodies that burn, that are shot, that are tortured; clumsy attempts at penetration; unwilling accommodation and underlying resistance; the Russian front during the first World War; France’s oppression and executions in Algeria, the destruction and murders and rapes that generations carry.

The mouth is a recurring image, but in general orifices stand in for one another, take each other’s place – and not just on the human body. Too much is being forced in; so much needs to be expelled that bodily functions replace one another, that new ones emerge. The speaker is becoming something else within herself that is both parasitic and liberating:

I would like to name the parasite, but I only see my face. Soon the thing will occupy the greatest part of me, it will come out of my skin and leave behind it what I will no longer be.

J’aimerais nommer le parasite, mais je ne vois que mon visage. Bientôt la chose occupera la plus grande partie de moi, elle sortira de ma peau et laissera derrière elle ce que je ne serai plus. (17)

There is no distinction between depression and systems of oppression; between pain in the hips and the pain felt by others across continents; between disappearance and mutation – because they are experienced from the inside throughout the book, through the body, through diasporic collective being. And Tapiero’s writing displays a deep awareness of contradictions, in the attitude of Canadian and Québécois men toward the speaker, in the attitude and longings of the women in her family as they play out the effects of colonialism; in her training through culture and education to become a collaborator of Québec’s own brand of (re)colonialism. And in the disjunction between being born and not being, naître and n’être (63).

I need to feel death to determine the contours, I need to examine the signs of the decomposition of others. Everything reveals itself in its damaging. It doesn’t stop me from grabbing on to things for fear that they might wane between my hands. I accumulate to slow the loss and it ends up destroying everything.

J’ai besoin de sentir la mort pour déterminer les contours, j’ai besoin d’examiner les signes de la décomposition des autres. Tout se révèle en s’abîmant. Ça ne m’empêche pas de m’agripper aux choses par peur qu’elles s’étiolent entre mes mains. J’accumule pour ralentir la perte et ça finit par tout détruire. (79)

The nothingness of the title is carried through a meditation not on emptiness but on appetite, hunger, absorption, creation, and birth. An emptiness perhaps in the sense of a transfer of matter or emotion, a transfer of life. There is the desire to assimilate, to appropriate, to possess, felt within the speaker at time, and for the most part felt as an outside threatening force, which threatens to swallow everything up:

to subjugate : to flatten out to exist : good intentions erase history : protocols are established : administrative sadness : it’s the order of things : what swallows us : all bodies included

assujettir : aplanir pour exister : les bonnes intentions effacent l’histoire : les protocoles sont établis : tristesse administrative : c’est l’ordre des choses : ce qui nous avale : tout corps confondus (97)

Yet through most of the book, the dominating desire is for the possibility that something great might be contained inside what seems to be empty but is instead absence, collapse, engulfment. A decolonial hunger for something other than what fills the bodies of colonized women and destroys them from the inside. Usually it emerges from loss and what has been kept from the speaker – language for instance, the forgetting, the denial, the confiscation of Arabic – often it is menacing, but it also motivates something like hope:

I make friends with what surrounds me. The epiphany is relational. I have felt it in my reading as in the forest, while listening to strangers speak to me to the point of whitening the night or on acid, collapsed by the streaming mountain of roots. To go through the relation dissolves me. It is the only disappearance that remains untouched that is not a violence or an erasure. A decolonial disappearance.

Je me lie d’amitié avec ce qui m’entoure. L’épiphanie est relationnelle. Je l’ai ressentie dans la lecture comme en forêt, en écoutant des étrangers me parler jusqu’à blanchir la nuit ou bien sur l’acide, effondrée par la montagne ruisselante de racines. Éprouver la relation me dissout. C’est la seule disparition qui demeure intouchée qui ne soit pas une violence ou un effacement. Une disparition décoloniale. (18)

Tapiero manages to achieve what I see quite simply as a feat. She lets us see colonialism without being overtaken by it, she makes something else out of it, in the moment of reading, in that lasting power that is created in the contact between the events she recounts with sparse detail, the speaker’s voice that prolongs them, their inscription in the body of the reader (“Nothing whiter than those blue eyes,” 41; “your eyes blue like death,” 83). She locates colonialism. In Algeria. In Europe. In Québec (and were I to write in a different context I might focus on that facet of the book - that, and my own blue eyes). In bodies. In minds. In relationships.

There is in each place the ghost of fantasies disappointed by the place.

Il y a dans chaque lieu le fantôme des fantasmes déçus par le lieu. (65)

She names colonialism, colonialism, just as she names fascism, without being didactic or turning poems (if these are poems) into essays. She shows it as a nothingness that is passed down (“a time bomb,” 47), a desire to be other, to escape the effects of colonialism by becoming more completely colonized - and not as trauma.

It’s fitting then that the book ends in Greece, that place to which the West traces its beginnings, that moment of great imperialism and collapse, in disappointment and in the disappearance of the self as the horizon nears, as something else is being prepared. Delphi becomes a place not for knowledge of the self, but to expulse the self and give birth to it.

Rien du tout is deeply political, it shares the intimate experience of oppression and the energies of revolt and revolution, it sides with the latter by focusing on them. The book is a series of revolutionary acts through unforgettable hyper-realistic and surrealistic images. An overthrowing of silence, of ignorance, of complacency. Of violence. All I can do, really, is say: as I read, this is happening; make it happen too.

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the author of two books of poetry, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018), and more recently a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.

Angeline Schellenberg : An interview with Joanne Epp

In Cattail Skyline, her second full-length collection with Turnstone Press, Winnipeg poet Joanne Epp really does make you feel as if you’ve “just walked through a doorway in the air” where life is stirring on many atmospheric layers at once. With its deceptively plain language, like a scraggly-haired rambutan from Cambodia“you have to take it in whole.” During National Poetry Month 2021, I talked with Epp about country roads, mythical trees, and why she hopes her readers can put her book down.—Angeline Schellenberg

AS: Hi Joanne. I loved your first book Eigenheim, which I understand means “one’s own home,” launched exactly six years ago. How would you say Cattail Skyline is different from your debut collection?

JE: Eigenheim was a search for home—as a place and a state of being. Cattail Skyline takes home as a given and explores new places…and familiar ones in new ways.

AS: Tell me about the title. Besides the fact that it was an excuse for a gorgeous sky-blue cover, why Cattail Skyline?

JE: What I notice, and hope my readers see, are the different levels in the Prairie landscape: of course, there’s the sky, and there’s what you see at ground level, when you crouch low. Then when you go down the creekbank, that’s another level altogether: the cattails become your skyline. I find those changes in perspective interesting. Small things down low catch my attention.

AS: How did Cattail Skyline come together?

JE: I tend to start with something particular, with an image—say a road to the cemetery or a flower by the creek—and the themes develop as I keep writing. I began thinking of these poems as the beginnings of a manuscript way back in 2008, while putting together my application for the Poetry Colloquium at Sage Hill. What I had thought of as several separate series of poems turned out to have themes that related to each other in interesting ways. There has been a lot of adding and revising, and some subtracting, since then, but that was the start.

AS: Most of the poems about a particular place, such as Star Lake Camp in Whiteshell Provincial Park, are grouped together, but the Cemetery Road prose poems are scattered between the other series. How do those pieces function within the collection?

JE: That arrangement was Jennifer Still’s suggestion. When my editor Alice Major asked, “Does this collection have a single arc? What is its shape?” I said, “It’s a path with several branches.” The Cemetery Road is the path that leads through the book, and the other sections are the trails leading off it.

AS: Speaking of the editing process, when I went through my first book, I found far too many socks. Is there a word you realized you use over and over in this book?

JE: Trees, trees, trees!

AS: I noticed that. I found at least 75 references to trees, including 13 different species. Why are you so drawn to trees?

JE: It’s possible there are theological underpinnings. Certain things have stuck in my mind, such as one of my professors at Canadian Mennonite Bible College talking about how the biblical story is bracketed by images of trees—the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life (Genesis 2:9) reappears in the vision of a reborn Creation in Scripture’s final chapter: “and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

AS: Do you have a favourite poem or section in Cattail Skyline? Why?

The first one that comes to mind is the Omand’s Creek series, about the park near my home, because it’s so cohesive, with a poem for each month as the landscape shifts. I like the way I take that small area of ground and see so much in it.

AS: “Blue hills,” the section set in Cambodia, is unique—how does it speak to the rest of this book about the Canadian Prairie?

JE: One of the main threads of the book is how we connect to a place. When I visited Cambodia for my work with Mennonite Central Committee in 1994, I was absorbed in an unfamiliar place. The poems are me reflecting on how it’s not quite possible to know a place, despite that immersive experience. I didn’t write the Cambodia poems right when I got home. There were so many sensory impressions I had to let settle. Years later, an uncle asked, “What happened to you there?” This series is my attempt at an answer.

AS: As I read, I had the sense of the Prairie buildings and bones disappearing under layers of silt. Is there a sense that you feel as foreign on the Prairies as in Cambodia because of how the land—or you—are constantly changing?

JE: That’s true. The British geographer Doreen Massey says our memories are tied as much to time as to place; they’re memories of places in a particular time. When we return in another season or decade, we’re visiting a different place.

AS: So can we ever feel at home in a place?

JE: I think so. What you gain after a long time of caring for a place is a sense of attachment. What you have to steer away from is a sense of possession: my creek, my lake. It’s better to speak, as Jenna Butler does in her book A Profession of Hope, of “landscapes we belong to.”

AS: Would you call this an environmental book?

I know there are books of poetry that talk in a more elegiac way or angry way about environmental damage. I couldn’t do that; it’s just too sad. But what I could do is be attentive and write as carefully as I could about the places I’ve become attached to. A book I read recently said that in talking about climate crisis, where you have to start is with love and gratitude. Because love and gratitude imply a relationship of interdependence, one that acknowledges we’re not separate from the rest of creation. There’s no such thing as “the environment”: there’s the world and we’re a part of it.

AS: What experience do you hope to leave with your readers?

JE: My first thought is I want them to go for a walk!

AS: So you’re not concerned that your book could convince readers to put it down and head outdoors instead?

JE: Not at all. I walk all the time: to get to places, get exercise, clear my head. It’s the way I explore. I’m happy to think others might find the same enjoyment in it.

AS: But you aren’t always moving: I counted 22 occurrences of the word still in Cattail Skyline, both in the imperative to “be still” and in the reflection on what is still here.

JE: I hadn’t picked up on that. But the two meanings are connected: in that quiet observation, you can pay attention to what’s still there and what has changed.

AS: Thank you for reminding us to keep our eyes open.

Joanne Epp is the author of Eigenheim (Turnstone Press, 2015) and the chapbooks Crossings (2012) and Nothing But Time (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Canadian Literature, and other journals; her collaborative translations with Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen have appeared in The Polyglot. Her second full-length collection, Cattail Skyline, has just been published by Turnstone Press. She lives in Winnipeg.

Angeline Schellenberg wrote Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), a collection about raising children on the autism spectrum, which won three Manitoba Book Awards. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. The host of Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline recently launched Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). She loves talking to dogs and eating other people’s baking.