Ben Robinson : One Question for Laurie D. Graham

 

 

 

 

 

BR: I’d like to ask you about your author bio, which, is maybe generally a rude thing to do, after having read an entire book, to just ask one question about what tends to be a pretty standardized form appended to the “real” text, but here I think your bio is more related to the content of the book than usual. In the bio you list, where both your maternal and paternal families emigrated from and where they were based in Canada upon their arrival, along with an estimate of how long your family history in this place extends. I’m wondering if you can first say a bit about the process of uncovering this familial information, second, what function this information serves in your bio and last, how that familial knowledge then shaped the poem — was it, as you say in your excellent newsletter crop samples, “scaffolding” for the “scant words [you] wrote in reply” or are those family histories present in the poem in a more tangible way?

 

Thanks for this question, Ben! I’ve more or less known since early on where my four pairs of great-grandparents emigrated from in the early 1900s; I recall being a child and reciting the countries to myself and others, reinforcing personal lore given to me by my parents and grandparents. The book I’m working on now involves learning more about the specifics—moving from reciting rote facts to carrying something of the story (and the silences): the circumstances of my forebears’ arrival on this continent, what they left, why they left, and how their arrival forms part of Canada’s colonizing project. It’s tougher than it might seem. There are many erasures, and attempts at erasure.

I can definitely see how saying where I come from and what landed me here—alongside what treaty territory I grew up in and whose land I now reside on—lends context to Fast Commute, helps ground the reader in a poem that’s in near-constant motion: if you know something about who I am and where I come from, you now know helpful things about voice, subject, even use of language or why certain metaphors are chosen or certain images evoked.  My bio might also give the reader some understanding about why this book, as well as in my last book, Settler Education, is so pre-occupied with drawing connections between the Prairies and southern Ontario—that this comes from a place of personal in addition to historical examination. I think I understood such disclosure as a responsibility, and a courtesy, and I really like that you saw this refracting through and speaking to and of the poem, that a bio could have a deeper function. And I think you got it right on to point out how Fast Commute is offering scant words in reply; in fact, I think that might be what all my books are trying to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education, was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Laurie’s maternal family comes from around Derwent, Alberta, by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from around Semans, Saskatchewan, by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.

Stephen Brockwell : Heard, Unseen Poems of Monty Reid

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

 

 

 

 

1/

Skip the biography: remember the voice,

visceral words

packaged by the mouth

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

dispatched on the air, measured, weighed,

said, as they must have been written,

with cadence and the musical clarity

of a well-tuned mandolin.

2/

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

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

The rain is finished

but there is always something

 

in the lid of the body

that resists

 

and something with bigger holes in it

than the holes in rain.

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

3/

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

4/

Monty Reid gardens naked.

The ghost of William Blake stands, arms crossed,

naked on a heap of mushroom compost.

Monty plants a seedling tomato.

William contemplates an eternal truth,

imagines his burin engraving it.

Monty mumbles the truth about the soil

lining his hands and feet.

William eats a ghost tomato without pleasure.

5/

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

The body always retains something that it gives up,

 

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

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

 

and then there was another but less emphatic plop when they

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

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

6/

I would never garden naked

the shears less terrifying

than the embarrassment

of being

seen.

7/

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

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

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

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

8/

Swaths of our life are unseen.

We sleep.

We work sometimes alone, see

our hands, belly, knees, feet.

We have a lover once in a lifetime

that sees us—sees

us. We appear to be

never more than

partially grasped, stood upon.

A mirror is the flat

window for our

awakening and soon-to-be

sleeping selves

cut off at the belt or the knees.

Seldom

full-bodied.

Those other moments,

the vast

hours of breath,

unremarked

by the living being

sustaining

its squirming,

invisible trillions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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