Kim Fahner : Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty, Bahar Orang

Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty, Bahar Orang
Book*hug Press, 2020

 

 

 

To read Bahar Orang’s Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty slowly, and without rushing, is to allow yourself the permission to slip into a space that feels intimate and sacred. From beginning to end, Orang offers her reader the ability to consider why beauty is important in our daily lives. She ponders connections between beauty and the notion of what ‘home’ means, but the collection then moves on to consider how the appreciation of beauty is so linked to physical touch, to our own sensory explorations in (and of) the world.

Through these poems, Orang also speaks to how love and beauty often bloom from the tentative and uncertain electric spaces that exist between people, and also to how language conveys the meaning of beauty. A small poem on lavender makes you think about the true worth of something beautiful as the poet writes: “But if I stay with/lavender too long, I start to want it in abundance./Because I recognize each small gathering of lavender as/synecdoche for umpteen fields of lavender” and that “the whole of lavender is just infinite lavender.” So true, to think of how we can find beauty enough in a small sprig of lavender, and not need a whole wide field of it. There is more worth in really noticing the truly distilled beauty of a single sprig than in a blanket of it laid out across a hillside.

An intern in Toronto, Orang began to write this book while she was in medical school, as a student. A number of the prose and lyric poems in the collection focus in on this, too. The poet wonders how she thought she could have imagined finding beauty in a demanding career where it may not be that easy to see in an operating room. Her description of a C-section is vividly described, with “blood flowing, organs and slimy bits/protruding” as the “digging gets harder” and “the surgeon wrestles, hard, with the uterus to/reach baby” while the “blood spills freely.”

A surgeon speaking about a colostomy procedure tells the medical students “Make a hole in the/abdomen, reach for the intestine until it emerges from/the belly, then sew it down onto skin so inside is/continuous with outside.” This is opposite to the beauty found in field of lavender or in the gathering up of a lover’s hand.

Even in a hospital, there is beauty that can be found, and Orang strives to share her “desire to/think about beauty instead of suffering, or rather,/to integrate beauty into reflections on suffering.” As she says, “in any place of suffering there are islands of beauty.” It means, really, being able to know where to look for it, and to be mindful of finding it where you sometimes might least expect to do so. It may even be more potent to find beauty in those places—where you least expect it—than to just come upon it with an expectation of finding it in the more ‘traditional’ places.

Some of the most poignant pieces of poetry in the collection are little definitions of beauty. You’ll find them rippling through the fabric of the book, and each one will strike you intensely, in specific and unique ways. The poet writes: “Is beauty the moment of tension between two or more parts, where friction is sweet, things touch, and the possibility of togetherness slips through the poet’s fingers?” Then, in her exploration of what beauty is, Orang ventures into thinking about other people’s creative work. References to John Berger, Frida Kahlo, E.M. Forster, Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck, Solmaz Sharif, Ocean Vuong, Mary Ruefle, and Rumi—just to name some of the influences—are woven throughout the poetic meditations. This works to create a layering of meaning that invites the reader to make connections to other interpretations of beauty. Artists, thinkers, and writers—it seems—have always been transfixed by what beauty is, and how it works itself into the creative process and then the final work. That so many creatives have found themselves rooted in this lineage is both fascinating and comforting.

When you read Bahar Orang’s Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty, you will want to not rush through it. These pieces are planted in the heart first, so they sort of bloom and grow inside of you as you read them. You’ll begin to think about how beauty connects to poetry, art, language, love, sexuality, and your own mortality. Find a quiet place where you can let the poems sink in and marinate a bit. You won’t regret it.

    

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Primitive Information Episode 5 : David Hadbawnik interviews Dale Martin Smith

A poet and literary scholar, Dale Martin Smith was born in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), and American Rambler (2000). A new collection, Flying Red Horse, will be published by Talonbooks in fall 2021.

In a recent editorial, Kim Dorman notes that Smith’s “poems are auto-biographical; personal, yet universal. They are permeated with history and geography; socially aware and impassioned. At the same time, they can be quiet, even tender. Dale weaves textures of culture and memory that explore and question the experience of being alive in a volatile world.”

Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017), for which he received Simon Fraser University’s Charles Olson Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998–2004. Smith joined the faculty of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, in 2011.

www.ryerson.ca/english/about-us/…culty/smith-dale/

Interview with Dale Smith conducted January 21, 2021.

dhad · Primitive Information 5

Tim Duffy, Sarah Venart, Joshua Beckman, Joshua Corey + Leesa Dean : virtual reading series #25

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Tim Duffy : “Between the Church and the Door” and “Cart”

Tim Duffy is a poet and teacher working in Connecticut. His work has appeared recently in Bodega, Pleiades, Entropy, Rabbit Oak among others. He is the founder and EIC of 8 Poems Journal.

Sarah Venart : “Octopus Laser” and “Stun Guns”

Sarah Venart was raised in New Brunswick and lives and teaches in Montreal. She is the author of I AM THE BIG HEART and WOODSHEDDING.

Joshua Beckman : “If You Pray These Days” and “poem n form d bill bissett”

Joshua Beckman is the author of a number of books including The Inside of an Apple, The Lives of the Poems & Three Talks, and most recently Animal Days.

Joshua Corey : “Exterior Century,” “Interior Medusa,” and “Interior Birth.”

Joshua Corey is a poet, critic, translator, and novelist whose books include The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), The Transcendental Circuit; Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2018), a new translation with Jean-Luc Garneau of Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses as Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), and the forthcoming Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press). He lives in Evanston, Illinoi with his wife and about-to-be teenage daughter, and teaches English at Lake Forest College.

Leesa Dean : “Self-Isolation”

Leesa Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program and a Creative Writing Instructor at Selkirk College. Her collection of short stories, Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards. Her poetry chapbook, The Desert Itabira, was published by above/ground press last year. She is a settler on Sinixt territory in the Slocan Valley where she roams her small acreage, finding inspiration in the wildness surrounding her, and mostly fails at trying to grow melons. The long poem read for this series is from a manuscript in progress titled How to Survive which explores macro and micro forms of survival, ranging from the species level to the personal, including meditations on the author's summer spent at Aircrew Survival camp in Northern Alberta in 1995 and her mother's life-long repercussions from having polio as a child, a condition that ultimately killed her at the age of 60.

Kim Fahner : Q&A, by Adrienne Gruber

Q & A., Adrienne Gruber
Book*hug Press, 2019

 

 

 

Having never had a child, it is perhaps odd that I’m reviewing a book of poetry about pregnancy and birthing. I know absolutely nothing about it, except for what I’ve heard second hand from friends. Twenty years ago, I had one friend tell me that she had thought she was going to die during childbirth. It was such a traumatic experience for my friend that she only had one child. You so rarely hear about these stories of struggle. Adrienne Gruber’s Q & A is a book that documents her first pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. What comes after, too, is a reflection on postpartum life. Here, in poetic form, is a book that actually wants to tell the unpolished truth of what it is like to travel through pregnancy, birth, and beyond.

There are some brilliant poetic sequences in Q &A, one of which is Gruber’s “What to Expect When You’re Expecting (100 Years Ago),” wherein she speaks to some of the historical beliefs that once surrounded the mystery of pregnancy. One belief is “When long walks cannot be taken,/carriage riding may be substituted,” while another is that “A lazy woman bears a long,/painful childbirth.” Women should have “no fear that the bath will disturb/the contents of the womb,” and “A woman’s sexual nature should find expression in motherhood,/not the grosser forms of sexual activity.” Such outdated and archaic views of sex and birthing are, thankfully, now cast off with a derisive laugh and a shake of the head.

In “Gestational Fall,” Gruber writes of a hike taken along the West Coast Trail, a journey that is not for the faint of heart or body. She hiked it with her partner while she was pregnant with her first child. She writes: “We carried our bones for days. Each night I wiped between my/thighs and to my relief the paper came out clear.” Then, in “Ode to Lucy’s Pelvis,” Gruber speaks of the pain of a lengthy labour. The poet references “Lucy”—Australopithecus aferensis—our common female ancestor: “I curl fetal./Calves throb/tendons convulse./Pray for apoplexy.” Gruber’s is a poetry that tells the truth about the gruelling and graphic nature of childbirth.

This is not the airbrushed and photoshopped recollection of childbirth that we so often hear about after women have given birth. In my experience, the majority of my women friends seem to have had really wonderful birthing experiences. Have they told me the truth, or is there a secret society of women who promise they won’t tell other women the really honest stories of birthing? Do they just leave things out? Is there an erasure of what happened? I’m not sure. What Gruber does here, though, is peel back the superficial glow that is more traditionally presented and speaks instead—realistically—of how a woman’s body can be nearly broken by the birth experience, and how her mind and body will be changed forever afterwards.

After poems that speak to the ‘in between’ space of waiting for a baby to arrive, in pieces like “Time Is Still (Linear)” and “Last Straw,” Gruber shifts into poems like “Finale,” “Push,” and “The Cat Has the Stunned Look of a Murder Witness,” where the birth of the poet’s first daughter, Quintana, is documented. In “Haikus for Baby Blues,” Gruber gets at the crux of post-partum depression when she writes of how it has traditionally been written off as ‘just a passing thing,’ something to be lived through and managed: “Don’t worry, experts/coddle. You should be able/to just shake it off.” She writes of a placenta that “left a hole.” Hormonal surges are to be expected, but this doesn’t make them easy to fathom or navigate. “My therapist says/fear is a bird that searches/for a place to land.” Would that it would be so simple, to find a place for that bird to land, to calm the surging.

Gruber isn’t afraid to honestly document the stories that are not as frequently shared. In “Cephalopelvic,” the poet writes of how a rough birth process can “crush and kill/the soft tissues of pelvis.” There are those babies who don’t live through the journey, “a fetus asphyxiates,” or a woman is “left/with the decaying seraph/inside” until it is born afterwards, a child who still has a name that ought not to be forgotten.

Adrienne Gruber’s Q & A is a fascinating collection of poems because it pulls back the veil on things that haven’t often been spoken about when it comes to the bodily journeys that women undertake during their lifetimes. For those of us who haven’t carried a child, it’s a doorway into a world that seems almost secret and hidden. For those of us who have had children, well, I would imagine it would be a relief to read more of the reality of childbirth. These are poems that don’t shirk from the gruesome physicality of birthing, but there is beauty here, too, in the poet’s love for her daughter, and in the recognition that there are many sides to the prism of a woman’s life.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com