Émilie Dionne and Sean Braune : On Microbial Soup Kiss

 

 

 

On Microbial Soup Kiss:

 

 

ÉMILIE: At the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like time was happening differently, and it did not only seem to be affecting humans. Time and temporality took on aspects of speed and slowness and there was a kind of “adaptation” period occurring in the natural world. It felt, at times, that all life forms were responding to the event of the pandemic: an overall sense of quiet. Even squirrels in urban settings seemed more at ease—more free to run in multiple, nonlinear directions. 

SEAN: Perhaps our “human” “cities” could become more nonhuman—a sort of nonhuman socius. This sensation was like, but not exactly like, a post-apocalyptic movie where large segments of the population have died.

ÉMILIE: There has been a lot written about how people’s “sense of time” was altered, affected. Many people actually worried about this and experienced this as something particularly destabilizing, scary even, but also disruptive of one’s sense of “grounding” and even perhaps “identity.”
          A bit like something played with each of our forms of “proprioception.”
          I felt the need to think about this, but differently than solely through hyper-cognitive mechanisms. To try to explain everything, to make sense, to give sense, to everything. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like trying to make sense of all this doesn’t always feel like the right call.
          Poetic writing appears more suitable. More connected with what I, personally, was experiencing.

SEAN: For me, writing the poetry of this chapbook was the expression of a desire to be with words and also outside of them—to dive into oblivion and a sort of negation of self by experimenting with the words and sounds and imagery that I heard all around me at the beginning of the pandemic alongside a new sense of silence, quiet.
          The writing process was largely unfocused and featured a series of e-mail exchanges between two voices and the editing of the poems reflected the sonic preferences of each voice.

ÉMILIE: And now that I think about it, that I try to think about it, I can’t even quite recall how it all played out. How we decided on this project.
          For me, there definitely were events. For one, I recall—like so many other people—“discovering” my neighborhood. It was also, in truth, a “new” neighborhood, as I moved to this new locale about 6 months before the pandemic. Still, I’ve walked these streets so many times by now. About 2 weeks into the pandemic, I went up this little alleyway and discovered a series of very large and tall trees whose trunks were indissociable from the fences that run along the alley. It mesmerized me, these “city trees,” and I felt this was a true expression of the Anthropocene, where the metal, the “human activity,” had become intricate and inalterable to the trees’ “being,” their form, this form of life.

SEAN: Both of us were trying to come to terms with the new “pandemic reality” beginning in 2020 and, for this reason, the poetry is phenomenological in some ways—it dealt with individual temporalities—almost a form of sonic autoethnography. As Émilie says, we were both walking around our respective cities (Toronto and Montréal) and experiencing the absence of the streets and a natural world held often at a divide as it took up greater residence in urban settings.
           Microbial Soup Kiss was like any poetic or artistic collaboration in that it reflected a sort of rhizomatic tension and unity that was a reflection of the complexity of the world as such—a reflection of the panoply of voices and schisms of natures/cultures, especially as that nonhuman “interloper” known as “COVID-19” disrupted the perceived (although strictly idealized) “normality” of human life.  

ÉMILIE: And, to me, this experiment—or experiments (perhaps ongoing)—is in itself a lifeform, a new life form. Re-reading it creates ripples—in me, my mind. It provokes, invites, entices; new voices, images, “tunes,” feelings (e.g. shivers, warmth, etc.) in me. It is a gift from the past where the past comes alive and engages a conversation with the present, and serves to recall the past, but also to give it new meanings. Earlier, I spoke of “sense-making” and how uncomfortable I was, and still am in many ways, with this compulsion, throughout the pandemic and the multiple other events that happened in the past two years—culturally, politically, environmentally, socially. Yet poetry is, to me, an undeniable force to make sense, to make sense matter differently, and that all matter, where we think both in discursive but also material terms (or “configurations”) about what happens, and what we allow to happen, or “participate” in shaping.

SEAN: I agree with Émilie on this point, but I would slightly alter my own poetic commitments to be an attempt to make nonsense matter differently and I see poetry as a force that can sometimes unearth the profound disequilibrium and absurdity that exists behind concepts like “normalcy” and “reality.”

 

 

 

 

 

Émilie Dionne is a sociologist, feminist ethicist and political thinker at Université Laval & VITAM, as well as a writer of fiction (novels, short stories), poetry, and visual artist (drawing, painting, ink, wood-burning) based in Quebec (Montreal & Quebec city). She's been writing since she was 10, wrote three novels, five plays, many short stories and collections of poetry. Her writing has been published only once before, Secrètes Immortelles (1999), and her visual art is available online (@emilie_fineart on Instagram). She's a runner, lover of animals and nature.

Sean Braune is the writer of the poetry book Dendrite Balconies (University of Calgary Press, 2019) and the philosophy book Language Parasites: Of Phorontology (Punctum Books, 2017). His first feature-length film, Nuptials, has been shown at the Cyprus International Film Festival (2021) and the Austin Revolution Film Festival (2022).

Lydia Unsworth : On Residue:

 

 

On Residue:

I’ve often felt the character of a house invade my person. The pressure of a room. The presence of a room’s position within a building, of that building’s position in relation to the adjacent buildings, the opposing buildings, the planned buildings. The shared walls, the narrow alleys, the upturned dirt of a newly designated garden that hasn’t yet been patted down. One city-centre flat I lived in had a small rectangular window in the bedroom, in the wall facing the head of the bed. To get the light, to check the day, I only had to raise my body up on my elbows, lift my neck. During the year I lived there, a series of skyscrapers were built on the prime estate to the rear of the complex of small red-brick two-high flats, presumably ex-council properites, mostly lived in by people who had been there forever and who other people were waiting to die. Storey by storey, my sunlight (and the last sunlight of some of those pensioners still hanging on to architecture’s earlier ideals) was knocked out, only to be replaced by the fractured sunlight of the reflective coating they went on to apply to the city’s latest skyhigh. The dwellings of each of these poems are worlds - with myths, with ghosts, with storms and tides and anniversaries and languages and neighbouring planets. They are eulogies to dead yet formative selves, to selves that continue to drive or haunt me. I’ve been a different person in each of these structural way points. I’ve died and lived and tried and failed a hundred thousand times. I move, I wipe the slate. The silt around my toes comes with me, the lice embedded in my hair. I sink into the latest carpet or slide along ungarnished floorboards. I unpack, collect and throw, a baleen filter. I map routes out from the new nucleus. I spread. I open the doors, to the front and the back, eddies of wind make my skin prickle. I’m heavy with children now, there are containers on ships we can pay for transit and there are gentle sentiments to protect and shelter. For the past two years I have lived in a remote castle, mice have got in but little else. My children notice or do not notice the madness of a wife turned monument, of a coin glued to the ground, of an unsoiled seed in an unopened drawer as the dampness that is life absorbs into the surrounding paper. These poems were a way of returning to the drift of all those buildings I knew way back when the world was turning. Of returning to the flow of the people who came and went and came and went again. Without movement, the mind slows to a halt. My body is a slender portal and my breath is that which passes through it.

 

 

 

 

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Some Murmur (Beir Bua Press) and Mortar (Osmosis). Her most recent pamphlets are Residue (above/ground press), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Work can be found in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman, SPAM, Tentacular, and The Interpreter’s House.

Andrew Gorin : Two poems

 

 

 

Mapquest

Looking back before directions, I saw how to make
In the beginning, you’d think we basically won
Whatever he said. The way that way leads us on
It is necessary to be absolutely  
Ping of ecstasy drowning a studded beach
Way not to declare that beautiful
Breadfruit, sites of passage into
Before you made bread with your hands
There was a conference for us to go to
Eleven hundred enthusiasts converging
On the last known copy
It seemed a paltry fee compared to
What we paid for the crystal in our teeth
Fingers should be boiling over in minerals
A nod to them, to you
Like I ever existed without extras
If there’s no disco ‘neath the glacial ice it means
We get to invent the music
If there’s disco, I’m going
Which will be hot or cold depending on your
Inner thigh. The babysitter
Ordered pizza with an unused air of expectation
Normal shorts, blood diamonds
I thought were a particular kind of diamond
We had it once and we lost it and now
We have it again, as if that’s any consolation
I don’t attach moss to reference of any kind
It’s too perfect and I’m too busy
Silting the sports bar with day-glo looks
Towards eternity, which is beer for my friends
I could go on singing arias to the
Trees are men, a perfect leisure on TV
But the avenue of displaced shame
It is no longer difficult, driving in New York
You see a lot of aggression directed toward
Doctors, lawyers,
Estranged from their machines, the heart
Goes on wanting architecture but it is not enough
To disrupt
Seeming with seeming

  

 

Back Home

He arrived she a bath
She a shower I knocked on her door
He came downstairs I breakfast
I woke up the sun shine
Tom the meal the phone rang
The boss arrived she a letter
He shave he cut himself
She the dishes the telephone rang
They watched t.v. I on the computer
He arrived I the plants
She cry I got home
It began to rain I home
We saw the accident we wait for the bus
I a magazine she turned off the lamp
I woke up the baby cry
Carol and Linda drive home they saw a UFO
The bomb exploded I talk on the phone

 

 

 

Andrew Gorin is a poet and scholar based in Brooklyn. His creative and critical writings appear in Chicago Review, Urban Omnibus, The Boston Review, and Criticism, among other publications. He’s currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU and an editor for the Organism for Poetic Research (organismforpoeticresearch.org) and The Distance Plan (thedistanceplan.org).

Kim Fahner : Who is your mercy contact?, by Ronna Bloom

Who is your mercy contact?, Ronna Bloom
Espresso, 2022

 

 

 

Handmade chapbooks make me get weak in the knees. I know. Dramatic. Ronna Bloom’s elegant Who is your mercy contact? features twenty-one poems that she wrote over the course of 2020. Bloom wrote a poem each day, but this is a collection that is divided into months, documenting what the poet calls “as much a spiritual practice as a writing practice.” The chapbook is about being mindful, of cultivating a spirit of openness, and a “faithfulness to the flickering experience of now.”

The first poem, “Vows,” begins with an honest voice: “I courted emptiness for ten years/and it suddenly married me.” There are birds “flying through me,” then, but when the speaker hears of how many other birds have perished “smashing into windows,” she says, that it “only makes me/all the more certain of my vows.” The poems in this collection sometimes speak of solitude, loneliness, and the fear that gripped everyone around the world at the start of the global pandemic.

In “On going to the carnival,” Bloom writes of the closure of the Venice Carnival because of quarantine: “Stoic the faces of the gondoliers who disinfect boats,/then send emojis with wide scared eyes.” Prepared for flooding in Venice, servers in outdoor cafes “know to lift the chairs before/the water comes,” but “no one can dress for this.” First encounters and experiences with the coronavirus were a bit surreal, and Bloom conveys this in some of these poems.

The pieces from that early wave of hysteria are bleak and evocative of a specific place in our history as humans. In “Holy Week,” the poet writes: “Wednesday my sister had a Seder and read the plagues/without a hint of irony. I ate a frozen dinner at home.” By Good Friday, “it was reported nurses everywhere/had the taste of death in their mouths.” The sense of impending doom, isolation, and loneliness is poignant in “Immeasurable,” when a woman walking down the street looking for an open butcher shop tears up at the cinematic strangeness of a too quiet city. Bloom writes: “Some of us/looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes,/others looking up, sending out our million help me messages.” Thinking back to that time, when we washed our oranges and eggs, these visual images seem both surreal and unsettling. The world is different now, but just as strangely off kilter.

In disconnection, Bloom seems to suggest in her work, we can still find the points where we can discover connections. These places of connection aren’t always as obvious as they once were, before the virus arrived, but perhaps we are more finely attuned to their quiet—yet momentous—arrival in our lives. At a moment when news of a friend’s death arrives, in “When I heard you’d died,” Bloom writes: “I got up/and lay on the grass, saw nothing but earth/held me as it will you.” Then, in “I used to know,” the poet speaks about how it used to feel comfortable to speak to people. In a pandemic, she “sits with everyone/in the big asklessness, waiting/for birds to fly out of our mouths.” Loss comes dressed in different pieces of clothing, sometimes with grief at the death of a person we’ve loved, or someone whose path has diverged from ours for reasons we can never understand, or because of a pandemic lockdown that keeps us in bubbles with pets, or people, or both.

The final poem, “Prayer,” sings with a hopeful voice.  It follows “Service,” a poem that speaks to the way in which “doctors are writing poetry” and “poets are listening/to the stories of soldiers. The soldiers/are changing the sheets of the aged.” While all this happens, in pandemic years, “The aged are dying as trumpetlessly as ever.” In the face of sadness and despair, in a world that’s too often populated by fear and war, poetry offers us a source of light. Bloom’s chapbook is, in so many ways, a very good ‘mercy contact’ in such difficult times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com