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.

 

Jeremy Luke Hill : two poems

 

Microchimaerism

Microchimaerism is the presence of genetically distinct cells in one body. In nature, it occurs only through the transfer of cells between mother and fetus during pregnancy. The child's cells are carried in the mother’s body for years afterwards, perhaps for life.

We exchange cells with children in our care.
No matter how they come to us, we become 

one creature. You may as well divide soul
from spirit, or joint from marrow, or sense 

from matters of the heart. The mythological
chimaera was composed of lion, goat, 

and dragon. My eldest son is none of these.
He is the wolf, by way of a surname 

passed down through his mother's line.
Chimaeric cells increase immunity 

in mother and foetus, but also cancers.
This is called love coming at a cost. 

The chimaera of myth was slain by arrows
from the safe height of a flying Pegasus. 

My middle son flies too. He is the hawk,
an inheritance from his birth-father, name 

begetting name. We can't discern blood
from blood through human senses. A mother's 

wounds may flow with a child's cells and she
will never know. If she puts her lips to the cut, 

she'll taste only mineral and bitter iron,
never the memory of the child she bore. 

Parenthood guarantees nothing except
that we carry our children in this way. 

My youngest son is the ram, has always been.
No one remembers why. Though he has names 

in plenty, none means ram. The word chimaera
can describe any hybrid of human 

and beast, usually implying monstrosity,
usually when it has no other name. 

It might be used to name a new creature
combining wolf and hawk and ram. 

My foster daughter was not with us long
enough to discover her animal self. 

This has always felt like a metaphor
for what we lost. Cells that are transferred 

early from the fetus to the mother sometimes
combine with the mother's organs, become part 

of her body, so that her heart will beat,
at least in some small way, with her child’s DNA. 

Nature does not care when it falls into cliché.

 

Cuckoo Birds 

Cuckoo birds are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. This behaviour is an evolutionary strategy that benefits the parasitic parents by allowing them to avoid the risk and investment of raising young themselves. This is why the phrase "cuckoo's egg" is sometimes used to describe children who are orphaned or adopted. 

The commonest question: How can you love them
as your own? The shells of cuckoo eggs can be 

thicker and stronger than those of their hosts
and have two distinct layers: the inner thin 

like a chicken egg, the outer thick and chalky
to protect them when being dropped into the nest. 

Adoption and fostering are experienced as trauma,
always. In some stories the cuckoo sucks the eggs 

of other birds before laying its own in the nest.
This is false. Another question: Is it awkward 

that they don't look like you? Female cuckoos
often lay eggs that resemble those of their host. 

I have been mistaken for my kids' coach, teacher,
social worker. I have known concerned citizens 

to call Children's Aid to report child trafficking
when a father picks his adoptive children up 

from school. This is called seeing something
and saying something. And still another question: 

How much do you get paid to take these kids?
Cuckoo chicks encourage the host to feed them 

with begging calls and open mouths. The basis
of attachment is a child's satisfied need. Cuckoo 

eggs hatch earlier than the host's eggs. The chicks
grow faster, evicting the nestlings of the host. 

They have no social model for this behaviour.
It is instinct. Not the last question: Why would you 

do some other parent's job for them? The term
"cuckold" has long been used to mock husbands 

whose wives are having affairs. Similarly, "cuck"
has become an insult among insecure man-babies 

for those they perceive to be weak and sensitive.
Cuckoos have no way to recognize their offspring 

once they are grown. My kids know their birth
and foster parents, more or less. Some traditions 

hold that the cuckoo, if burnt and the ashes eaten,
can cure stomach pains and insomnia. There is 

an association between cuckoos and loneliness.

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan. His latest publication, the chapbook a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, is forthcoming with above/ground press.

Farah Ghafoor : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Beginnings are the most important part of a poem because without a strong beginning, you’ll lose the reader. Many poems have lost me due to weak word choice and lack of tension, so I’m always paying attention to beginnings. The technical aspect comes later, however, because poems first begin in the heart and mind. In my own work, they begin with a question, or a phrase, or an observation. Occasionally an idiom I find funny or interesting. I tend to write two types of poems: poems of intent, and personal, meditative poems.

The first category might spark from research (read: fervent googling about why the world is the way it is) or by stumbling upon a fact (earthworms having five hearts – how devastating). I love learning via podcasts about history, climate, and economics. These subjects are so interlinked that I think they are the perfect breeding ground for poems, which serve to link ideas and thoughts. The linkages ferment in the back of my mind often until I have strong analogies or additional ties to my daily life. This has been a very fun analytical practice.

The second type of poem arises from freewriting, which I do as often as possible. I’ve heard that separating journaling from freewriting will make your work more focused, but I like to keep all of my thoughts, experiences, observations, and research in one place. Instead of morning pages, I practice night pages, writing when I’m tired and thus more imaginative. How do I understand this moment, this day, this month, this year? Through simile and metaphor. I once thought I could write myself toward any solution, which turned out to be untrue, of course, but I have plenty of material now, don’t I?

The most enjoyable poems begin, I believe, in other poems. Nothing beats reading a few poems by a brilliant poet and feeling the overwhelming desire to write. I love when poets use uncommon, but musical words in a poem, or words that are so precise that I have to look them up. I keep my phone near me when I read to do so. I love how poems become experiences this way, so they begin again and again in the hearts and homes of readers.

 

 

 

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in art exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.

 

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.