Dale Tracy : On Jenn Cole’s “Stepdancing the asinig (rocks) with pierogies”

Stepdancing the asinig (rocks) with pierogies

I lie down on rocks

Pick medicines

Sweet fern pointing me to blueberries

I’ve been here a long time

Squaw Valley, anishinaabemowin in the kitchen

          Grown up secret languages

      Clattering stove lids

But also my uterus builds a

      Placenta out of beets and cabbage

      The midwives have never seen anything like it

          Grannies

Hurtle through time and space with ease

      No matter the adoption                  Still

                               My son arrives from the star world

Somewhere with furs and carpentry gear, a woman from Moose Factory gets into the canoe

People only know me

              Here, in the bush

              Where I am more recognized by mosses and minerals

              Where that wiigwaas builder sees my great grandpa when he looks at me

Grandpa danced on tables in bars and then not on tables at AA roundups

                    

          Nan takes tobacco from her mom, puts it in my mom’s hand, she passes it to me, I

Pass it to Tom.

Stepdancing across the page, “Stepdancing the asinig (rocks) with pierogies” recounts a place, “[h]ere, in the bush” (17). In a reflection called “Following Nan to the Kiji Sibi,” Cole writes, “When I think of where I come from, it is a particular spot at the edge of the Ottawa River” (231), the Kiji Sibi. The rocks the speaker lies on in this poem might be exactly there. Cole’s grandparents are from “nearby” that spot, “little towns” like “Mattawa—in a community they used to call ‘Squaw Valley’” (231). This poem uses that old name (a slur) in place of the in-use name (an Algonquin word). This move situates the poem’s celebration of the speaker’s place (in this bush, in this family) within historical context, the context of colonialism. This word comes along with the mixed-ancestry cultural inheritance of pierogies and wiigwaas canoes. It’s in this colonial context that “anishinaabemowin in the kitchen” might sound like “[g]rown up secret languages” to a child who doesn’t speak it (5-6). But also this speaker uses anishinaabemowin now, and the asinig are the “here” the speaker is at.

“But also,” the speaker clarifies after remembering the languages and “[c]lattering stove lids” in the kitchen, where people build themselves with language and food, “my uterus builds a / Placenta out of beets and cabbage” (5-9). An artistic creation as much as a canoe or a poem, this placenta is the fruit of the land turned into first nourishment. On the literal level, the speaker eats vegetables that fuel her body, including her uterus as it builds a placenta. On a second level (synecdoche), the uterus is a part of the speaker that stands in for her; the beets and cabbage are a part of the land that stand in for it. The uterus for the person and vegetables for the land emphasize the fecundity of both. This fecundity does not necessarily mean fertility but instead a broader idea of creativeness—this poem shows the links in the family line “[n]o matter the adoption” (13). Not specifying which family member is adopted, the speaker reminds us the adoption is “[n]o matter”: all her inheritances help her arrive her son. Cole told me in an email that “it is my dad who is adopted, out of a Polish family. Those ancestors, too, made their way into me growing Tom in my beet womb!” Since the speaker isn’t interested only in the genetic links a placenta makes, it operates on a symbolic level, too. On this third level, the speaker prepares a way for the next generation, a way that is tied to this land. The speaker creates something whose meaning spirals deeper than the surface reality. After all, “The midwives have never seen anything like it” (10). That’s saying something, since this speaker moves through rhythms of picking medicines and blueberries that have been going on well beyond her own life.

          “I’ve been here a long time” (4), the speaker explains. She’s been here long enough to prepare these vegetables for the future, for when her “son arrives from the star world” (14). She’s been here longer than that, though. She’s been here long enough to know the past is also in the future: “Grannies / Hurtle through time and space with ease” (11-12). The speaker welcomes her son and the grannies keep them both linked into an ancestry.

“I’ve been here a long time.” The contrast between the hurtling ancestors and the “Still” before her son’s arrival indicates the enduring present moment that reaches into the past and the future, a reaching visualized in the blank space surrounding the word (13). While the poem moves around (to Moose Factory, with its storied colonial past, for example), all along the speaker is here, lying on those rocks. The speaker is still here, like the still before her son’s arrival, with its double meaning of unmoving and ongoing. This poem is in the present tense, so all of this is happening right now: the son arrives, the grannies hurtle, the speaker “pick[s] medicines” (2). (Those repeated “i” noises sound like picking—we can hear it happening.) But it’s been happening a long time, since those grannies, all the way back. The poem ends on this ancestral line, as one family member passes tobacco to the next (21-22). Because “Pass it to Tom” comes on its own in the poem, the verb form seems altered from the present tense into the imperative: the speaker tells herself to pass it on, and that’s where the poem ends—and thus doesn’t end, a direction to the future, despite holding the only period in the poem. Endings are always inside something longer.

 “I’ve been here a long time.” It’s “here,” the speaker says, that “People only know me / Here, in the bush / Where I am more recognized by mosses and minerals” (16-18). Does she mean that people only know her here, as in here she has no relationships outside of knowing (her only way of being in the bush is known)? Or does she mean that the only people who know her are the ones here (her only way of being known is to be in the bush)? Or both? Do the mosses and minerals recognize her more than people do elsewhere? Or do they recognize her more than mosses and minerals do elsewhere? Or both? The ambiguities in “only” and “more” play up these potentials of recognition, like the recognition of her great grandpa in her (19) that is the recognition that “I’ve been here a long time.”

Note to Readers

I appear here as a reader of these poems offering models of response, aiming to open up possibilities for other readers. I’ve connected with the poets, and I’d now love to connect with other readers. How do you respond to these poems? Do you have questions or comments about my readings? Or about this project? Please get in touch with me at deicticpress@gmail.com.

Works Cited

Cole, Jenn. “Following Nan to the Kiji Sibi.” Unsettling Activisms: Critical Interventions on Aging, Gender, and Social Change, edited by May Chazan, Melissa Baldwin, and Patricia Evans, Women’s Press, 2018, pp. 229-232.

Jenn Cole is a mixed ancestry Algonquin Anishinaabe performing artist and Assistant Professor at Trent University, in Social Justice and Gender Studies, where she researches the performance histories of two rivers, the Odenabe, here, where she currently lives in Michi Saagig territory, and the Kiji Sibi/Ottawa River of her home territory. Her artistic practice most recently leans into questions of what watershed ecologies (plant, animal and water relatives) remember, and how stories of Indigenous presence can be accessed and transmitted through the inspirited body in performance. This poem came out of a workshop with Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) in Nogojiwanong as part of the Precarious: Precarity in the Arts Festival in 2019.

Dale Tracy, a contract faculty member, is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017) and the chapbooks Celebration Machine (Proper Tales, 2018) and The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground, 2020). She received an honourable mention in Kalamalka Press’s 2019 John Lent chapbook award contest.

Dessa Bayrock : Razielle Aigen and the inside, the outside

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

There is perhaps no better time than a global pandemic to think about what it means to be inside, to be outside, to be somehow caught between the two. This is precisely what Razielle Aigen’s poem “From the Outside” (from her chapbook light waves the leaves, above/ground press, February 2020) struggles with, struggles against, struggles into: a poem which is “creating / a loophole, a visual / palindrome in which / rain rains on either side / of a windowpane.” 

We’re all acquainted with windows: one side is out and the other is in, and we sit in and look out. In this poem, however, Aigen begins to think of what it looks like when the outside, somehow, appears on both sides of the glass. The barrier hasn’t been broken down, but it has been circumvented, somehow. Is in still in? Is out still out? What happens if—or when—one becomes the other? Can in and out remain distinct from one another if they cohabitate or fall in love? What happens when these seeming immutable barriers suddenly become mutable?

These are perhaps familiar questions, posed not only by this poem, but by constraints on current living. I hardly need to tell you that the majority of us are stuck in our homes, leaving only for vital work or necessary errands before quickly returning inside. All of our narratives, understandably, have become inside-centric, and there is danger in something being purely internal—a one-sidedness that becomes an overgrown tangle with nowhere to go. I think most of us would recognize this as a self-evident truth of these times, pointing to our own restlessness, anxiety, fear, and loneliness as the proof of forced inside-ness gone awry, gone too far. 

How, then, might we imagine “a process of / overriding the insiding”, as Aigen puts it? The truth of the matter is that no one wants to be stuck inside, whether “inside” is a one-bedroom apartment or the walls of a single mind, unable or unwilling to emerge or communicate with whatever’s on the other side of the glass. It poses questions we might all be obsessed with: how can something that belongs outside be forced inside and still survive? How can we once again bring what is inside into a sphere where it can be shared, understood, or even loved?

Fittingly, then, the joy and excitement and driving force of this poem come from an instant in which these barriers seemingly disappear; even hidden within, the poet can be seen: as the poet’s lover repeats throughout the poem, “this is really you.”  

The poet brushes this off, mostly, but still feels compelled to “open all the windows and doors”—in other words, to dispel the barriers as much as possible, and continue growing closer to her lover. Together, the two of them begin to call out the things they see through these newly-opened portals—the birds, the plants—and begin naming them anew, as though they are Adam in the garden of Eden on the first day of the first spring. This naming feels monumental, captivating, somehow mythical in the way that reminds us: names have power. 

Stuck inside my one-bedroom apartment, it’s easy to see how this is a power we all have and yet all too easily forget. Aigen seeks to remind us of this power: the power not just to look but to see, and to understand and to know through our conscious, purposeful seeing. Put another way: how often have I stared out my balcony windows but not seen anything I’m looking at?

Perhaps we can rediscover this blessing, then, even stuck inside our lonely boxes for the foreseeable future. What are the names for the birds and trees outside the windows we stare at, day after day? What will it take to throw those windows open and to recognize what we see? 

Aigen writes:

pine-sparrow. walnut-lark. 

maple-pheasant. birch-

starling. holy oak! 

their shapes are pleasing. 

we are at ease. […]

we can’t explain what’s 

happening.

But her lover can, and does:

“I’m getting to know you,” she says “from the inside.”

There’s such joy in these sparse lines, and of course there is—because Aigen is not just looking out of her window, but out of herself. The poet becomes one with the world outside her window, but also begins to dissolve the barrier between her thoughts and her lover’s thoughts — and between her self and her lover’s self. The poet, too, is seen, and named, and understood. 

The end of the poem tangles all the threads of this discourse up beautifully: Aigen and her lover grow closer and closer in their separate understandings until it becomes a single understanding, falling into bed or into love, the clear boundaries between their bodies and words becoming blurred, forgotten, mutable. Love erases the barrier between inside and outside, blending both together into something that simply is.

So too is naming—or even just seeing—an action which transcends the boundary between the inner and the outer; a name, after all, is the shortest possible shorthand to signal knowledge of something or someone. By vocalizing our internal understandings, we make those understandings external, public—shared. Nested in her lover’s arms, this becomes clear even to Aigen, who tells us, at the end, that “by way of naming, we are / creating, we put it / outside.” 

She describes, then, the translation we all seek: from unspoken to spoken, from inside to outside. Even in the times we feel most stuck, Aigen seems to say, we can create connections out of seemingly nothing — building a vivid, shared reality out of the knowledge “nestled / on the inside, a hologram / of what we know is / happening.”

And so this poem has a message for this time of self-isolation: throw open the doors and windows. We can’t leave the inside, whether we take that to mean our homes or our heads. But we can open our eyes to see and our mouths to speak, and listen to our names for things twining together outside like garden snakes in the grass — verdant, gentle, flexible, and so very, beautifully, inarguably together. 

Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. Her work has appeared in Funicular, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others, and her work was recently shortlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. She is the editor of post ghost press. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.