Drew McEwan : On And Absurd Cycle

 

 

 

This poem was written by manually copying out every eight words in Jeffery Schwartz’s OCD self-help classic Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviour. From this list, I only eliminated words and lineated phrasings, without adding words or changing order of appearance in the original text. Originally published in 1996, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviour is the first, and still one of the best-selling, books for self-treatment and public understanding of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The book utilizes a bio-medical approach that relies on now largely discredited theory of biochemical imbalance and describes obsessive-compulsiveness as a “disease” and a “tenacious enemy.”

This paragraph begins the afterword of my above/ground chapbook, And Absurd Cycle. The poem (an excerpt from a longer work) operates as a highly constrained exploration of the subject matter of obsessive-compulsiveness by one with lived experience. The rules were important for writing this poem, and I didn’t want to give myself much leeway to shift meanings. The constraint was the message. The constraint, too, was a reading strategy of imprinting lived experience into a text.

This poem operates as a poetic manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive checking sets of eight times in order to avert logical and illogical potential harms.

In moments of heightened anxiety, I check the oven burners by eights, check in on my pets to make sure they’re still alive and count to eight, I check the door’s locked eight times. After this though, doubts and fears remain. It’s not rare for me to return home (if there is time to return) or worry to the point of complete distraction (if there isn’t time to return).

In writing this poem, I applied obsessive-checking as a text selection strategy. Through application of a pathologized routine as a writing strategy, the poem draws out a text of multilayered meditation on obsessive-compulsiveness. With the language drawn from an early and primary OCD self-help source, the content of the poem is constrained by a program meant to eradicate the experience. Yet, with an application of an obsessive-compulsive process to this text, the form speaks back to the content and moments of a conflicted subjectivity emerge.

Obsessive-compulsive experience is clinically described as “ego-dystonic.” This means that in an experience one has a doubled sense of self – both the self that enacts anxieties and/or routines, but also a sense of self that understands these to be irrational or counter to one’s wants and sense of self. Rather than providing relief, the ego-dystonic experience actually heightens fear, anxiety, and a loss of autonomy as one feels unable to match thoughts and behaviours with one’s self-aligned sense of reason. The tension in this poem, between form and content, at times becomes contradictory and conflicted, but also creates surprising moments of intersection and resonance.

This poem is an example in what I have elsewhere described as obsessive-compulsive oulipo.

Although poetics and debilitating anxiety are quite different, their form has strong overlaps that become obvious when moving between these areas of experience. The obsessive-compulsive’s life is a constrained experiment in (seemingly) arbitrary rules.

This poem embraces the mad, insane, crazy organization of a life.

To intensely focus on text selection might itself be pathological.

This poem is an exercise in the paradoxical imprecision of intense focus.

One of the cruel paradoxes of obsessive-compulsiveness is that intense focus and repeated checking actually cognitively limit one’s memory and perception. Counting eights, manually through the text, I am sure was similarly imprecise. This obsessive-compulsive imprecision too becomes part of the text’s creation.

Leaning into a compulsive routine is maddening.

This poem asks what becomes of the rejection of the narrative of cure.

I’ll end with a quote I return to often, by Abby Sher, which I found quoted by Claire Ross Dunn: “I would say … to whomever needs to do all these things … thank you for keeping your hands washed, and for counting the cracks in the sidewalk, and for making sure the lights are off and the oven is off and the plugs are unplugged and the door is locked. And your work is done.”

 

 

 

 

 

Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). She has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can't tell if this book is depressing or if I'm just sad, Theory of Rooms, and Recoveringly. She works as an educator and researcher at the University at Buffalo.

Indran Amirthanayagam : Process Note #50 : A Note From The Poet

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Indran Amirthanayagam is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

When the pandemic cast its massive and penetrating eye on the earth, I began to write poems about living under its gaze. I wrote daily and in various languages, and I wanted to document the pandemic. In doing so, I began to write about whom and what we were losing, and I looked closely and listened to my mother who was under my care and suffering from a series of ailments, the most serious of which was her losing memory and eventually the ability to walk. I helped to care for her, and while doing so, saw into her needs and wishes, and my own needs and wishes for our human family (hence the title Seer).

I wrote the poems initially under the title The Seared Eye–for the Covid eye, for the searing it caused in our lives, in our souls. Seer is accurate and easier on the tongue and eye. I hope it does not presume too much. The poet is just another observer. But the poet looks while listening, creates word music from the ear and eye and mind meeting. I hope these poems, this word music, pleases while it consoles. I hope too that it shows us a way forward, a path through the maze to a world where we too will survive, even thrive.

I write poetry in five languages. I am X years old. I don't know if I will still learn another language and then write poems with its metaphors and meters before the lid is shut on my coffin or if I go up in smoke. I have crossed lots of borders in my life, geographic, spiritual, linguistic. I made a terrible mistake when I arrived in London as a boy of eight. I stopped speaking Tamil, Sinhalese as well. I blocked them out. I must have wanted to be one with other migrants (from Ireland, Italy, the Philippines) and the English boys and girls. I attended a mixed Catholic primary then a boys’ grammar school.

My last name was shortened to Amir, to make it easier for my mates, and Tamil was kicked out of my mind, the wound of departure buried under a thousand pounds of English literature and comedy. Monty Python became my new teacher, along with Larkin, Eliot, and Auden as I later began to discover poetry, reading poems by my father—Guy Amirthanayagam—and those he recommended.

I remember R.S. Thomas's A Song at the Year's Turning and Yeats: “I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree.” I remember Leavis, how my father advocated for deep exploration of the literary matter itself, which led to my belief that I can find the truth in poetry. The big truth, not just information, or a means to live, but the motherlode, discovery of the why at the heart of the other four w's: what, who, when, where. I also learned the five nevers from Lear.

Never stop writing poetry. Never believe that swinging a cricket bat will lead me out of the maze. Never become an accountant. Or a political leader, the prime minister of a country Eelam dreamed by my people. None of that earthly ambition although we are unacknowledged legislators. And never say no to the Muse. There you have them: five nevers. So go preach them on the moors and dales, in city centers, everywhere.

Time Present

There will be time, the poet said, to murder

and create, and I grew up thinking I would stop 

the sea as well as bake a few thousand cakes 

that sing and dance on the tongue, and murder

only cockroach and snake. But I cannot sift 

and parse, make concessions and compromise 

for the rest of my days. I must choose a path, 

be true to some plan, show resolve and purpose.

If not I would be deemed mercurial, humored, 

a human folly, not a computer or a stable figure, 

a steady captain on deck to recite O Captain! 

My Captain! over the raging sea. But help

me out, may I still kill the roach while arguing 

for sustainable living, long-term conservation 

of the ecosystem? If they are unseen, insidious, 

what options do I have but to bleach microbes

who wish to invade me? They do not come coated 

with love, flapping wings of turtle doves. But 

perhaps they offer me release, an early exit from 

this stifling, overheating fishbowl, once a gentle

trade-winded cul-de-sac. Claptrap. Remind 

myself of the Big Bang, and later in geologic 

time flaming rocks the size of the Empire State 

destroying the carnivorous, malevolent Tyrannosaurus.

Let me go back to dust with that earlier predator. 

How easy to pull off the calm veneer, especially 

when trafficking in words. Damn this. I am 

going for a walk. The sun is shining and

the winds are calm today. Who knows when 

the first hurricane of the Atlantic season 

will roar through the Covid-infested 

atmosphere. Get communing with nature

when I can. But keep distant from 

neighbors. Not a problem: the grand illusion, 

faith in tomorrow, conserving one's health. 

I must keep that idea circulating for babies

arriving today, kids waiting for treats 

at the next Halloween, and old men 

and women whose fronds were blessed 

yesterday on Palm Sunday with the gift

of memory, during this Covid year 

whose collateral benefits include 

digging into the attic of the mind, finding 

photographs, sharing them with any

household members, and on line.

 

 

 

 

Mother, in Tongues

Mother has gone back to the kitchen

where she needs two pounds of cardamom,

a cup of cloves. She will make love cake

again. This is Christmas in January,

and she is visiting her daughter in California.

Where are you Mummy? In Templeton.

Who am I? Indran. On Tuesday evening,

her body burning, she began to speak

in tongues, to invoke the Holy Spirit,

taklata, taklata, taitata taitata. We called

911. Ambulance and paramedics came,

along with two fire trucks. I have become

expert in friendships between these

groups of first responders in America

where more elements give security,

jack up costs..in America where

we moved to live then die . . .  America,

tak lata tak lata tai tata tai tata.

 

 

 

 

Mother's Wishes

I want six Eden Pure fans, twenty pounds

of cashew nuts, two thousand dollars in cash,

one thousand of which to be given

to the church for its annual appeal. I want

you to write to your brother. Have him

call me. I need money, also a checkbook.

I want to paint the patio, fix the carpet

on the landing. I want to go to Lourdes.

I would like every grandchild to keep

receiving a birthday present every year

from me. I want Bupsy to get a little extra.

I want Cissie to be given shares. I want

Revantha to have chocolates and nuts.

And I want to powder my face at my own pace

and without interruption. Now, tell me, what

can you do besides arguing for the other side?

 

 

 

 

 

Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, YouTube host, and diplomat. For thirty years, he worked for his adoptive country, the United States, on diplomatic assignments in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Amirthanayagam produced a unique record in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty-five poetry books In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; writes; writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony. He is the IFLAC Word Poeta Mundial 2022. Amirthanayagam hosts The Poetry Channel. New books include Seer, The Runner’s Almanac,  and Powèt nan po la (Poet of the Port), Indran publishes poetry books at Beltway Editions.  Amirthanayagam’s first collection in Portuguese Música subterranea just appeared from Editora Kotter in Brazil.  

Maw Shein Win's new full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at USF and is a member of The Writers Grotto. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com

Aaron Tucker: Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy

Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024

 

 

 

        There are always the specifics and the lyrics details in John Lent’s poems, and in Molecular Cathedrals, a work that spans Lent’s terrific life of poetry, the reader is asked to inhabit the author and the landscapes of Western Canada, the Okanagan Valley in great parts, in the most intimate, direct, and wondrous ways. In this, the poems move the reader around physically and mentally: the pronouns (you, we, I) shift, the reader is the observer and the writer, the hills brown and relight along the lakeshores with the seasons, the lines extend, long and prose-like, like a breath held long, lungs released at the break.

        This is a book that demands that the full collections be sought out. If there is one critique to make of the book is that there is not enough of the poems, a fact made clear by how Lent works in the long form: a reader can take them as individual poems, but those same works really come to life within the scope of the book-length projects they come from, where the conversations and ecosystems are given the space intended. Any of Lent’s works would be worth searching out in full, but Wood Lake Music and Frieze are favourites, a soft spot for Black Horses, Cobalt Suns (my first Lent book), and his later work, Cantilevered Songs, A Matins Flywheel, in full sequence are beautifully meditative, crystalline.

        It’s not to say that the book doesn’t work with the arc it gives; it very much does. Through the decades this book covers, the reader gets a quiet excess of life, life (lives) lived, clear-eyed optimism, and amazement. It is that wonder that lingers throughout, Plath’s angel flaring at the elbow, or at a birdhouse in “Carpenter”:

        …And there it is again, this mystery
        of joining, of intersections, corners, fits, so
        damn important in everything we do, each
        small jazz symphony we might
        construct, for example,
        or song we might want
        to sing in the middle
        of the night, or poem 

Or the morning kitchen, in “Light”:

        You turn a faucet, you
        feel the chrome handle
        while another part of you
        reaches for the coffee beans
        and all surfaces, outside and in,
        are illuminating this instance
        of pure glee, pure surface

This is what I exited the book with, against a world that glooms everyday, that the daily, with enough attention, can also hold dazzle and dignity and a beautiful moment, or string of moments in surprising combination. This collection is an intelligent delight, bookended kindly by Jake Kennedy’s introduction and Lent’s closing essay, worth the investment between the covers and the effort to find the excerpted books in their complete forms.  

 

 

 

 

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels and three books of poetry, including his latest, the novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books (2023). He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Memorial University, where he teaches Media Studies and Creative Writing. More at: www.aarontucker.ca