writersreadconcordia How Poems Work, poetry, Uncategorized

unspeakable, unresolvable questions — form and function in Rankine’s Citizen

In anticipation of Claudia Rankine’s visit to Concordia University we are featuring writing that responds to Rankine’s works Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This piece is by Concordia MA student, Chalsley Taylor. Rankine will be giving a public reading at 7pm, March 10, 2017 in the DeSeve Cinema in Concordia’s Library building on de Maisonneuve.

unspeakable, unresolvable questions — form and function in Rankine’s Citizen

By Chalsley Taylor

A body in the world drowns in it—

Hey you—

All our fevered history won’t install insight
won’t turn a body conscious,
won’t make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing

to solve

even as each moment is an answer

(Citizen, 142)

Citizen bears witness to the lack of resolution in the saga of black oppression & resistance by staging the uninterrupted violence to which black folks are subject (in America, though this violence surely exceeds borders), drawing together past and present iterations of anti-black state violence in a nonlinear fashion. Popularly compartmentalized historical violence is not simply layered upon its contemporary counterparts (whether spectacular or, as is more often the case, quotidian); rather, the two meld together and, at times, even align. This movement occurs between pronouns as well in the lyric—while Rankine most often employs the “You” to signify the speaker, there are moments in which the “You” shifts to another subject.

In these moments there is a distinct slippage between the “you” and the “I” and neither subjectivity can be located beyond doubt. From this we may begin a list of slippages: between past and present, but also between Rankine, Serena Williams, and the “I’s” and the “You’s”.

Oh my God, I didn’t see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn’t see you. (62)

The speaker alerts us to a  temporal melding, asking, “What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?” is exemplary (Rankine 60).

ruminant (OSX Dictionary.app)

noun

1. an even-toed ungulate mammal that chews the cud regurgitated from its rumen. The ruminants comprise the cattle, sheep, antelopes, deer, giraffes, and their relatives.

2. a contemplative person; a person given to meditation.

“The process of rechewing the cud to further break down plant matter and stimulate digestion is called rumination.” (Wikipedia)

Characterizing the speaking subject as categorically “ruminant” conjures the transatlantic slave trade but also delineates the monotony of anti-black oppression, its banal iterations inscribed and re-inscribed upon the self. Yet still, its double meaning permits the “ruminant” their subjectivity. Moreover, if we consider the Wikipedia definition it seems to imply a coping strategy while also indicting this state by affirming the obligation to digest (process), again and again, what you have already swallowed. It would not be going too far to say rumination (as in rechewing) becomes a dominant modality of the text, one which “doesn’t include acting like…the before isn’t part of the now” (10). This connects to another slippage, one between text and image. Here the lyric form is stretched and pieces of visual art are included. Very early on, we are met with a benign-looking photograph of a suburban street, “JIM CROW RD” (Rankine 6).

Melding, however, is not always made so clear. 

Words work as release–well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid–what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise–words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains. (69)

This passage holds an ambiguous, undefined object. Upon my first reading, what initially sprung to my mind was the routine appropriation of black culture (accusations of which are so often invalidated by an insistence that black culture is but a self-serving fiction); upon my second turn, I read therein the prison-industrial complex. As amorphous as the references are here–what goes unfelt, unsaid–it well demonstrates a major accomplishment of the text as a whole; here, as elsewhere in the lyric, the mechanics of oppression are distilled to reveal their pervasiveness, their persistence, their infinite applicability. This ambiguity side-steps the potential for didacticism.

The temporal slippage also manifests a rejection of, as previously mentioned, any claims of resolution inserted into narratives of what is known as Black History. In large part, materials on the subject which are promoted/widely circulated during Black History Month (i.e., through corporate media, educational institutions and state apparatuses) present accounts whose narrative rarely lacks a resolute conclusion, “as if then and now were not the same moment” (Rankine 86). Even some current efforts which push back, in part, against sanctioned BHM rituals seem to imply some form of resolution, if only cursorily. (See Jamal Joseph, activist and director of the film Chapter & Verse, talks to Desus and Mero about his early days in the Black Panthers) In this way Citizen refuses state commemoration as described by Achille Mbembe:

… states have sought to ‘civilise’ the ways in which the archive might be consumed, not by attempting to destroy its material substance but through the bias of commemoration. In this framework, the ultimate objective of commemoration is less to remember than to forget. For a memory to exist, there first has to be the temptation to repeat an original act. Commemoration, in contrast, is part of the ritual of forgetting: one bids farewell to the desire or the willingness to repeat something. ‘Learning’ to forget is all the easier if, on the one hand, whatever is to be forgotten passes into folklore (when it is handed over to the people at large), and if, on the other hand, it becomes part of the universe of commodification.

(“The Power of the Archive and Its Limits”, Refiguring the Archive)

This practice of civilizing the archive is evidenced at Arthur Ashe’s appearance in the text, the tennis legend who is (now) remembered as “‘dignified’ and ‘courageous’ in his ability to confront injustice without making a scene,” beloved in his field postmortem (Rankine 35, 31). (And here we may also think of the sanitized nostalgia proliferated following the 2016 death of Muhammad Ali.) Perhaps Citizen rejects its own entombing via this irresolution, if not preventing it. While this rejection does not only manifest in this strategy (the slippery pronouns also work to this end), irresolution appears, to me, the guiding principle: “We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there’s no ending to our story” (Rankine 84).

J. F. Clark poetry, reading, student driven, Suzanne Buffam, text

Damian Rogers is a Social Menace

Off the Page Festival welcomes Damian Rogers Thursday, November 3rd, in Concordia’s Grey Nuns Building (1175 Rue St Mathieu), room M100, starting at 7:30pm.

Damian Rogers is a social person. “I will talk to someone for hours, no problem. I’m good to talk, as they say,” Rogers recently told Trevor Corkum of 49thshelf.com. The same is true of her page. To read her books, Dear Leader (Coach House Books, 2015) and Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009), is not at all like small talk. A testament to the absorptive power of her work is that hours of enjoyment will occur before one realizes the time. To finish her books poses the problem: what now? The solution is to re-read her work as if for the first time. As Rogers asks in “The Trouble with Wormholes” (Rogers, 23):

How many times must I learn the lesson of compression?
Let go of everything you know and start from scratch.

 

Damian Rogers’ work is menacing. Where her voice is accessible, her style, inviting, and her subjects, familiar, her themes challenge the reader’s sense of safety. Familiar objects – roller skates, pantsuits, soap dishes, and sweaters – lay alongside sensory descriptions of dreams, homes, and childhoods. Desires are addressed in association to these objects and sensations, such as the man and spider in “Poem for Love” who respectively “dreams of a red telephone that will only ring for him” or wishes for a “frame upon which to hitch his home” (Rogers, 48). Neither character will realize their desire. A common theme in Rogers’ work is, then, to remind us that life is a series of struggles wherein we often fail to reach our own desires. Life is gritty, we are imperfect, and we lack control to change course. To read Rogers’ work is to feel threatened by the reminder of what we don’t always see ourselves: That there is no escape from our imperfections but through catharsis. In this respect, Rogers’ work is as refreshing in its honesty and menacing in theme as it is creative in its composition. As she writes in “Storm” (Rogers, 18).

We live in
the arteries
of a large
ugly animal
and I saw
it move.

 

Damian Rogers is the editor of The Walrus and Anansi Press, creative director of “Poetry in Voice,” and the literary curator and co-host of The Basement Review performance series.

Damian Rogers is a hell of a poet.

From Dear Leader:

POEM FOR DEATH

‘Politicians, in my eyes, ruin our best chances
of making this work,’ said the man running for mayor.

Once they wondered, ‘Where do we go from here?’
And here is as far as they got.

‘If I start freaking out over this spill, I’ll never stop,’
said the oil can. ‘I want to get back to my wife.’

‘You’re a prisoner,’ said the snow leopard to the bank teller.
‘You’ll be the last of our kind to be free.’

‘Let the world turn,’ said the witch,
‘as if it would do so without you.’

‘That feels amazing,’ said the rock ‘n’ roll victim,
as he bled from his head. ‘Do it again.’

What can I say? I can’t wait to meet the future beasts that keep
on knocking from the other side of that big red door.

Don’t miss Damian Rogers with Suzanne Buffam and Sarah Burgoyne.
7:30, November 3rd, Grey Nuns Building M100, 1175 Rue St Mathieu

Rogers, Damian. Dear Leader. Toronto: Coach House, 2015. Print.

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark Literary Festivals, poetry, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text, Uncategorized

In with the New Shockley

Off the Page event:
November 4th, 7pm, York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Those who know Evie Shockley from her 2006 publication, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), will know how her lyrical style contains themes of ancestry and racial identity which flow through contexts of modern existential threats. Shockley’s words are just as markedly sharp in her latest release, the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2011), as she navigates through modern threats facing the lives of racial American-minority and feminist identities. Of the four suites of poems in the new black, it is striking to note how Shockley titles her suites – “out with the old,” “the cold,” and “out with the new” – to underline a treatment of black lives as casual commodities by a modern world, objectified and vilified by a modern American culture seeking to simultaneously appropriate and reprobate. Shockley’s strength in the written word parallels her strength in line presentation, whether it is the experiment of commixing and segregating connotative alliteration in “x marks the spot,” the barren feet tracking page to page in “the cold,” or the words that literally break off from their page and settle on the opposite side of the spine in “explosives.”

Take a listen as Shockley reads and discusses Ed Roberson’s “City Eclogue, Words for It,” and her own poem, “You Must Want This Lonesome.”

Off the Page 2016 welcomes Evie Shockley and Trish Salah to Concordia on November 4th.

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark poetry, reading, student driven, text

Bewitched by Broadbent

Writers Read and Concordia University welcome Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent tonight at 7pm, in the York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Readers first shook hands with Laura Broadbent through the pages of her remarkable, and strikingly titled book, Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Snare Books, 2012). Most notable are the sections entitled “Between A And B,” and “Men in Various States.” The former is a suite of poems that tangentially weaves lines of grit, glass, bodies, sex, and sky. Each poem presents as inky layers of interior perspectives bookended between A. and B., two physical, chronological, and metaphorical touchstones. The latter, another suite of poems, reads as the unspoken confessionals of various male voices — work that brims with an honesty of crude desire and psychological strife. There is a magic in Broadbent’s words and ‘terrestriality’ in her approach, if such a word can be coined, as if locating a ley line meant digging through not just bodies, but the hell of what people mean within and between, what makes a self. Broadbent might contest this interpretation through her invention of Jean Rhys’ voice in Interviews (Metatron 2014): “If I was bound for hell, / let it be hell. / No more false heavens. / No more damned magic.” But reading Broadbent’s work is tantamount to incantation because it summons something palpable, dark, and lurking. The trick of her magic is this: Her work digs deep until it connects to a Hell that was bound for us.

Broadbent’s voice most recently resonates with the publication of In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books, 2016).

Arrive early on campus to hear volunteers read the entirety of Lisa Robertson’s, Debbie: An Epic, throughout Concordia University’s LB building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd W) from 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm.

 

Poem from “Between A And B” in Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining?:

A.

Even your family can betray you but when there is no you your
family can’t betray you. The place between A and B formally re-
quests you to drop the story. He is not better than you because there
is no you and you have not failed because there is no you. You
did not say the wrong thing because there is no you. There was no
humiliating sexual encounter because there is no you. You didn’t
detect bodily decay because there is no you. He cannot hurt you
because there is no you. You aren’t stuck in your first-world issues
because there is no you. Your task is to walk among the ten thou-
sand things – look at the sky and become it smell the morning
and become it feel the temperature and become it scatter with
the wind. Not a name reaches you in your bassinet of nothing-
ness strung between A and B.

B.

 – Johnathan F. Clark

hannahjosepha poetry, student driven

How Poems Work: “The Stricture” by Lisa Robertson

From Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip.

 

‘The 69 heads of Messerschmidt cast in lead are not heaven.’

‘The magnetic cures of Mesmer on the plastic soul are more

difficult to characterize.’

‘The heavens of Flanders are like textile in lustrousness –

a bridal textile.’

‘We see the classic theme of a woman suffering, with pearl-

sized nipples, pink cotton billowing or nacrous skin

sprouting feathers.’

‘Here is a perfume burner of Khorasan, a bird sitting on top.’

‘Birds perch on heaven habitually. They are not certainty-

seekers.’

 

I wanted to think into the stricture of appearances.

There was a time when I came close.

To help the problem I changed into a clematis, I changed into

a dog, I changed into a perfumed smoke.

Some of my organs were outside history, which gave me an

advantage.

Place here the idea of a necessary inconspicuousness.

 

‘This is wrong’

‘This is beautiful’

‘This is social’

‘This is not thinking’

 

It is the handiwork of appearing only.

 

This is the topic we discussed in your kitchen this winter.

I said I didn’t know what thinking is.

You said you were trying to understand your sense of an

inner voice, which was separate from thinking.

I didn’t understand.

I let myself go blank.

 

I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing

it out, like sand.

_

*Information about a live marathon reading of Debbie: An Epic and Lisa Robertson & Laura Broadbent’s reading at Concordia on Friday Oct. 21st is below.

_

The poem opens with nonspecific claims from at least one unidentified, quoted speaker. We are told that “the…heads…are not heaven,” and “the magnetic cures…are [even] more difficult to characterize.” We do not know what the heads are, but we know what they are not, and we know that the cures are more difficult to characterize than these heads that are only characterized by their lack of description. These claims are presented as truths, and we are meant to accept them despite not knowing much and not even knowing the identity of the speaker, the authority. The first stanza is full of allusions to different times and places, pulling the reader from Flanders, to Khorasan (pre-2004 Iran), to heaven. We are inundated with images that increase in lushness, beginning with the heaviness of lead, the smooth synthetic of plastic, onto textile—bridal textile—and “pearl-sized nipples, pink cotton billowing” (here, Robertson names the textile and brings in colour). Then we are met with images of birds: the suffering woman sprouts feathers, a bird sits on a perfume burner, birds perch on heaven…

I was intimidated by this sensorial blitz at first; it is confusing. However, confusion is not a negative state in which to encounter a poem. It provokes thought, it is a productive feeling—like the birds, who are “not certainty-seekers,” Lisa Robertson welcomes uncertainty in her poetry. The speaker admits uncertainty in trying to think about the stricture of appearances and can only “[come] close” to thinking about it. Consider the relationship between the images in the first stanza and the stricture of appearances. A stricture can mean either a simple restriction, or a critical or censorial remark or instruction. We know that information is being censored, but how are we to engage with a poem called “The Stricture?” Is the whole poem, itself, a stricture, and in what way?

Robertson employs gendered language and imagery to explore the historical trajectories of women’s oppression; the theme of a woman suffering is, after all, “classic.” The suffering woman who sprouts feathers parallels the speaker’s metamorphoses in the second stanza. In this initial transformation, in the growing of feathers, the woman almost becomes a bird (another “classic” theme), seeking uncertainty and freedom from suffering. In order to even try to think about the stricture of appearances, which is deeply engrained in both sociocultural ideologies and in the body, the speaker transforms into different bodies and defies the stricture of her own body: she becomes a flower, a dog, and even smoke (perhaps the “perfumed smoke” from the Khorasan burner), which is not living, has no organs, is not even a solid. The stricture of appearances is so entangled in impositions of womanness or womanhood that one can only come close to understanding—or even thinking about—it if one’s organs, specifically one’s reproductive and sexual organs, are outside history. History dictates how we perceive things like standards of beauty, for example, so the stricture is historical and history itself is a stricture, critical and censorial. Confusion is necessary because confusion disrupts.

The next stanza makes firm claims but, again, we do not know who is speaking. Is this a dialogue? A series of remarks from one person? The speaker, or a judge? What follows is more gendered language and imagery: we read “handiwork” and think “handicraft,” or what is traditionally written off as “women’s work.” We are brought into the space of the kitchen, the pelvis of the house, which is a gendered space, also a stricture. Space, in Robertson’s poetry, is never incidental. Time and space seem layered and nonlinear, from the transient images and temporalities in the first stanza, to the modalities of occupying space, either as a shape-shifting smoke cloud or a dog—how do these bodies penetrate space differently, and isn’t the idea of “penetration” also gendered? We must also consider the space of the page, another stricture, upon which the elements of the poem exist.

“You” enters the poem in the second last stanza—but who is “you?” Perhaps “you” is the inner voice of the poem, which is otherwise thinking. We know that, in her poetic practice, Lisa Robertson researches ferociously before writing. So while the content of the poem can be very cerebral, very complex and layered and factual, perhaps the “you” is the opposite. The “you” is here to induce confusion and to disrupt. The speaker responds to “you” with, “I didn’t understand,” and claims uncertainty within their own narration. In throwing everything out that is doubtful, the speaker “[goes] blank.” Therefore, everything is doubtful, and uncertainty inhabits this limitless, liminal space. However, “[going] blank” is perhaps not entirely possible. In order to go blank one would have to free one’s organs from history and escape the body. Language functions in the poem like it does on the body: language is also a stricture and lives both on the page and within us. We are left with the image of sand, which, in relation to history, evokes the hourglass, time in flux, unfixed and uncertain. The speaker’s time is up, the poem is up, but the poem remains. Even if all the copies of this poem were to dissolve into smoke tomorrow, the poem continues to exist, at least in the context of this exchange, immortalized in this way and defying the stricture of time.

-HJK

Come to an evening with Lisa Robertson and Laura Broadbent tomorrow, October 21st, at 7pm. York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine. Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic will be performed in its entirety on Friday, October 21st in LB 671.05 at Concordia University’s LB building from 2 PM – 5 PM.

output_gvdcp7

 

 

J. F. Clark poetry, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

Submission Call, Off the Page Festival: A Haunting

We have seen ghosts—in the flickering of light bulbs, of the body, and in the persisting reverberations of history. We hear them with our mouths and pens; we write them into memory. Who are they? Do they hear us? What do they know?

“A Haunting” will address the question of what it means to occupy an already occupied space—in the context of ghostly stories, and in narratives of indigeneity and immigration. Canadian-Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand compares her practice to the act of “unforgetting”—of re-engagement with legacies of colonial trauma as they have manifested themselves in the present. How do our bodies in the present act as the ghosts of the future? Are we haunted by our perpetuation of colonial legacies, our voices, our silences? Who and what is implicated?

With our feet on Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) territory, Off the Page invites writers and artists—with priority given to the voices of Black, indigenous, and/or writers of colour—to make words, sounds, songs that manifest their ghosts. Successful submissions may engage historical and generational traumas; they may explore or in fact embody resistance. This event sees writing as possessive, an engagement with identity, history, language, and secrets mediated through the body in performance. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, spoken word, dance, music, theatre. Collaborations between writers and other performance artists are especially encouraged.

The selected works will feature on November 4th, 2016 and lead audiences through a performance-based ghost tour that explores decolonization through haunting. Works must be received by 11:59 PM, Monday, October 24th through this form: https://goo.gl/forms/FoRLb7JuTl1yuu9m1

hannahjosepha student driven

dream/arteries to be Taught in BC High Schools

“A hundred years ago…the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada with 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu migrants travelling from Punjab, India. They were refused entry at Vancouver, even though all passengers were British subjects. The Komagata Maru sat moored in Vancouver’s harbour for two months while courts decided the passengers’ right to access – and while the city’s white citizens lined the pier taunting those onboard. Eventually, Canada’s racist exclusion laws were upheld and the ship was forced to return to India.”

– Talonbooks

Phinder Dulai creates a collision between poetry and history in his recent collection, dream/arteries, which has been recommended for British Colombia’s high school curriculum. “I think I might be the first South Asian of Punjabi descent who’s book has been included [in the curriculum], both this year and any time before.” Read Dulai’s full comment here.

Phinder Dulai will be reading tonight, Tuesday, October 11th, at 7pm in room LB 6.646,
1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W – Concordia University Library.

writersreadconcordia poetry, reading, Uncategorized

Tonight: Phinder Dulai Reads

Phinder Dulai, Tuesday October 11, 7pm, LB 6.646, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.

“Combined rhythmic discipline and a wide descriptive palette, wielded by a talented composer of word images; this would be the definition of anyone’s preferred reading. These essential elements are richly present in dream / arteries … While a pointed, heartfelt and lyrical precis of a sore spot in Canada’s expansive immigration history, dream /arteries is no less a work of agile poetics and vivid juxtaposition … a full range of common life experience and observation, shifting its focus from the specific immigrant experience on into a wider observance of the world and its offerings. The volume is elegantly produced and includes strategically placed archival photos, some faintly impressed as sepia ghostings upon translucent panels. The effect is one of contemporaneous immediacy within an irresistible sense of the importance of the past. It is a testament to Phinder Dulai’s consummate skill, aside from his personal connection to the material, that we come away fromdream /arteries with a heightened awareness of all travel phenomenon, the harshness and revelatory thrill of new lands, the coldness of alienation and the vivacity of new connection.” – Vancouver Sun

9780889229136

Phinder Dulai is the Vancouver-based author of dream/arteries and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). His most recent work has been published in Canadian Literature and Cue Books Anthology. Earlier work appeared in Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, the Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. Dulai is a co-founder of the Surrey-based interdisciplinary contemporary arts group The South of Fraser Inter Arts Collective (SOFIA/c).

coopbookstore
*~*~* The Co-op Bookstore will be selling books ~*~*~
The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is pleased to offer a viable alternative to the corporate structure, putting students’ best interests above and beyond our own bottom line. As a not-for-profit alternative to corporate bookstores, we are conveniently located right on Concordia’s downtown campus at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. Offering both new and used books, in addition to a wide variety of artisan consignments, we also boast the largest selection of sex and gender studies titles anywhere in Montreal. (Cash + Credit only)

writersreadconcordia poetry

Angular & Crabwise: a Reading with McKay and Dodds

Join Writers Read on Friday October 7th at 2pm (MB 2.130, 1450 Rue Guy) for our first event of the season, as we host Don McKay and Jeramy Dodds, two equally original poets, for a reading and discussion about writing poetry, winning poetry prizes, and speaking in the voices of Old Icelandic, bird songs, and stones.

“Over a span of more than forty years, Don McKay has been writing and publishing poetry and essays, his reputation and influence increasing with each passing year. McKay’s books have been recognized with many awards, including five nominations for the Governor General’s Award, winning twice, and three nominations for the Griffin Poetry Prize, winning once. His is the voice of a careful observer, a confiding and companionate voice that whispers “Look!” to the reader, pointing out the barely noticeable and rarely considered phenomena that underpin our short existence.” (Gooselane Editions)

Jeramy Dodds’ first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His poems have won the CBC Literary Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. He holds an MA in Medieval Icelandic Studies and his latest release is translations of the 13th Century Poetic Edda. “Dodds’ wasabi-infused free verse is sprinkled with its own odd Cat in the Hat magic, twisting familiar idioms into unexpected meditations while exploring the sublime potential of myth, metaphor, and the English language. Reading Dodds’ poetry, one is first struck by a sense of familiar smells, distilled universal moments; yet, his language stretches to the very edge of consciousness.” (Mark Vincenz)

writersreadconcordia poetry, text, Uncategorized

Don McKay’s “Fridge Nocturne”

In “Fridge Noc­turne”, a short poem near the begin­ning of Don McKay’s selected poems, the sleep­less poet lies lis­ten­ing to the sound of his fridge, ‘the old/armless weep­ing wil­low of the kitchen’. The fridge’s “Hum­ble mur­mur” brings to his mind sev­eral dis­tant rivers–“the Saugeen, the Goulais/the Raisin”. The per­me­abil­ity of the bor­der between the domes­tic world and the wilder­ness which lies beyond it marks a land­scape whose vast­ness teaches early that, “Lonely is a knife whose han­dle fits the mind/too well, its old­est and most hos­pitable friend” (“Noc­tur­nal Ani­mals”). How­ever, “There is a loneliness/ which must be entered rather than resolved” (“On Leav­ing”) and to enter the wilder­ness with Don McKay is to have the sharpest, most informed and respon­sive guide. Here are his thoughts on the White-throated Spar­row:

I was think­ing of the mus­cles in that grey-white breast,
pec­toralis major pow­er­ing each down­stroke,
pec­toralis minor with its rope-and-pul­ley ten­don
reach­ing through the shoul­der to the
top­side of the humerus to haul it up again;
of the ster­num with the extra keel it has evolved to
anchor all that effort, of the dark wind
and the white curl on the waves below, the slow dawn
and the thick­en­ing shore­line. (“Load”)

Read the rest of “Introducing Don McKay” at Arc

(Photo Credit: National Post)

mckaydodds_banner

Don McKay & Jeramy Dodds, Friday October 7, 2pm, MB 2.130, 1450 Rue Guy

McKay’s collected poems, Angular Unconformity was published in 2014 and he has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry twice, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity(2000). Dodds’ most recent publication is a translation of the Poetic Edda (Coach House Books, 2014) from Old Icelandic into English. He is a poetry editor at Coach House Books.