Side Lines: A New Canadian Poetics

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Other books by the rob mclennan as editor evergreen: six new poets Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (forthcoming) Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets Written in the Skin: A Poetic Response to AIDS You & Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing (with Andy Brown) poetry bagne, or Criteria for Heaven bury me deep in the green wood harvest: a book of signifiers Manitoba highway map Notes on drowning paper hotel The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh

side/lines

A NEW CANADIAN POETICS

edited by rob mclennan

INSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 2002 by rob mclennan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access copyright, i Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E iE5Copy edited by Richard Almonte Designed by Mike O'Connor

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Side/lines : a new Canadian poetics / edited by Rob McLennan. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-894663-34-9 i. Canadian poetry (English)—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. 3. Poets, Canadian (English) I. McLennan, Rob, 1970PS8i43-S42 2002 PR9I9O.5.S53 2002

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

to George Bowering, whose writing got me asking these kinds of questions in the first place; to Miz Mulligan, for a multitude of "above & beyonds"; to Kate, for the use of her "one good eye."

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introduction: rob mclennan 9 John Barlow 11 Notes and Slips Retrieved from Various of My Works, with Reference to My Poetics four poems Dana Bath 22

A Garish Simulacrum of Being Alive Bottle Episode derek beaulieu 35 poetics statement: problems in composition theory does people: Letter to Pierre Gamier 1963 an object in vision: Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958) Robert Budde 39

A Prose is a Prose is a Prose is a horn flicker Stephen Cain 52 Poetics Statement from Arcadian Suite from Elabouration from GAS-FOOD-LODGING from Double Helix NataleeCaple 62 Into the Ocean from A More Tender Ocean Margaret Christakos 69 Company Mark Cochrane 75 en train de: (his little fraught patriation of forms Wayde Compton 80 Self-Interview from The Reinventing Wheel: A Turntable Poem Bluer Blues JeffDerksen 92 "because capitalism makes the nouns / and burns the connections": Notes Towards an Articulatory Poetics Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically Tess Fragoulis 108 Damsel in Da Dress Soul Man Michael Holmes 124

Notes Towards an Operational Poetics ----6----

from Centences Adeena Karasick 118 Ambit. Ardour. Orders: A Poetics of Poly medial Pasties Catherine Kidd 227 Happy the Ghost-Boy Ryan Knighton 234 PULP GIMP: A POETICS five stories Jason Le Heup and Chris Walker 244 Poser GilMcElroy 253 (The Function & Field) Of Speech & Language two poems from The Book of Knowledge David McGimpsey 265 Sweet Poetry or Mystery Meat? three poems rob mclennan 273 Ottawa snapshot: a quick poetics Juliet is the name of a wound from stone, book one from the other side of the mouth Shane Rhodes 280 Holding Pattern two poems Ray Robertson 185 Good Golly Miss Molly: An Autobiographical Poetics from Heroes StanRogal 293 Poem as Collage of the Real two poems Ian Samuels with JC Wilcke 204 COPPING: The Double Voice and Jazz Ethics Cent ens by JC Wilcke nathalie Stephens 223 Berlin M'ore A poem is not (meant to be) a pretty thing First Person Plural Polysemique from Clutch

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Anne Stone 231 Writing the Eye (a game of cat's cradle) from The Tourniquet Vanish Michael Turner 239

Uses, Not Muses from Survivial: A Strobic Guide Steve Venright 249 My Meteoric Rise to Obscurity—A Treatise On the Merits of Lexiconjury, Deliriomancy and Icelandic Breakfast Foods Secrets of the Occult Science of Torpor Vigilism (A Brief Lexical Introduction) from Spiral Agitator The Gated Now (Three Excerpts) Sheri-D Wilson 263 FIRST WORDS author bios 265 related (and recommended) reading 272 acknowledgements 273

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introduction: rob mclennan The pieces in this collection, almost exclusively commissioned from authors selected for various reasons, reflect on the considerations about the craft of writing by a loose generation of Canadians working in the thick of it. Reflections not to be held as lifelong theories, perhaps, but rather movements made at specific points in time. Ask the authors again in ten years, or twenty: they might answer the same, refined in the intervening years, or else be off in completely different directions. It's the movements, the process, that defines any art; the fluidity of something that, in the end, perhaps can't be described. I suspect that the core remains predominantly the same, throughout an author's writing life. The pieces in side/lines go far beyond Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) (sampled inside brilliantly, by Michael Turner), with its theory of one underlying theme existing in Canadian writing, and beyond whatever else was suggested in the late sixties and early seventies, by authors whose canonization took over much of what appeared afterward. For the public, Atwood's thesis still haunts CanLit as a marker, arbitrary as it may seem. (Apart from this, and Frank Davey's From There To Here (1974), that made no grand claims, was there anything else that really worked to consider something larger than a regionalliterature, and featuring poetry at that?) Did any critical attentions work up from regional considerations, only to retreat there again, after the post-Survival swipes at Atwood's thesis? By the time Gary Geddes included bpNichol, for example, in his 15x anthologies, it was hard to take the anthologies seriously. Not to mention the long exclusions of Christopher Dewdney, Steve McCaffery, and so many others. It felt in many ways a CanLit truism: the avant-garde as a phase we have to get past, before the serious work can begin. This collection is a consideration, sure, but it deliberately leans toward the fringe elements (so to speak), into poetry-heavy, non-narrative and more adventurous "language" forms, the kinds of writing usually left behind. Made up predominantly of poets (with some prose writers thrown in for good measure) who have appeared over the past five to fifteen years, working in ways that are not only interesting, but different than what we have seen before, side/lines focuses on writers who have sidestepped previous concerns with form, language and subject through their own work, working in traditions as varied as they themselves are, from different parts of the country. Given only slight prodding, these essays and writing samples reflect a range of answers—from straightforward essays to complex visuals—to the deceptively simple question "What do you do, and why?" Even the form of the answer is left to each author. From Wayde Compton's self-interview, Steve --------9

Venright's piece on critical dreaming, to Catherine Kidd's novel excerpt, derek beaulieu's visual response, and Mark Cochrane's shifts in en train de. With so many pockets of interesting writers in Canada, still suffering as a whole under the effects of a predominantly regional distribution and reviewing of books, among other difficulties, any grand-scale analysis is impossible in a collection as limited as this, with only twenty-eight (or, thirty, depending) points of view being represented. What interests me is to pick from groups in various corners and let the reader go further in, whether to the Calgary of derek beaulieu, Ian Samuels and JC Wilcke, the Vancouver of Wayde Compton and Mark Cochrane, the Toronto of Margaret Christakos, John Barlow and Stephen Cain, or the Montreal of Dana Bath, less Fragoulis and Catherine Kidd. As well, there are the offshoots, working from positionings that seem specifically their own—Sheri-D Wilson, Rob Budde, Gil McElroy and David McGimpsey. Unless we know what's going on, in various corners of the craft, how are any of us to improve, and truly challenge those notions of what a literature is to become? If there are theories of a national literature, they exist on par with theories of Canadian nationalism, where any point of view is said to be given equal weight. Perhaps, isn't that the point? rob mclennan Ottawa, June 2002

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John Barlow Notes and Slips Retrieved from Various of my Works, with Reference to my Poetics What are my poetics? What is my religion? What was the religion of the Christ? What of Mohammed? In both cases, opposition to oppression. Nietzsche suggested that in each case it was the subplanting of intolerable law with an attempted greater law—a greater truthfulness—his objections withstanding—truthfulness may be lawlessness: The falun gong english translation concept mind/nature I may oversimplify but assume is that makes that connection as a conflation of mind and nature such that we'd observe our minds as we'd observe nature. There'd be no place for argumentatively defending it nor even for stating it. And these are my poetics: a dolphin-like plunge into a swarthing sea. All that I have encountered echoing into all that I encounter. My father's poetry was very romantic, very philosophical, very Keats defined poetry for me prior to all else—however, the experimentation which led to my own taking the odd form it has, involved listening to recordings of "myself"—the after-the-fact by-product of countless millenia. Many's the time if I was out, and having a good time, I would "write" verbally into the air with an ease largely unreflected in my intentional writing. Early primitive attempts at transcribing from memory such styles were nothing to recording myself, transcribing that and looking it over; trying to engender states of mind while being as ecstatic as the nights out could be, and running it through again. I'd say it was only in certain poems ("tension, tension," 1982, Windsor, "CRUNCHING THE FINAL WASP WHICH LAID THE EGGS FOR TOMORROW'S PAIN" 1983 or 4, Melbourne St. in Parkdale, "The Happy Idea," 1985, College St. just before where it and Dundas join) that I partly "caught up." For years I reworked a ten-year-old poem always with an indescribable twitch of reversal and then one day my father's cancer had moved to his brain and he of the wiry wood carving english and the frustration with my writing style as such was suddenly using it the day after a stroke which made the doctors say he may never talk again, it'd be a week before they'd know. He was brought home and that day answered the phone effectively quickly rerouting the information so that it was slightly strange but entirely understandable. Noticeable breakthroughs like this are outnumbered by ones so diffuse as to be again in-de-scribe-able. As his condition became worse we continued to succeed in quickly redevising means of communication. It should be said his talent for rerouting was per unique genius and infinite patience, where I had ---11----

inexplicably stumbled into the attempt as if smoothing the effects of listening to myself and becoming more and more impatient. The wise and dreadful cynics among us dismiss this as a poetics of voice. I'd argue consciousness of the habits of voice are as consequential if not the same thing as awareness of the failures of language. Speeding up dissemination, speeding up the skill of rerouting, liberating awareness, is more or less the job I interpreted out of the usually dilettante function that is poetry. The world might be nicer if everyone spoke as David Bowie sang in the 70s but I believe a concrete effective echo of any voice is helpful. Take the frequently mocked yet ever pampered voice of the pompous asshole that says: "I don't care if they give welfare to those that need it, but if they're cheating on it then they don't need it and they shouldn't have it; that's not right." The Government could reduce the welfare rate to five dollars a month and shatter the teeth of all recipients, and such an asshole would still have this shit guffing out of his mouth. "Well if they've still got their teeth then something's wrong, right? It isn't fair to the others then." The accurate rendering of this voice reveals much. Its thinking, which is sizeably the thinking of sufficient Canadians and Americans to be the ballast to actual public policy, (at the expense of many lives), is best revealed by simply listening to that voice. Not its logic, but itself as voice: an anal retentive whiny moaning pushing and pressing against no wisely conscienced impediment. Similarly the voice of sanctimony from those less pathetically disempowered, whether it be that of some bureaucrat, accustomed to dispensing millions and millions of dollars to fatuous projects and purposes—then slamming paranoically down on the head of someone that complains about being rejected—unable to pay witness to its own frustration as a literal human intelligence, and so forced to deny and degrade the intelligence to which it is responding. My early writing ranged from stilted and awkward to perfectly incoherent, (the latter very developed subject giving rise to my strong curiosity about language writing as practised by the Kootenay School, though it has never seemed clear the intentions or lack thereof were the same, and they would not say). In any case observing my mind with the same attitude simply substantially shifted the focus and anticipation involved in thinking, and seemed to afford a greater optionality with regards to language or communication. ANOTHER EXPERIMENTATION INVOLVED REVERSALS OF COSMOLOGIES. My primary research method is to find out. Now let's just say that hatred is what we hate most. Two hates don't make a hundred but a few tens of millions isn't bad. ----12----

A person seeking to eradicate age-old ignorances is confronted with methods of destruction similar to them. What might I say of the poetics behind these statements...? I expect it is something in the veins of returning from the pillory of expectation to the precipice of pure divulgence. Being free to comment on a matter in the nine or ten words it takes rather than in the manner to which we are trained. For years I've vaguely but persistently advocated a suicidal withdraw! from X-Files America in favour of a walled off and otherwise internationalist Canada. Have our televisions set to a distinct frequency, seal the border to imports of any kind, and make use of the incredible resources of our habitat along lines suited to its and our immediate possibilities. In a poem, one might perform the opposite: present Canada as the slug infested underside to the eminent stone that is America and conjecture the grandeur that would be one vast planet USA. Similarly one could write as if loving one's enemies and hating one's friends. At the level of poetics, this could involve revisionally running through a text causing it to state at every point the opposite of what it had been stating so as to pull out every linguistic impediment to stating what one wished, every ambiguity or ambivalence resolved. The relief to one's breath and mind of escaping the entrapping harness of desire for expression could thus afterward allow a gimme putt of a simpler statement of true will. I go peacefully somersaulting along because the boundless energy of stingray infested evenings in the tightest branches does tend to glow just glow glow. O if only I could be unhappy and sad all the time and the crickets weren't mechanical no matter how good they got with the trees clapping away. All of these perverse rules I've had about my work: that deletion is cruel that editing by outside parties is disgusting that rules cause redundancy that photocopy is the ideal manner of transposition (which I realize some are almost mortally incapable of) stem from the anguished response most people have into which whatever outcome it does in them the dislike of steeped power relationships upon which Western Civilization still apparently wishes to be based, with even the most powerful acquiescing to fin de siecle fatalism on behalf of everyone, and the glee of a natureless toxic future for a mindless species of anthropoid just blooming in the minds of fresh new marketers. ONLY THAT ONE ENJOYS ONE'S WORK WALLOPS AGAINST THE GLASS WALLS OF FUTILITY. It has been the rigor mortis position in bed that anything one says is ideal, ----13----

one must be bound and do only that or one does not mean it. This has always struck me as a primitive, youthful behaviour on par with a John Diefenbaker or early Joe Clark kind of posturing puffery. Even the corniest politician in Canadian history, the clown-like Preston Manning, seems to have evolved beyond this one, and yet one finds the line of thought among poets and other writers. It reminds me of the sight of a gorilla with a little flag and a Vote Dubya button on its fur. The value of pointing the value of a method is that its value becomes known. As people learn the best methods and gain confidence with them health widens. Those using other methods might work harder to make those methods work at all, faced with the better alternative. Since the billions evolve individually in the circumstances they face, each personal failure one encounters only seems to necessitate the widening of the considerations involved. This returns me partly to the value of the Daoist mindset—"I know nothing: Go forward"—which works explicitly well as a tag to commence stream of consciousness or automatic writing as much as to articulate existentialist or self-defense or romantic instants in one's life. Setting the mind for ideal function comes at the question from the opposite side. I often didn't find it welcome to speak my mind to other human beings, and may have retarded the function somewhat, (at once with rushing forward when welcome.) So devised a language system that would facilitate literal physical effortlessness. Its goal would be akin to telepathy: speech without speech; scripts carefully constructed so that my mouth would need not move and I need not breathe. Texts of all one breath or no breath at all. Texts which require nothing from me. One can be as rigid as one wishes about any of this; there is still no escape from what amounts to relativism: my advocacy of any position will not have the effect of implementation, to the letter, so I cannot be accused of having the effect that I advocate. If I were not part lizard, what would I have to do to prove it? Homo sapiens drove the rest of us to the farthest reaches. Only we whom left our bodies lived on. Our poetics may seem not to have changed since then. Perhaps only our necessities have. The lies we must swim through like fallen electrical wires or like endless misunderstandings. Unfortunately it doesn't always work. My goal of telepathy is often overwhelmed by incoming speech which is inane, violent, and ridiculous. Pugilistic if anything. Just basically get killed. In my recent book ASHINEoVSUN (Exile Editions) I sought to eliminate this aspect of sometimes losing, sometimes failing, etcetera, producing instead an implied successful circumstance of clairvoyance and liberation, all the while watching my personal existence become more and more hapless and unhealthy. There's something like a slingshot effect to this kind of gambit. The ----14----

book is so wonderfully against the grain of all likelihood in its triumphant revolutionary endeavours I giggle incessantly as I read it. On the other hand, it is all true, true and real; it rests on the extraterrestrialist notion that if such transformation does not occur we are all fried, and, given my wonderment at the notion of afterlife, and my faith in the eternal delight I have in people and other creatures and natural elements like wind and water, minus myself a relatively complete infinity should carry on handsomely. It's very solid scientifically if I do say so myself. A mathematical certainty. In Canada everything open minded one says is presumed to be false. The level of dogmatic robot faith in making such assessments of others' intents lacks all power of the skeptical in my opinion. It's a strange phenomenon. Being male my lengthy arms often suggest themselves as a means to correct this glitch. But maybe bodies are just meant to be good poetry and it's hard to work violence in. I am only a pacifist by result. Everything functions better without cruelty. Many of my closest friends are poisonously cruel, compulsively oppressive. I am very careful to study the necessity out of which they operate as such. Often it takes many years to adequately assess the precise nature of their cruelty of the mistake that they are making. Often then it is only by this I refer to as witchcraft anything can be done, i.e., what of primitivism anyway and, what of nonprimitive primitivism? Without obnoxious, abyssmal, power relationships, I am one who assumes we would be as tiny new plants unfolding our leaves in delightful innocence. And grow to oaks and willows et al. with rapidity and ease. So I and others have worked at allowing language to function this way. It's useful. All illness, all body pain, is caused by flawed power relationships as simple as if a flawed power relationship were a deformation. So I look at a Preston Manning or a Mike Harris, no less so than at a Jorg Haider or an episode of Law & Order, as killers, and think with my liberal mentality, my divisive primitive centrism, and inborn gentleness, and wonder!!!!!! It is incredible that the malignity prevails at the expense of the healthy. And yet. I myself am in ridiculous pain. And so are the fish and the animals. They are running wild of it. And the trees are getting ready to hang themselves. I note the irony of a poetics of impatience coinciding so precisely with a poetics of delayed action: the sieving action—and I am sure most pacifists know it—means only those perfectly cornered or at the brink of death or extinction are ever in a position to take action. And it is often then too late. Save the , save the , gone; too late. Such is the insane advance of the right wing. Globally. And there's Caroline and I crying out our window o please let them have their winter back. And she thinks maybe we should go for their throats before they get us. I'd sweet enough write in the category "open minded writing"— and I would also like the phrase "animal poetics"—and I really am such a 15--------

fusion of other people's religions and impressions. Including those of creatures such as Caroline. Perhaps I have been convinced of the seeming veracity of informations which cannot be if other informations carrying the same effect were also true. But it leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that none of the informations are true, so I tend to focus on the healthiness in the transmissions seeming true as if therein lay the value. I was the driver of the golf cart in a long ago church of eccentrics, telepaths and eccentrics. Life without communication: I did and do wonder if they'd ever hear one another. Howling and shrieking in the night, the children of what parents... The literature of a person struggling to cohabitate in close proximity with others is unlike that of those whom are not. It'd be ridiculous to say X is superior. Though it might be. A crime that never happened in a place that no longer exists. The attempt to make it available only at a mostly unreachable price and then be proud of it as such is the creme de la creme of our present capitalism, but the manufacture of things readily purchaseable at low prices that then turn out to be worthless is its mainstay. The hubris and aggression inherent in oppositional orientations—the assumption that a thinking must be defeated— will be the death of us. It is the last wave of deconstructionism, and it resembles the very last moment before sleep. When having the option within a sentence of saying the and , or less succinctly the and the , I, while sometimes teasing or paying my rental attention to the accenting of others, will settle it thus: if my breathing is easy and the urgency of the text placid, I settle with the and the (of) local customs never catch up with ya with their real facts, unless I feel that the two objects of conjoinment are very much one thing, such as in the above instance: "the hubris and aggression"—because if they were two separate things gladly I'd the hubris and the aggression, but they are not. "Hubris and aggression" becomes a fixity of relation, not a listing of facts. Hubris is aggression and aggression is hubris. I have believed this for 30 years. Anyone can kill anyone, everyone sleeps, life is vulnerability. One's opponents may be one's teachers and allies demonstrating and insisting the necessity of exertion beyond mere statement—statement of preference or statement of desire or statement of refusal—and I think the question does "come down to" an unreadable collective will. What we have now is anarchy without consensus. This I seek to rhetorically outrun. It is such a cliche to say I hate language language is to blame etc. etc. Mostly sheer pretence whatever the intellectual origins of the gambit. Language is an infinite shield and a mostly malleable one at that, only slightly removed from breath. ----16----

Less and less have I cause to reject the notions of super and preternatural reality, but I would never not acknowledge the marginality of these often lifeextending connections. It is with the confidence of the trapeze artist one allows partial neural alignments to form thoughts and even conclusions, flight resulting. Other notes Visual Poetry: This indefinable enrichment of the realm of the poet I consider something of a coup: functioning against scale, I usually prefer the work of visual poets to visual artists, and note the economic nature of their work, versus conventional visual artists; and love it for openness to the heights of experimentation and the lovableness of collage. Sound Poetry: All poetry is sound poetry (but for Visual Poetry) but I say this not to subtract from virtue of emphasis (that the sound poet brings to her work.) Language Writing: All poetry is language writing. So is all Spoken Word. But I'd be amused to hear of the category "Unconscious Language Writing." Publishing/Bookmaking: The three primary forms of writing exist in infinitely duplicating modes where poetry at its finest attempts unique moment; therefore it is perverse unfortunate and odd for poetry's tiny obscure publishers to insist the poem exist only in that one spot, page 49 down the left side margin of the inside page; it is almost cultish! It is reminiscent of the never defined "Conspiracy Of Silence"—which obviously I did not agree to. I prefer a blended invisibility, something like a face that appears in the toner here there and everywhere, wordwide. But most of the thinking in this area consists in malice, so ultimately one is navigating the variegated malices, and recreating the instance of disappearance in the work itself. Scrabbling to shore. Ideology: My tiny fierce masseuse says that given the concentration of power authority and wealth in incredibly limited agency, all else is unable to find expression, resulting in the wealth of disease, constraint, enjambment and futility. Ludicrous simulacra fill the void. And then passive aggression arrives to save the day. It is quite incredible to be smoking cigarette after cigarette, guzzling cup of coffee after cup of coffee, certain to die of it, but alive and doing it at the time.

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four poems Most People Laugh At Small Dogs ...but there's a sizable minority that don't and that's my orgganizaytion ...it's all performance art and use of the word kill among we the desolate Keatses and Burroughses see a small dog go off on a bigger one i know that's an honest dog or a dog with an agenda - one way or another that's a damn fine dog, says the entire cat world the cats look on it's crazy to think of it now i'm sorry i've caught love of so many people we only have living to live for glittered the sun dial O7 without incident so what do people think? what do people really think? well we think everything don't expect us to be brief peace instantly like not colliding i guess that's what separates man and dog cats are so bold now so real

Golden Foot Protectorate Solve the whole problem Our brothers overseas KC at work, as inspiring ----18----

as divas of small press Latin America Phillipino Friedrich Nietzsche said What doesn't kill you makes you wander because you're not dead which is startling evidence of your survival I want you all back here in one hour You know what they say Don't have such an oppressive society if you want to fight oppression

Once we're all dead and know for sure if there is afterlife and all the strange things you see on television really are the product of that industry being mezmerizable by ghosts setting up the confluent conditions where this or that individual will watch at this or that time well poetry works a lot like that even for the living doesn't mean poets are incompetent we deliver our end th persecution of love is well known to artists and musicians couriers and acrobats librarians and o o oo o oo

THE STANDARD TERRORISM OF THE WORKPLACE The standard terrorism of the workplace - employees gaunt, haggard, dread-filled meets the fun loving lives of the kids that won't accept it. But the structural terrorism of the economy / marketplace is a deity not believed in by those whom spend more than a poor man's rent on one night's entertainment, while more and more 19--------

can't afford heat or even a room Is it legal to care? We the conjectural food of politics hurl ourselves through walls because those walls were planned badly CHORUS: (warning: contains phrase 'parents of protestors') So this guy goes to a protest eh? And he's got a gas mask on. Who knows what else, but he's waiting for his pancakes, and thinking he's ready for anything they throw at him this time and WHAM!! 8 COPS take'm down, it said on the radio. And you know what it said on the radio: you have to sway into it, with love (you know out in the suburbs you say that to someone in a parking lot "with, lovvve" as in "there's generations of these kids "they're cool and strong" "you know like they're all young but all their parents exist - dead or alive" would it have made cops hesitate? "ah ma laddy our society is too pluralistic to think about warah" "i love everybody" and "war is too theoretical - not to mention heretical - son - of a peacekeeper press - you say that in the suburbs you'd have to have a fight ironically enough"

o violent suburban boys they're just dying to be violent whereas we warmly embrace humanity

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COOING

We would wake to dove's cooing A thousand things going on Grass flowers worms squirrels And tho we didn't have a pool the possibility of swimming The sun lift an awning over the lake The cabinny little house my father and mother already up

1979 80 81 university years no more high school grunge doves cooing

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Dana Bath A Garish Simulacrum of Being Alive I decided I was going to be a writer when I was eight years old. I was a deeply unhappy child, deeply in the sense of vaguely, existentially without surface provocation. Even now I can't point to anything, or even any things, and say: This is what made me crawl away from the world. Only books made sense to me, and in the traditional view, of course, making sense of the chaos of existence is what books are for. When I was a child, I devoured novels at an absurd rate, sometimes going through three or four substantial books in a day. I wasn't precocious in my tastes; I read Enid Blyton, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Judy Blume and other standards. I also read others who were, and are, less known to the adult reading public but whose books are still beloved and on my shelves: Lois Lowry, Eleanor Cameron, Ruth Nichols, E. L. Konigsburg. (I read mostly women at that time, and mostly about girls.) Even my unnatural reading speed wasn't due to exceptional intelligence or skill, but to impatience and gluttony. One of my greatest pleasures was taking a book out of the library a second time and stumbling through it again, discovering bits and pieces I'd missed on my whirlwind first reading. It wasn't unusual for me to read a book three or four times, at intervals of a few months. It was always a new experience because I hadn't really digested it my first time through. Books made sense. The things that happened added up to something. Characters were, within fifty pages or so, interpretable. Even when they behaved in unexpected ways they were not "out of character," just surprising and subsequently explained. Events led to consequences, and the consequences were satisfying. What's more, books were reassuring. I suffered from a pathologically guilty conscience: if I told a lie I suffered paroxysms until I set the story straight; minor transgressions of parental dogma were confessed within hours, and the confessions were usually torrential with tears. But if I did something "wrong" and then read about some fictional little girl who had done the same thing, I was immediately soothed. I was only bad so long as I was alone in my badness. I didn't want sainthood, just company. I'm still sad, now that I'm a grown-up, but I'm no longer unhappy. Sadness and happiness are, to me, inextricable. My childhood addiction to books (and my childhood inability to wrest the remote control out of the hands of my more muscled siblings) gave way, in young adulthood, to an addiction to television. For many years, although I wrote a great deal, I almost never read, and when I did, I rarely read fiction. I won't indulge in the old complaints 22--------

about how a degree in English Literature inevitably destroys any love of reading, but the combination of greater maturity, intellectual inquiry, and self-conscious literary identity did, I think, change my relationship to books. When I was very young, the distinction between "good" and "bad" books was irrelevant. I recognized that Judy Blume didn't thrill me in the way that Lewis Carroll did, but I read them both. This is not to say that I think Judy Blume writes bad books; I think her literature for children is seminal, but that isn't the point. What mattered was whether I could be absorbed and transported, not whether I could analyze and ruminate. Being challenged was not a criterion but a detriment; if I had to work too hard, I became conscious of my own relationship to the material, and consciousness of my own anything was not what I was after. As I grew older, things changed. Some friends expressed impatience at what they saw as affected literary snobbery on my part; I could enjoy hours in front of The X-Files, or Blossom, but was cringing and spitting three paragraphs into a John Grisham. It was as if my fundamental need—the need to leave my life behind—had cracked neatly in two. Or not neatly exactly. I spend an embarrassing amount of time with my TV. I don't like soap operas, but that's about the only place I draw the line, and it's a question of taste, not discrimination. I do love The Practice and ER and The West Wing, which are just soap operas with better dialogue and a slightly cleaner sense of denouement. I like my TV to be clever, but I'm not above watching America's Dumbest Criminals just so I can spend another half hour not living my life. I'm well aware that this is not unusual. But many of my friends—all are intelligent, thoughtful, creative people, and I like to fancy myself more or less like them in those respects—almost never watch TV. This baffles me, but I know for a fact that most (although maybe not all) of them aren't just saying they don't. A lot of my friends, when they want to relax, do the dishes, put on some music, and sit down, with a book. Why does TV now do for me what books once did? Is it because I've spent all these years engaging with literature on an analytical level, and now books are work? And those that aren't work smack of laziness, whereas watching TV is by definition a lazy activity, and therefore not to be held up to impossible standards? Is it because, now that I'm a "writer" and spend a lot of time speaking of "writing" as "text," I can no longer get lost in narrative, character, story? Whereas TV, from The Simpsons to Frasier to Oprah, is often about story and not much else? Maybe. This is all leading to something I want to say about my struggle with contemporary distinctions between "experimental" and "traditional" literature (I'm afraid those are the only terms I have at the moment), as those categories relate to my own writing. 23--------

A few years ago, one of my manuscripts was rejected by a respected, fairly cutting-edge and adventurous B. C. publisher. The publisher in question had nibbled after seeing a query and outline, but after seeing the first fifty pages sent them back to me, writing, "As you know, experimental work of this kind is very difficult to market..." Now, this was not Doubleday. This was a small women's press with a roster of challenging works behind it. I acknowledged to myself that the press might be giving me a standard brush-off, but I was both flattered and astonished that it had applied the word "experimental" to my work. I had always felt that my writing had more in common with Anne of Green Gables than Gail Scott. I live in a community of young, boundary-pushing writers. (These are not necessarily the same friends who don't watch TV. I have more than once discombobulated one or another of them with a phone call in the middle of Jerry Springer.) These are people who are, deliberately or instinctively, trashing the formulae, pissing on the canon (sometimes because they don't notice someone left it in the urinal), and wringing connotations I never dreamed of out of words I thought I knew. What's more, here in Montreal, more seasoned writers like Gail Scott, Erin Moure and Robert Majzels are providing an inspiring "old guard" (a bizarre term for writers who are still so young, but it will have to do) for those of us (and yes, I am one) who want to do "new" things. I'm suspicious, as I'm sure some of them are, of the idea of doing things because they are "new," but I also recognize that it's important to shake language up, stir it around, make it dance. Words are powerful, and they're also fun; English is capable of more than we give it credit for. I have desperately wanted to be an "experimental" writer. I've wanted to crack the language open and expose its inner workings, demonstrate the tasks language accomplishes behind our backs, with our tacit compliance. I've wanted to be Helene Cixous far more than I've wanted to be Alice Munro. (Feel free to chew up my definition of "experimental" and regurgitate it any way you like, but you get my drift.) But I keep banging up against myself, and this inescapable fact: when I was eight years old I decided to become a writer because I wanted a way out of this mess of broken things. I wanted to go to a place where life was put back together in the end, where things happened and added up to something. And I still do. That's why, instead of going home to read the writers I admire the most—James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Jorge Luis Borges or Gail Scott—I go home and watch ER. I don't like this fact particularly, and I'm chewing on it. I don't think that doing what's easy and comfortable is of much use, usually. But whenever I start questioning myself on this point, I think back to a post-colonial theory 24--------

seminar I participated in during my master's degree. One evening we were discussing how to introduce a broader, more culturally diverse literary curriculum in high school literature classes. Our prof had brought in a Globe and Mail article by a high school teacher who was trying to negotiate the tension between assigning students readings with which they felt some sort of "identification/' and giving them works which challenged them and their preconceptions. The prof said, "I don't think that it's necessarily natural and innate for us to be drawn to the familiar. Couldn't it be just as natural for us to be drawn to things that are different from us?" And I thought about everything I had been taught, and believed, about the "hook and eye" model of learning, the idea that in order for new information to make sense and stay with us, it has to attach itself to something we already know. And I said, "When you're teaching someone something, you have to start from where they are." That includes teaching yourself something. It's all very well to try to be what you most admire. But, to bring in another brief anecdote, about the same time that I was doing that post-colonial theory class, a friend and I had a conversation about my impending thirtieth birthday, and he said, "When I turned thirty, I suddenly realized that it was all right for me to be what I was, and to let what I was becoming happen more or less organically." All this is to say: I'm not sure one's life goals, predilections, and motivations should fossilize when one is eight years old. But recently I've been turning off the TV and returning to my books. Occasionally I pick up Barthes or Daphne Marlatt, suck down a few pages, savour them, enjoy them. But mostly I've been reading juicy, tumbling, escapist novels: Fall on Your Knees, High Fidelity, White Teeth. Most delectably, just this morning I finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and closed it with a sigh that started somewhere in my solar plexus, feeling, as I've been feeling recently for the first time in many years, the wrench when the fictional world evaporates and exposes the reality of my self. I've been trying to read more slowly than I did when I was a kid, to make the dream last longer, and the books follow on each other's heels, so that one illusion will dissolve but briefly before another takes its place. That's the problem with TV. Commercial-break limbo, that fragmented deja-vu nastiness that comes eerily close to being a garish simulacrum of what being alive is really like before we pull a narrative thread through it, happens too frequently and too long. It's that narrative thread, if anything, that's going to keep me writing. I want to be something more hip and groundbreaking than a teller of tidy stories, but in the end, I have to start where I am. I'm still that eight-year-old plowing through the stack of library books, afraid to lift her eyes from the page and see the world in all its smashed-up, nonsensical glory.

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Bottle Episode I kiss Joe's sleeping face and he murmurs, "You have to tell her today, babe." I slip out of the hotel to take the SkyTrain to Waterfront Station, where my mother and my mother's girlfriend are waiting for me in front of a yellow halfschoolbus. As soon as I see them I have a seizure of regret, thinking of him still asleep, long and heavy and warm in the crumpled sheets, while I'm out here with all the anger and cold and damp in the world. The sky hangs close and grey. Pat and Addie, outfitted in warm green and black, are stiff little chesspiece figures against the yellow side of the bus. As we stand waiting for someone to tell us what to do, I light a cigarette. Pat says nothing, which is admirable. A ragged man leaning against the building near them is watching me, and I give him a nod. He puts his fingers to his lips and pulls them away again in a smoking gesture. I hold the pack out toward him; he trots to me and takes two. "What's your name, honey?" he asks. "Lisa. And yours?" He shakes his head. "Got a light?" I've put my lighter back in my bag, and can't seem to find it. The man holds out his hand for my cigarette, and I give it to him. He lights his own from it, hands it back to me, bows his head in thanks and shuffles away down the street. I'm about to put the cigarette back to my lips, but Pat plucks it from my fingers and tosses it to the ground. "Do you know," she said, "that forty-six percent of people don't wash their hands after going to the bathroom?" "Where the hell did that number come from?" I mumble, but her expression of horror is so sincere that I let it go, and don't light another. Last time I came to Vancouver to visit Pat, I took an afternoon to walk alone down to Granville and Howe to meet a friend. I turned onto Pender from Main and a man came out of an alley and followed me. It was the middle of the day, but I looked over my shoulder anyhow, and he said, "Don't be afraid of me, dear, I'm not going to hurt you." He had beautiful straight coffeebrown hair almost down to his waist, no shirt or shoes, eyes like black pinwheels. He walked me fourteen blocks and told me about dealing junk, about his ex-wife and his children he hadn't seen for twelve years. He told me about his client the social worker, who shot up in the company bathroom between appointments. "I told him," he said, "that he's living a lie, saying to people they have to give it up when he's fucked up himself all the time. Excuse the language, miss. A lie like that will eat up your soul. You have to be true; you have to have principles. I don't deal to kids, and I don't deal to anyone who deals to kids. I give money to people who have less than me." He stopped, 26--------

bent down, plucked something from the sidewalk, put it in his pocket. "I don't expect anything from anyone that I don't expect from myself." When we got to Granville, I said, "Well, I have to turn here," and he said, "It was very nice talking to you, miss," and when I looked back he was waiting for the light to change, standing straight, his long hair ruffling. When I got back to Pat's place that evening and told the story, Pat said, "I wonder why he chose you." Pat and Addie take a seat together; I take the empty one behind them. A tall white bony man with a shaved white head stumbles on with a fat pack like a pillow on his back. He pulls the pack off and falls into the seat next to me, stuffing the bag down like a cork between his knees. "Greetings, friend," he says. "My name is Warren. Pleased to meet you." He lays his head against the back of the seat, closes his eyes, and falls asleep. I watch Vancouver turn into trees, big shadowy prickly trees, starting sparse but then thickening by the thousands, climbing up the rockside hills and drooping under the weight of the damp sky. The guides stand up and introduce themselves, explain a little about the surrounding landscape: Douglas fir, lava canyons, waterfalls, the Coast Mountains and the Howe Sound fjord. I watch the trees. When I was a baby and colicky at night, Pat would put me in the car and drive me around until I fell asleep. It never took more than a few minutes. Addie turns around to offer me a piece of fruit log. She is barely older than me, and looks a bit like me. People sometimes point this out before realizing how inappropriate it is to say such a thing. A lock of Addie's short blond hair is sticking out on one side, and there's a smudge down the middle of one lens of her glasses. I try to break off a piece of the log, but it's rubbery and sprays coconut, and in twisting my morsel free I manage to fire it into the face of one of the passengers across the aisle. Warren, next to me, wakes up with a start, his bald head jerking forward. Addie, nonplussed for a moment, holds out the fruit log to him. "Much obliged," says Warren, breaking off a generous piece and popping it into his mouth. "And who are you ladies and where are you from?" Addie and I introduce ourselves. Pat doesn't turn around. "Enchantay, enchantay," says Warren, chewing his fruit log and spraying spit a little. "I am from Spokane myself, but have been living in Japan for many years now." He pauses. Addie and I nod. "I am a Butoh dancer," he pronounces. He pauses again. "I see," I say. "Do you know what a Butoh dancer is?" A scrap of pink fruit log is clinging to his lip. ----27----

"Yes." Addie nods as well. "Ah. Well, good for you. And what do you do?" The back of my neck grows cold and hot. "I'm a caterer," Addie says. "And I import European antiques and refinish them and sell them to the wealthy at exorbitant prices." I stare at her. When Warren looks away to wipe his mouth with the back of his big bony hand, Addie winks at me. Pat turns to look at Addie with sudden interest. I grin and say, "I'm in medical school, but what I really want is to be a scuba-diving instructor. I'm thinking of making a career change before it's too late." Pat's eyes, large and jealous hazel, peer at me over the back of the seat." She looks at Addie, and then back at me again. "Children," she says. "Stop your silly games."

We pause in Squamish for a pee break. In the gas station toilet, I vomit three times, thinly and biliously. I watch my face in the dark, smudged mirror as I wipe my mouth, then watch my mouth forming one set of words and then another. The rims of my eyes are so dark and painful that I don't see why my mouth has to say anything. I call Joe. When he answers the phone, his mouth is full and he swallows. "What's up?" he shouts. "Is everything okay? Has your mother convinced you to leave me?" "My mother isn't talking much. I can't tell if it's because I've pissed her off or because she feels guilty about not inviting you." "Does she not want to meet me or do you not want her to meet me?" I look out at the parking lot, where Pat and Addie are huddled over cups of coffee. Warren is standing with them, gesticulating toward the sky, the filling station, the pavement. Addie nods and asks him a question, her blonde eyebrows drawing together under her glasses. Pat's face is a blank. When I told Pat about Joe, over dinner at a Japanese restaurant when I arrived last week, I told her that he was abrasive, and loud, and large. "On the surface," I said. I cursed myself for making excuses, but it's important to prepare Pat for things. "You can't imagine, Mom, how he loves me," I said. "And how do you love him?" Pat asked. "As I've never loved anyone before." "Hmmm." Pat peered into the dish of sashimi as though she might be able to read someone's future there. "But that's how we always love, isn't it." And we didn't discuss it further. "Hello?" Joe barks. ----28----

"I don't know. I'm afraid you'll hate each other." "How could she hate me? I'm so utterly charming." "You'll be with her for five minutes before you're yelling good-naturedly about white-haired dykes and the lesbian separatist agenda, making jokes about how terrified she is of you, and she'll turn into a hissing harpy. I have to get back to the bus. I'm sitting next to a Butoh dancer from Spokane named Warren." Joe bursts into a guffaw. "That is priceless. What the hell's a Butoh dancer?"

In the bus Addie and Pat break out the rice crackers and Warren is delighted that we have not only heard of rice crackers but eat them. He pulls a packet of photos out of his overstuffed backpack and hands them to me one by one, explaining their history and gesturing that I should pass them to the rest of the bus, who look bemused and uncertain as the photos begin drifting their way. Looking around, I think of something Joe once told me about the "bottle episode," an installment in a TV series when a number of people are caught together someplace, and no one new can enter, and no one there can leave. "Here I am performing in Fukui. I forget the name of the theatre. And this is in Edinburgh, at the dance festival...oh, here's one, this is my favorite, it's in the Koraku-en garden in Okayama. I designed all the costumes myself..." His bald head is almost touching my shoulder as he leans too far, to point to the images I can already see. Several of the photos are blurred. Addie has turned mostly around in her seat and takes the pictures from me, nodding, and at Warren's gesticulatory insistence passes them to the people in the seat in front of us. Pat would no doubt be staring out the window, but Addie is by the window, so Pat has to make do with staring straight ahead. "I'll show you when we get there," he says. "Have you ever seen Butoh?" "Yes," I say. "Well, you'll see. I've brought some costumes with me." He pats his fat pillow backpack, but then he stops short. He leans forward and peers into my eyes. "You have very beautiful blue eyes, my dear. In Japan you'd be a star with eyes like that, although many people would be afraid of you." "Thank you," I say. Pat glances over her shoulder with a smirk, but Addie tilts her cropped blonde head to one side and looks from me to Warren thoughtfully. Warren smiles, his white face serene. I wonder if maybe he took some calming medication earlier and it's only just kicked in. Then I notice that his eyebrows have been shaved off. "They are not happy eyes," he says. "In my experience, people with blue eyes so large and brilliant tend to have difficult secrets. And..." he looks down 29--------

at the photos still in my hands and reaches to take them away from me, "...they tend to be extremely nearsighted. In different ways."

The old-growth forest in the Elaho, one of the guides explains as we stand on the logging road about to enter the Douglas Fir Loop, is part of a proposed national park which borders on Whistler, and which includes the Upper Elaho Valley, which is the largest ancient temperate forest left in the region. The tract includes cedars and Douglas fir which are in some cases more than a thousand years old. Logging companies have already encroached upon the area and tours like this are meant to stimulate awareness. If after this tour you feel concerned about the future of this unique and irreplaceable forest, we will give you some contact addresses... I stare up at the sky, which seems low and weighty enough to touch the tops of the enormous trees. I'm shivering. Pat pulls a green Goretex jacket out of her backpack and hands it to me. I'm annoyed by this, but I put the jacket on. We head into the forest, one behind the other like a caravan. I move into the crowd at the head, knowing that Pat and Addie will stay behind to take their time. Warren is a couple of people behind me, and I can hear him announcing, "My goodness, I have never seen anything like this. Can you imagine, some of these trees have been here since...well, since before most anything that we know about! It simply boggles the brain. Lisa! Lisa, sweetheart, come back and look at this wonderful mushroom!" I look behind me. I step off the path to let a couple of people pass, but it seems that everyone wants to look at the mushroom. It's as large as a honeydew melon, moist and fire-orange, almost pulsing. It looks like a sea creature. "Oh my Lord, the beauties of the world are just endless!" declares Warren, his nose so close to the mushroom that it looks like he might kiss it. The others try to move on, but I stay with Warren until he's ready to leave the mushroom behind. He fondles it a little with the very tips of his fingers, strokes it like a cat, coos. When he finally straightens up, he doesn't seem to notice that he's blocked up half the party, and he doesn't apologize. He walks behind me, and for a while neither of us speak. Then he says, "I hope I didn't offend you, my dear, with that comment about the eyes. It's none of my business, of course, but I have a kind of gift, you see. I tend to know what people are like." I laugh. "Really." I look over my shoulder at him. He's not laughing. His face is very smooth and white and serious. The lack of eyebrows gives him the look of an extraterrestrial creature surprised by the human condition. He has deep lines around the eyes and mouth; he might not be much older than forty, 30--------

but he might be sixty. He also has blue eyes, but they are a pale grey-blue brought out by a grey-and-blue bandanna he's tied around his bald head. "You're a hard one, truth be told," he says. "Why don't you tell me a secret, and I'll take it from there. Tell me what you want out of this life." The person ahead of me hoists himself over a fallen tree. I pull myself up to sit on it, and pause a moment, my legs dangling. I pluck at the bark of the tree, watch it leave bits of dead brown tree-skin in splinters on me. Warren waits, as does everyone behind him. "I'm in love," I say. I give a little self-deprecating laugh. "I don't think I've ever really been in love before." I pull myself over the log and continue along the path. It takes him a few seconds to catch up. There isn't really room for two abreast, but he tries to pull up alongside me, bumping me presumptuously in the process. "And how do you know you are this time?" I shrug. I think I feel a spot of rain, but maybe it's the slight wind shaking moisture from the trees. The man ahead of me releases a cedar branch and it wallops me gently in the face. "I care about him more than I do about myself," I say I push the branch forward and hold it until I feel Warren grasp it. "That's the first answer I'd expect. What does it mean?" Warren is panting with the effort to stay beside me. The air feels thick and wet, cool but heavy. I shake myself a little. I almost say, Look, this isn't really what's on my mind. But I can't quite bring myself. "If he left me, for his own happiness..." or safety, I think, "...I'd understand. I'd wish him well." I frown at my feet. "Ah. But that hasn't happened." I shake my head. "And do you expect it will?" Someone left me once. At first he didn't physically leave—he was still there in the house, rustling the newspaper and sweeping the kitchen and shutting me out of the study, but it was as clear as if he'd stuck a sign on his chest saying "Back in 5 minutes or when you've gone away, whichever comes later." He used to complain that driving with me was boring as hell because I wouldn't talk; the best I could do was sing along with the radio, and it just wasn't social. I often wonder if he left me because I was no good at small talk. Not long after I'd decided to marry him, he dropped by Pat's house to pick something up or drop something off, and Pat didn't invite him in. I wouldn't have known this—he never mentioned it—except that Pat brought it up the next time we talked. I didn't express any interest in the incident, but Pat explained nevertheless: "I don't feel I have to have a relationship with him just because of you. If we're going to connect, it has to be as two individuals. And I don't see that happening." "Does he plan to marry you?" Warren asks. I stare at him. He grins. His ----31----

teeth are crooked, and quite yellow. "Your love." "If he does, he hasn't mentioned it." I sound more affronted than I intended to. "I'd have him marry you, dear." He nods sagely, his blue eyes steadily on mine until he trips slightly on a tree root and falls a step behind. I laugh. "I tried marriage. It's not much of a guarantee." "No, it's not a guarantee." His voice is muffled, and I turn to find him struggling out of a cedar bush which has engulfed him. "Not a guarantee. It's a declaration, that's all." I hold out a hand and he hoists himself free. "Have you married anyone, Warren?" "No." He brushes himself, but he's still looking at me as if nothing, not even death or serious injury by cedar, is more important than this conversation. I look ahead again and continue on my way, and he plods after me. "Not in the traditional sense." I hear him stop behind me and he lays a hand on my shoulder. "Lisa, dear, look at that." Ahead of us on the path is a fallen tree. Its trunk is as big around as ten people lying together in a pile; it's stripped of bark, polished and grey as the sky. Warren pushes past me and goes to lay his hands on it. "This is it," he says. He drops his bulging backpack to the needles on the ground and shouts, "Everyone! Everyone, please gather round. I need your attention for a moment."

Warren leaps onto the log and throws his arms to the sky. "Friends, I would like to perform for you a dance in the Butoh tradition, in celebration of the marvelous corner of the earth which we have been given the privilege..." At my shoulder, Addie murmurs, "I wasn't aware that Butoh was a tradition. Wasn't it invented about twenty years ago?" I smile. Warren jumps from the log, limbs splayed, and lands on the path catlike. "Ow," I hear; he holds up one hand, inspects the palm, plucks at it with a couple of fingers and then opens his backpack and with several grand flourishes pulls out a river of lime-green chiffon. He gathers it up in his arms and gestures with a hand flapping at the wrist for me to come closer. He passes me the cloud of green fluff and it swallows me to the top of my head; I try to press it into a more manageable wad as he leaps onto the log again, kicks off his hiking shoes, pulls off his socks and the bandanna from his bald pate and drops the whole load on top of me. He crouches and murmurs to me intently, "If you can find the end of the fabric—ah yes, there—please hand it to me and hold on just loosely..." He pulls out a length, then begins to wrap himself, over shoulder and around waist and then the same again, turning like a gyroscope until 32--------

he resembles a tall barrel-bellied elf with a stream of green hanging from either shoulder. The breeze picks up the chiffon and moves it behind him like lazy sails. I look up. The sky if possible, has moved closer, although maybe it's just the effect of the dark magnitude of trees. Then I feel a speck of rain, for sure this time. Warren is being the wind. He skitters from one end of the log to the other, his arms outstretched like airplane wings, his chiffon billowing. He's making wind noises between his teeth. He extends one foot ahead of him and hops, on the other, the length of the log, until he slips and lands hard on his backside, which inspires him to stretch his white face silently in a skull-like approximation of Munch's The Scream. His chiffon has tangled around one leg, so he takes an elaborate several minutes to untangle it, loop by green loop, still seated with his legs on either side of the enormous tree, and with each movement he spreads his whole body in paroxysms of welcoming joy. Then he stands and begins to creep the length of the log, stopping after each inch to balance and twist on one leg or the other, and raise his face to the crowd or to the sky, lips contorting, eyes alternately stretched and shut. Addie whispers, "I think we are seeing a rather personal conception of the Butoh tradition." I almost burst into laughter. Pat is standing near us. Her arms are folded, and she is smiling slightly with tight lips, her eyes on Warren. I watch her for a moment. Pat's face, under the white bristle of her hair, is long and almost grey in the cold mist of the rain. She looks small, but sturdy, like one of the young cedar bushes dwarfed by the age-old trees. "Mom," I say. Pat turns her long grey-brown face my way, and my stomach knots. She's tired, I think. She's tired of bad news. Oh my Lord, the bad news of the world is just endless. What if I live a long and happy life? What if there is never any reason for either of us to be afraid? The night I was attacked on my way back from the university, but managed to get away unscathed, I tumbled home, without crying and without collapsing, to that man who left me, and he sat with me until very late. He made me tea and we watched the television and finally, at about one in the morning, I said, "I want to call my mother." "Why?" he asked. I didn't answer. I tried to imagine what sort of answer he wanted. "You're fine," he said. "There's no need to make her worry." He got up and emptied the teapot. I waited until he went to bed, and then I called Pat. He left me not long after that. Most of the time, when I think of him, I think of that moment, and wonder if there was something to what he was saying. 33--------

I'm crying, I find. I sink onto a stump, and the few people standing near me are spreading away from me like steam fleeing a drop of hot oil. I can still hear Warren's chiffon rustling. I feel Pat's small body close beside me, and her arm around my shoulders. I heave, and vomit between my feet onto the forest carpet. I was ashamed of tears as a child, but when I grew up, at the end of each bad love affair, I found myself running back to Pat's house and staying there for days, lying under a duvet on the sofa and weeping and being comforted with back rubs and rum toddies. I often slept in Pat's bed with her, and sometimes we talked late into the night, sometimes cuddled like puppies. Thinking of it now makes my skin creep on my bones. In Pat's murmurs, "I told you so" was buried so deep that only I could ever have discerned it. I wipe my face and look up. Pat is waiting; beyond her, Warren is throwing his arms and face up to the rain. Pat's eyes are not blue like mine; they're a dark hazel, but they're the same large round shape, although Pat's vision was perfect until several years ago, when her doctor told her she needed bifocals, and she laughed at him. "There's something I need to tell you," I say. The rain comes down like the sea. Warren, his costume sticking like lime juice, takes a bow.

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derek beaulieu poetics statement: problems in composition

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Robert Budde A Prose is a Prose is a Prose is And I am thinking about prose, the ease of it, the unnerving ease of it. Sometimes I think prose exists more than anything else in the world. And I am thinking about the latent power of poetry, the poetic confrontation with mysteries of meaning making, wrecked time, language itself. And, finally, apocalyptically, I am thinking about the absolute impossibility of "a poetics." Nothing could be further from the truth. But I am game. 1. a prose body It is impossible, but as a writer I want to capture a flicker of memory, briefly but completely, in a way that retains the emotion. Memory, that bio-electrical trick, keys the polished paint of prose, sends it reeling into itself. This is the key—to retain/replicate the emotional content. While perhaps not valued in scholarly or intellectual contexts, emotions—those rushes and sways that swell through our bodies—are something I've learned to cherish and explore. How do bodily chemistries translate into writing? It is about rhythm, no? About blood and bile and cranial fluid and testosterone/estrogen in our body? And so, rhythms of body = rhythms of writing? Too easy. I am thinking of Fred Wah's poetics in which "body memory and histology, the musical press of tissue on tissue" in Wah's version of Charles Olson's "proprioception"; "a precise visceral and physical act of self-perception" (Keahey, 152). But also, projection or "projective verse" out from body to line and sentence. In his introductory "Notes," Wah sets up Music at the Heart of Thinking as "writing as a notation for thinking as feeling" which "shapes the voice of the body so that some of the text can be seen as felt." Wah defines an "erne" as an "irreducible (chemical?) constituent in language," once again emphasizing the organic biological nature of language function. It is the body's recollection, the "memory behind the fingers" (9) which allows an unearthing of the estranged rhythms and improvisational potential within language. But there is more to this writing body. Work by such theorists as Judith Butler and Teresa De Lauretis have called into question assumptions of "body" as an essentialized referent. The body cannot be innocent source. All those havens we thought might hold truth are turning up just as fickle and fraudulent as the last. How can I speak of my writing body when it is always already encoded and historicized? How? Answer me! Patterns of thetic "contact" position a phantom body we really really like to believe in. A leap of faith, an act of piety. So, the "body" becomes more of a projection than maybe we thought...but 39--------

we can't stop now, we're in it up to our proverbial navels (as it were). Provisional body then...and the responsibility of the reader, ta-ta, to not touch. And besides, a body is never just a body—it's always doing things: kissing, working, running around, playing, singing, fucking, hiding, talking, shitting, dying, driving, eating toxins, staring into a computer screen typing a poetics statement... and so rhythms shift and other rhythms are added; cultural prosthetics that condition our body/ writing—the habits worn into narrative, sentence, line. The daily rhythms of farmwork, a freak show, a pizza driver, a filmmaker—these are the models for narrative mobility that insinuate my writing practice. Writing form might emerge from the postmodern form of living—a sudden recognition, a new verisimilitude. So we have a body writing, but don't know if it's actually there or not, and if it was, it is so overcoded and conditioned "it" couldn't recognize itself in writing even if "it" wanted to. "So much for that" (Kroetsch,"Sketches of a Lemon," 83, 85). 2. a prose gentry

I am of two minds about "language" poetry—and both sides are influenced by the writers and theorists in that tradition. Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, all create transient, disjunctive, and nimble texts which realign the ways language moves around us. One the one hand, this resistance to dominant language modes instantly draws me to this kind of writing. But, on the other, the writing threatens to become too much of a game, technical, intertextual—a theoretical conflict or problem that loses emotional impact between the idea and the page. Or maybe that's the point. Or maybe it is a problem with the way we read poetry. "Language" poetry, paradoxically, seems to me fundamentally "democratic" in its meaning making principles but, at the same time, "elitist" in the sense that 99% of readers aren't participating in said democracy. What to do? I seem to be trying for a middle ground. A concession, yes, but political/aesthetic resistance to the status quo takes a variety of activities or it fails. Change must happen in concert or it is not change at all. I am interested in the ramifications of "Language" poetry in Canada—the ways in which it has infiltrated poetic sensibilities in small ways, drawing writers away from spatio-temporal linearity (line, sentence, narrative) and, if nothing else, drawing attention to the fabric of plain prose discourse. One might pull one's thinking of narrative and sentence into the realm of Marxist critique by equating reading comfort with text as consumer commodity. In this way, interruption of plain prose would be a poetics which throws a proverbial plug coin into the slot or a textual practice and bypasses the normal toll booth of easy customer access. By extension, this poetics would also ----40----

attempt to undo the all-consuming power of an Anglo-Canadian male Bay Street hegemony, in the process. Form is a cite for the reproduction of values. The prose sentence, its hypotactic syllogism, carries in it a history of values that I do not share and cannot abide by. These formal residues are toxic and need to be cleaned up.

Prose is also invisible.

That, too, I can no crv

t

ab

i

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So, these flickers are not stories and they are not poems. The sentence are not one. "A sentence should be arbitrary it should not please be better" (Stein, "Sentences and Paragraphs," How to Write). 3. a porous prose Fred Wah once said that the prose poem is necessarily a site of exile and resistance so I do not think these are prose poems. This is not saying they are apolitical, but they are not articulated from a position of resistance to overt political oppression. Postcard stories are not an established form but these may fall into that unofficial category. They are, I suppose, flickers. Predecessors might be the poetic prose in Wah's Diamond Grill, Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral, and bpNichol's Selected Organs. Thought on the sentence came out of study with Fred Wah who pointed us to such texts as Ron Silliman's essay "New Prose, New Prose Poem" and the work of Gertrude Stein, especially "How to Write." He taught me the word "torquing" which I am still trying to rev up, still searching for that "material prose" that undoes what has been done (to us). The very first flicker (which isn't one of the ones included here) came out of a creative writing class with Robert Kroetsch in 1989 and it was he who encouraged me to experiment with form even to the point of absurdity, encouraged me to write a new tradition, fuck around with the cannon. That first flicker was pretty conventional—sticking mostly to prose conventions and only allowing a surface display of vandalism by not using capitals (I ----41----

thought I was being "radical" man). 4. a prose flicker These flickers are personal, not autobiographical. Many in the collection address ideas of "maleness," my complicity and struggle with those structures of masculinity and power which should always be in question if not eventually dismantled. I find it exciting to explore the power of incomplete thought, the poetics of interruption or self-censure or gap, the aesthetics of the utterance that trails off, awkwardly, meaningfully, and suggests out into... The flickers have altered in form over time (there is no set prose receding as attested by a changing attitude toward punctuation and capital letters) but I have always found them to be wonderful places to think and discover. I would hope that readers would approach each with attention to sound and intensity of reading poetry but also with an eye to re-examining prose—what is going on t/here. An instantiation of thought, a drift, a small sip of rumination on a thing, a relationship set sail, an idea snuck, disseminated time quick quickly turned tucked into writing, there. Suspended animation if you will; still...but with the possibility of motion, resuscitation after a brief ellipsis. These "flickers" beg to be mouthed, breathed into, warmed with the touch of lips and tongue (say "lips and tongue") dreams of contact—not oral via the myth of presence but thrumming with a trace of body, that flickering sense that here, once, was a word that meant something goddamn it! That flicker of knowledge a flower of faith is a faith is a Works Cited Keahey, Deborah. Making it Home. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999. Kroetsch, Robert. Completed Field Notes. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention. Toronto: Nightwood, 1986. —and bpNichol. Rational Geomancy. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1985. Olson, Charles. "Proprioception." In Poetics of the New American Poetry. Eds. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove, 1973.181-184. Silliman, Ron. "New Prose, New Prose Poem." Postmodern Fiction: A BioBibiliographical Guide. Ed. Larry McCaffery. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. —. The New Sentence. New York: Vintage, 1991. Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. New York: Dover, 1975. Wah, Fred. Music at the Heart of Thinking. Red Deer: Red Deer College, 1987.

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horn flicker #27 When you lovingly stare at yourself in a mirror, any mirror, do you writhe? I had an unusual picnic lunch with the ghost of Freud on a breezy May afternoon last year. We met in the gravel parking lot. That year I arrived first and sat on my hood waiting until he drove up slowly in his polished Volvo. We greeted each other, saying each other's names, "Rob," "Sigmund," with a warm handshake, as we always do. I gave him a package of tobacco, again ritually, and he feigned gratitude, as he always does. He does appreciate the gesture but we both know he could go into the city and get it himself. This, we reasoned, was the nature of friendship. When we first met by the snake pits I asked him if ghosts can taste smoke and he chuckled, "If you can hear me speak, why would I not be able to move you?" I nodded assent. Of course, how silly of me. My suspension of disbelief was returned. We usually ate first, walking in towards the pits and spreading a large Hudson's Bay blanket by one of the drifts of shivering young poplars. He lounged on his side cupping a tall glass of red wine and fingering slices of fontina cheese or thuringer while I sat cross-legged with a beer, breadsticks and a bowl of pickled eggs. The wind always tussled our hair because it was always windy here in May on days when we met to talk. We never talked much about the snakes, not aloud anyway. Our conversations always began with writing, mostly with me offering confessions to some perceived textual act of perversion and him calmly comforting me, quoting himself to explain the phenomenon. Lately, though, I have been more confident in my writing and needing less to have him give me permission to go on. Now, I seem to write more against him, write in order to shock him, shake his stoic ghostly demeanor. Inevitably our conversation turned to matters of love; typically with me trying to disavow my passions, somehow trying to disassociate myself from my own maleness and him comforting me, again, mostly quoting himself. (Only once did he dare divulge his own desire, claiming he was thinking of flying to France to court Kristeva. Seems to me he must have gone but how it turned out I don't know.) The pits themselves are unremarkable. Undefined limestone slabs cradle a nondescript depression in the ground the size of a bedroom. Boulders and fallen poplars litter the stage. Over one of the pits there is constructed (tastefully) a platform (or balcony) made of 2 X 4s and chicken wire. A sign across the path outlines the zoological details of various stations in the life-cycle of the red43--------

sided snake. A sign stands; the life-cycle awakens. The snakes unfold languorously from the cave, unfold like tongues, unfold like legs from a fancy car, unfold like voyeurs' gazes, unfold like sentences, populous (as in many more than one, one being but many more more interesting clearly more interesting) and unpredictable. Freud and I watched. A large group falls part-way down the side of the pit and twists in a frenzy of lust. "Jesus," Freud says. "Jesus." That's what he says, "Jesus." And when I say "deep," do I mean more me than before? On this day, just last year, a gregarious snake wound its way onto our blanket. Our conversation stopped. (He was in the middle of discussing the "symbolic relation between the precipitating cause and the pathological phenomenon" of my recent aversion to the word crucifix.) The snake lounged. The sun had warmed up the blanket and the bulk of our two bodies leaning close over our conversation sheltered it from the stiff breeze. It basked. It may have even sighed if snakes can sigh. It was a male—smaller than the much-sought-after large females emerging from the limestone caves. He looked spent, smiley even. After a long contemplative pause, Freud reached over and picked up the post-coital snake. He turned it and stared close into its tongue-flicking, nownervous face. Freud brought the snake closer and quickly bit its head off with a soft snik. He tossed the body into the grass and spit the head after it. When an object is a sexual symbol does it stand in place of an exiled desire or does it announce the presence of desire in full bloom? Freud went on about causation and memory but at this point, I have to admit, I was a little rattled and his words were not finding a register. The daylight changed, becoming brighter, lamp-like. The snakes appeared near our picnic spot with more frequency. I feared for their heads. A clump of ecstatic lovers rolled out of the woods and bumped against our thighs on the blanket. Males struggled to entangle the female who strained against the weight of them all. There must have been at least forty snakes on the blanket when Freud lowered himself down off his propped up elbow and let the snakes crawl over his legs and arms, into his hair. His cheeks were rosy from the cool wind and he stared up at the sky seemingly in a trance as the snakes cavorted about him. ----44----

The large female broke free from the clump and wound up from between his legs, over his chest, and stopped inches from his chin. He looked down at it, whispered, "You are my father and my mother. Take me home." The snakes twined about him, twining, twisting, across his tall prostrated form, spasming against his frail limbs. One by one by one one by one by one by one he re moved he re he moved re he re he re by one moved re moved by one dis he re robed dis robed he re moved he his robed one by his moved he dis robed one by (This was not the first time he had done this to me you know—leaving me there, staring, awkward, not sure if I should avert my gaze, intervene, join. The last time he ran with the snakes he emerged from the knot, from the fabric of sex, his head crowned with wild rose twigs, glistening with secretions, and held up a magnificent female, coiling and uncoiling, creating and recreating itself in his hands, and he held that snake up to the sun and said defiantly, "If you are a god, speak and defend yourself" and it replied in a thin seductive voice, "I decline"...and while he pretended that this was what he expected, it was clear that whatever dreams he had erected, whatever monuments stood tall in his vision, had crumbled at that moment, the moment she had said, "I decline.") one by moved by robed by dis one un clothed and dis by one un moved one un robed dis clothed by one by one by one byone one oneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneonewwwwwwwww wwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa And then he fell asleep, fell back into prose, his head lolling to one side. Just like a man. The snakes slid away into the unbetrayed bush. -45--------

Whenever we walked to our various picnic spots, Freud would worry over the path, always unsure of his footing. Especially in shaded areas the dew still lingered making the fescue and clover slick and the earth unreliable with inclines. He would reach out and hold my arm, sometimes so hard it was painful, and he would mumble to himself, mumble disjointed passages from The Future of an Illusion, as if fending off disaster with his words, as if the earth would rise up and swallow him whole if he did not speak, as if some chthonic worm would suck him into a bottomless hole if he didn't make muffled mewling sounds to comfort his trembling, as if the ground itself was about to "abreact" the secret he most desires to hear. (My attention is divided. Freud muttering next to me and, nearby, indecipherably, Raven is eating dead snakes, shitting out stone snakes pointing north. I do not know how to read this. I do not know how to read this.) The Interlake scrub-brush; bristled pubic hair. I went into the woods to pee and studied my penis. It was not any different than before. Whew. A garter snake approached subtly and, a little ways off, stopped to drink from a small pool. At least I think it was drinking. Do snakes drink? I had never seen this before. It bent down, gently down so its face touched ever-soslightly the surface of the pool. Then I thought maybe it was just looking at itself. Maybe there, in that quiet puddle in a garden of wise trees, in an ancient meadow between willow and sapling, maybe it was staring, studying itself, maybe it saw a large human penis in its dreams and was disturbed by it and needed to reassure itself that it was, indeed, just a snake. Or, maybe it was in love with itself. Maybe it came every afternoon to gaze at its reflection as if it were a lover. Or, maybe it was drinking. It senses me watching, slithers off. It is not possible to distinguish what is new in it from what has been said from other authors. We walked to the parking lot and said good-bye. I had helped him brush off the leaves that clung to his clothes. Schoolbuses full of children were arriving and he didn't want to be seen dishevelled. We stood by our cars in silence, not wanting to leave but not knowing what to say without embarrassment. It was a very male moment. We let it linger, knowing it was typical, but secretly our thoughts wound together, formed a knot, created life.

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And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

flicker #17 mourning, reading charles olson, and historying. whereas: etymology is either the history of word origins (word as grave) or studying the landscape of the word spoken to find the manic inside the epitaph—there is, placed upon (epi-) the tomb (taphos), a remembrance which... ...on the one hand, creates the span of life which one must follow compliantly (the obsequious obsequies)—here is inscribed (logos) succession, the regulation and monitoring of the obedient soul standing in its presence, the tomb unyielding to the touch, the sealed sepulchrum of monuments against your fist, against your fist. ...or, on the other, creates an energy of mind, reminding, propelling memory to act, say anything, a mania to move you, warm and uncertain, the history that is the issue of a single tear, breathing presentness and i spoke a stone premonition; exhale, throat, plume, wail... ...it happens then — historying takes you by the hand, leads your sluggish feet.

upon her passing, i built a mausoleum of flesh and bone, sought comfort there.

flicker #12 obsidian sliding, a throat; the comma catches, and then what is heard is what is here, divisible not by focus, or measure. the rock comes lost in a box of other rocks, deep black, revulsion even, the texture charted by the textbooks, revising its insane purples and blues, a necessary magenta falls away, the word as much as anything, "obsidian" and it was. a throat as audience, beginning with attention, attending, the idea hooked into air, hooked into a palm, oblivion between fingers. the only rock for miles and miles in the silt-sandy soil of the Peace River, downstream Dunvegan drowns in bridge, this chunk of hurt churned up from the subterranean chambers where rivers flow with four banks and water falls 47--------

up. contorted masks of igneous, gneiss, quartz still hot, hissing out between teeth, past tongues of lava, eyes of mica, but here, once, on a plain stretch of summerfallow, is the dramatic entrance, a throat, sound, obsidian. the word sets a pace and first is breath, wind, furrows, a comma disc cuts roots, thin sod, rhythm, the rhythm of steppe, murmur of water surges deep within, convulsions—a body heaving with names. carving, carving away possible images of a face, carving away, settling on a method of handwriting after many nights of practice, settling for that face, that face. finding strangeness, and love, in a palm cupped in practice, pressed together, stitched, the pattern believing in sight, believing in the stone, the hands cupping the stone believe in gradation, the granite hinges turning, waits the taste of a stone tongue. a picture may have been taken, holding the camera with a lattice-work of brown iris, precipice, pupil, the edges of the stone blotted out, a blur of inky black, attention set aside, postures solicit equivalence, solicits use. this is obsidian, once. the artifacts of conversation, touch, maybe the silence after, forgetting to breath, pressure, the subterranean seething in valiant black, a glass-sharp hush, inhalation without colour before sound obliterates. the stone, obsidian, was lost, the oblique moment, stooped: an eye flash, toe stub, laughter even.

flicker #14 deep, the hydra reading h.d. and waiting for you there, seas coalesced into a blue not unlike eyes with its wet opened up at the tight point of touch, touched by the imprint: the hieroglyph of hydra waiting there, a wooden skiff skimming a surface tension of soundsense—dual notions of horizon and a net of noise, seeing that slim chance of cadence by catching this; the zones of water and sky and fingertips that flow through both of us signing the supple tendrils of spirit, this is hysteria or the melodies of passage, this is synchronicity or a succession—a seeing that spans history, and the currents undulate the insides of skin, a wake verging on design, this is the hydra: the sentence of perception—a many-throated calling signing your name as it used to be, and may still, an enchantment spoken in the face of extinction, scripted and cipherable on skin, bone, the slow turn of gazes, then, the flood of landscape flees, these waters break over and into and out of. three tongues lick, the cold shock of submerging turns on you, turns into you, turns and shapes the surprise of buoyancy.

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flicker #13 the noise, the noise bullied his small steps each planned on the way he had come absolutely sure of the way back, back the way he had come, the way coming close, curling astray. streets lost themselves, the names sounded themselves in his falsetto with no noise at all they seemed to turn to nothing at all. far beyond sound the streetsigns were plain black and white they pronounced, signs the size of a book, but the names seemed old and his eyes soon lost the syllables, the pieces sliding between the cracks the streetnoise blundering into his tipping frame lost, he was indeed. that building, the cracks in the concrete running, sidewalk slabs slightly off. a man in a doorway talking in his sleep, his dream babble, cradling a paper, cars without direction the drivers invisible, finding the right street curbed the gurgling fear dabbling his palms, the buildings leaned, the architecture of mistaken paths, steps winding, unknowingly sure-footed. of course he knew his phone number nothing could be clearer a quarter shining pocket deep, an eye without black, without iris, without cracks, snug just for the occasion but wasn't that lightpost here before, the dry wind stole the wet from beneath his eyelids, slapped papers against his knees, the street released its length into the next and he ran a little closer to the next corner closer than it was to the next, the building was old. stone is always old he knows, the light was less too or was the sun behind the shadow of the building was certainly old. the phone number, yes the phone number was still. and my name he thought, he knew his name still ran through his mind with streets echoing his name in steps. lost in the noise he heard the smallsounds. they rattled and thrummed high overhead against stone, out of reach, a sparrow, tumbling like a quarter on the asphalt, glancing against stone, tinging to a stop eyeing a crumb. papers flapped against wall staples, flattered words the breeze threatened to send off. the staples remained like scattered crumbs, tinging. the street crackled with voices in passing, passing as familiar, words stretched between hurried feet, an occasional touch you know was meant different. now it was time, time to find that street that looked like the one he knew, the way the trees touched overtop and the grey house with the big windows looking a little like home. but the dark. the quarter keeping cool a spot on his thigh, his name. the sparrows knew. ----49----

flicker #15 but the phone hadn't even rung at all. it crouched still and refused, but motion nine times out of ten he wouldn't have, he gave it a second thought, this man was obviously he coughed horribly, loud over long distance, i winced at the punctuation, moved the receiver through it the angle of the sun found us equal, the old man turned, gruff wheezes that the line lost though, squint study of love slowing, at the source the wall shivered in the heat so. shrug over his shoulder the sweat speaks, beading on plastic receiver, drying even as dying, he was. he said time lapse didn't, telephony, i drank water and whispered the word wet. the man's older tones unclenched dry staccato, a quenching the phone didn't, not rung, its sound a motion of hand, the voice was unsurprised by we. once the old man. speaking in a question of health, a question of health and time he says, he says softer, within reach, within late reading the outside like newspaper mice, spelling backwards so was dying, heart so. wounded not so large to. but yes always closing in. within, i know to chuckle, jokes told by a fingernail's breadth. bustle he grumped. a bed pan sort of pause, the line waited, holding, under his ear cradled, weightless old was not. i felt years on the other end. static of course, a strange connection this, over time we off always, comparing clocks they always, just off. just by seconds, off the old man watched t.v. a signal stamped on the room's wall's lifespan's record, he called the plays, retold the news, suspicious, talked up. answered the skill testing, won the car. a storm, next week on seventeen hours, one day sending, ears receiving pressed and raw. receiving, reaching late a bottle under cover, a pillow sending, chuckling he reached, i knew his reaching, a drinking under, he knew only was dying, reaching, he knew too a punctuation waits his wound he said, touching within, opening up within, touched, his hand inserted, he. a healing a quenching, speaking in. but motion

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sheets i heard, i heard them piled high, thin on thin, framing hadn't rung at all. nine times out of ten. just barely receiving, motion slowing sending within reach under

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Stephen Cain Poetics Statement 1. The quotidian is more expansive than you imagine. My personal metaphor for the poet has long been that of filter, or cultural recombinator. With the deluge of stimulus in late industrial capitalistic society presenting subjects with an indistinguishable blur of data, the poet's role is to filter the gold from the dross and recombine the immensity of information into new aesthetic forms. Of course this "gold from dross" does not imply a hierarchy of value—to me, James Brown takes up as much space in my consciousness as Sir Thomas Browne. Or, in other words, when I reference "Klein" I'm referring to A.M., Melanie, and Calvin equally. To represent "reality" in a poetic mode without mentioning that pop song that's been buzzing through your head, the inane television program that's become a guilty pleasure, or the babble of the preteens behind you on the subway, is a reactionary gesture that ignores the "true" state of existence at this point in history. To dwell on classical tropes, tired archetypes, or antiquated forms is playing ostrich—and to denigrate the everyday as low or unpoetic is equally fallacious: the quotidian is more expansive than you imagine. 2. Platitude of political construction a finale expected but we're not in Kootenay anymore Toto. I certainly never set out to be a LANGUAGE poet, although it's become an easy short-answer to how my work might be characterized. When dyslexicon came out, it was called post-LANGUAGE, and I can agree with that term, although lately I've been thinking that I might be a pre-LANGUAGE poet— using the term like pre-Raphaelite. My first major influence was Gertrude Stein and one section of dyslexicon was an attempt to rewrite Tender Buttons, project which I only later discovered makes up a significant section of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. If I am post-LANGUAGE it's only in the sense that I don't belong to the original LANGUAGE poets' circle, and don't necessarily agree with the theoretical framing of their poetic practice. I'm not as extreme in my rejection of conventional syntax or subject matter—I like to mix pop culture, personal reflection, sex and environmental influences alongside discordant or asyntactic structures. What would it mean to be post-LANGUAGE anyway? It seems to me that like Visual Poetry and Sound Poetry (which I also practice), LANGUAGE ----52----

poetry has become depoliticized and accommodated into a larger poetic discourse. It's become a genre, rather than a movement, and is often accepted by, say, anthologists or magazine editors who will toss a few LANGUAGE writers into a collection as a tokenistic gesture or indication of open-mindedness. There'll need to be another revolution of the referent before we really become post-LANGUAGE. 3. All this will make sense if you've read the same books as me. I think the notion that non-referential utterance is impossible has been welltrod so I'll go on record as saying that I'm really writing referential poetry — just that the allusions are buried deep enough to approach hermeticism. Sure I throw a little white noise into the mix, but words are never wasted and every thing'll make sense if you've read the same books as me. 4. Bonds, and the freedom they entail. When you set up constraints, or at least parameters, for yourself it "frees up" the way that you write —it pushes you to think in different ways than your conventional writing style might dictate. We all have verbal "tics" or phrases or structures that reoccur throughout our writing, but by setting constraints you force yourself to bend to fit those rules and overcome the habitual writing patterns you develop. I first noticed the problem when I was writing free-verse long poems, just after I had finished dyslexicon. Sitting in bars, attempting to write "conversation" poems, in the tradition of Apollinaire, I would think the poetry was flowing. The next morning's sober second look, however, would reveal that the same words would recur over and over again as "linking" or "transitions" between stanzas, most often conjunctions, so I realized that even with the drink, the external stimulus, and the freedom to write whatever I wanted, my muse was still generating the same structures and phrases. Once I realized that devising a constraint was—in itself—a creative act, analogous to composing an "original" poem, my creative energy was directed in more productive ways, resulting in Torontology, in which every poem in the collection is written under an implicit constraint. 5. In Katmandu did Chaka Khan a greatly measured moan by me. There's nothing I like more than a good pun, which is probably the staple literary device in my arsenal. Puns which mix canonical literature or contemporary theory with pop music or culture are my favourite, and serve to bridge 53--------

the gap between "high" and "popular" culture. Ideologically, that's probably one of my most defined goals—to attempt to unite the street with the tower, or the underground with the mainstream. If I can be the missing link between, say, Christian Bok and Daniel Bradley, I'd say my enterprise has been a success.

6. Fun the minimal component of intercourse. O'Hara was probably right when he said that poetry should be at least as interesting as the movies. The problem now is to make sure we go to interesting movies. As for me, I'll take a post-modern comedy everytime. Thus, when I write, it'll be self-aware and attempt to be funny. Experimental poetry without humour is not worth the exertion—on the part of the author or the audience.

7. Listen for odd noises. If you can't "make it new" at least try to make it newish. Subscribe to at least two literary magazines a year, and go to as many readings as time allows. If you believe in indulgences, this'll get you out of Purgatory and into Parnassus that much quicker. Read everything anyone gives you eventually.

8. A sonnet can be written more than once. I don't go around marking a circled "c" on everything I write, nor do I have a rubber stamp with an embossed TM. If people want to copyright everything they mutter, so be it, but to my mind no one owns language. This issue strikes me as important with regard to literary forms that somehow get patented, either explicitly or implicitly, to one writer: if you're writing phonetic poetry you're ripping off bissett, if you mix scientific terminology with lyricism you're a disciple of Dewdney. Fuck it, go ahead and write phonetically, you're a different person than bissett, it'll come out differently. Just because Petrarch was the first word in the sonnet didn't mean that no one else could participate afterwards. While I like to think that I've in vented/discovered a few modes or poetic constraints on my own, I'm not crushed if I later find out someone's already done it. Just call them anticipatory plagiarists and leave it at that.

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9. Most Canadian professors of English Literature possess at least one lame. If we have a responsibility to writers younger than us (and I'm not sure we do, they'll be trying to pull an Oedipus soon enough and—as Alfred Jarry has noted —perhaps that's how it should be) it is to introduce them to what's really contemporary, and what's worth reading—to save them time and let them get on with discovering something. None of this jealousy and egotism of advancement (whether in age or career) which amounts to nothing more than attempts to eat the young—there's room enough for all of us. The point of intervention that I've chosen is teaching, but it doesn't have to be formalized. Read and critique new writers' work, encourage them to read more than they write, and insist that they work on the writing, not on publishing. Then, lead by example. 10. Nothing is more important than writing. As Stein said, when you write you can serve God or you can serve Mammon. In other words, don't write for money and don't write for fame. To this I'd add, don't write to get grants, to get on television, to be a rock star, or to communicate. Don't write to seduce, to impress, or to immortalize yourself or others. Instead, write to think differently, to change perception, and to expand the dimensions of that ingenious invention known as language. Write because you believe that nothing is more important than writing.

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from Arcadian Suite PAC-MAN "I've got a pocket full of quarters, and I'm headed to the arcade. I don't have a lot of money, but I'm bringing ev'rything I made. I've got a callus on my finger, and my shoulder's hurting too I'm gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they all turn blue." — Buckner and Garcia, "Pac-Man Fever"

Eating one's way through the eighties. Coffee crystallizes times never taken. Country Style dunking, or consuming the circular objects, awaiting the sugar rush. Can make you invincible after all. And everybody eats everyone on this planet. Conspicuous consumption. Twisting the joystick in hopes of catching a cherry. Through one hole and out the other. Polymorphous necessity. Four phantoms in a shifting labyrinth. Prozac indigo failsafe. The breakfast was nothing more than a lucky charm, the vision a narrative failure. Imploding at a touch, the swallower swallowed.

DONKEY KONG "I hear something stamping ... A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps." — Virginia Woolf, The Waves At Pepi's the joysticks were as greasy as the pizza. Once learned to jump barrelling past the voyeurs. Performance anxiety, flaming out with tar and cross-current vectors. Elevation anticipation. How hard did you have to try to get high? Fear of picking up that phone, writing it down in flow charts. If/then situations always drifting off the map. Umbrellas don't stop the rain from falling. Ethnicity's not a stereotype. An icon for a generation with MetroGoldwyn-Mayer merely a lost genealogy. Things can achieve their apotheosis after, but a carpenter, not a plumber, is our Christ. ----56----

from Elabouration HYDRA Listen for odd noises Note any operator concerns Listen for odd noises Check for cleanliness Note any operator concerns Check PVC former Listen for odd noises Ensure all guards are in place Check for cleanliness Report any safety concerns Note any operator concerns Check sensors Check PVC former Check all fans are operating Listen for odd noises Inspect delivery chute Ensure all guards are in place Check heat box Check for cleanliness Check warp bar push rod nylon knuckle Report any safety concerns Check lamps of master & slave are "on" Note any operator concerns Check belts & chains Check sensors Check clamps for tightness Check PVC former Check nuts & clasps are secure Check all fans are operating Check bag seal Listen for odd noises

---57----

Clean nozzle area Inspect delivery chute Clean head assembly Ensure all guards are in place Clean & grease eccentrics Check heat box Apply grease to all nipples, then wipe off excess grease Check for cleanliness Grease nip drive rollers Check warp bar push rod nylon knuckle Grease post bearings Report any safety concerns Grease pillow blocks Check lamps of master & slave are "on" Check hardened brushings & lubricate Note any operator concerns Drop of oil on chain Check belts & chains Check impeller is properly mounted on the shaft Check sensors Check screw weakness, then drive home Check clamps for tightness Check tightness of screw Check PVC former Check & record clamp pressure Check nuts & clasps are secure Check & record pump pressure Check all fans are operating Check & record ram pressure Check bag seal Check & record screw pressure Listen for odd noises All sensors working? Disconnect, disassemble, check, sanitize, & reassemble piston & cylinder Dismount horn & clean Replace filter & diaphragm if necessary Craft packing stripper & rewind Listen for odd noises 58--------

from GAS-FOOD-LODGING ROUTE I; FED XING l. Glory days of recorded memories. Spangled sleeping & a shady summer Pete. Smell of coconut & travelling in Leatherstockings in hopes of seeing 18 Indians. Quick trip triptych. Wanting to find that flow, or revisit the fluid ink, but the amusement is merely local. Making water from rocks in a fallen state. Masticating mastiffs, but I'm too meek to meet. Sharing or stopping smokes too much to sleep. Absolute amiability almost embarrassed byActs. The quick swish kindeyes cracking mollusks with a musty shell. The right height. Forget Amazonian acclamations of inferiority. Now that's better, things need time to calibrate correctly. So selfish seclusion. Reading over caffeine & company. Not always, but I suppose an inverted ordering is still an Order. Other. Mann of the Magic Mountain, one named for a potential familial. Mount Baldy too & everything will be alright. Be-aware of boundaries when becoming a brother. Too eager to respond with wit can make you even more bare. Colossus to your Ariel, in fog the stations come in static. Rapid movement from State to statement. Brown nut coffee that warms in the morn. Quizzical Tansy on the halfshell. And Olson knew that flower grew ubiquitous. 2.

New Direction enterprise or Faber & Faber friendship. So sordid soaps & simplistic syllogisms can lead to bonds of beer. Once a child, always an infant. Prepared pork is presented & sadness shadows a silent home. Necessary appearances fulfilled & a warning given to the trio that continues to vice despite the evidence, cummings is cool & comings are welcome. A cellular shout-out & they are twins afterall. Dress to match the verdure, at least I think that's what we resemble. Two dykes for every buoy. A goodman Jones, too early reminisces & there's no there there. Wanted the new age connection but bullets can come in the form of heads as well as projectiles. Peachbasket interchange, a peculiar nationalism is manifested through destiny. Choose your lovers or travel with friends. A strange truth. Teetotallers finding salvation in juxtaposition, a tension headache or wristy ventures, a deep tissue memory. Fight Santana, matchbooks promising illumination or attraction. Lotsa coffee & a little Scotch. An innocent exploring new territory. Smith & Wesson instead of Mason & Dixon. Not really ----59----

lost & the torments that affection entails. Many marriages, constructing links & narratives that remain unread. 3.

Wondertwin transformation, I think the monkey's name was Gleep. Fire brigade spotlight on the floor or performance of impish offspring. Secular ceremony magnified by magik. Waiting is rewarded & a final waltz before the first dance has begun. Hotel homosociality, when the opportunity for silence ceases you still have nothing to say. Stupidly cigaretted, enough of the booney roads. Toes & fingernails, ankles & preadolescence. So speedy sartorial assemblage. Candid confessions & difficult decisions. The gift outright—we were a couple before the coupling became first. The goodside of American Beauty, but it's so cold in Alaska. Left holding the Blue Velvet insult, I'd give it up for a couple of those. A camera-ready signpost for serenity. Just because you haven't heard the Call doesn't mean you haven't been callow. Draw the curtains to cover the cross. Face the farewell with consideration. Consternation is akin to culpability. Link the circle of secrets watched over by an absent grace. Consider the peace of trauma. Lots of sugar in pink pastries, ring that glass-cutting symbol. Buddhabeauty. From where does dry skin arise? A bit hung, but otherwise merely a hanger-on. It's Father's Day & everybody's guilty. I think that's how it grows. No interest in splitting cells, tell me Sister Morphing. Or else bp caps it all. Lower the case. 4.

A Family Compact car, a Shadow Cliquemobile. Fed Xing. Speeding to a Karmic resolution. Goof-balled into guilt. Watertown as a watering-hole, but take the pastoral & watch for predators when otherwise occupied. A rusty musket sabre-ratting them out at night. Summer sweat immediate. Menthol memories in cross-border stopping. A lover's rocking boat. Chair stickiness or Alabama ignorance. A skin-swim proposed, to lay the situation bare. Paired to the bones once shared. A store of simpletons, shipping fools in service. Indigenous coffee never so fine or free of fatuousness. Roman names without the glory wholes. Seemed particular at the moment, so swerve the awakening when questioning the value of grunge. Hard rain reminders lying at True South. Considered response (I meant repose). Now interrogate the better Loved One. Vile Bodies bode a symptomatic problem better left to professionals. Autograph annoyance: billed for the baptism, credited for the confession. Confirm the last rights of marriage & priestly orders forbid the 60--------

maintenance of memory. Ames low but across on hi-way robbery with a chance raconteur claiming alacrity. Serviced by the mile. Missing heads found bagged together. Stephen Cyan.

from Double Helix WAITING We await the second coming of Tristan Tzara. Dance the variable and leave the remainder to flounder. Pause to allow habit to reach equilibrium. Back against the fall. At the end of the experience lies the message. OK you can write, will that change the discourse? So it's an expense, does that make the production any less worthy? Only if predestination is the precondition. Clean the table-talk and allow the ante to carry. Indeed the monitor lies beyond the range. Keep the dromedary debacle at the point at which it crystalizes. Coffee driven, cigarette given, radiation ridden. Nostril bull-breath, clasp the hair and cleave the calamity. Telling tales outside of class, a fantastic ass. Greek lexicon confronting the fact that nipples do harden. Telling teeth, blue piercing, and the flesh that is revealed by inattention. Maybe. If one races across the street to call James. Run in one place and let that eyebrow carry the conversation. Once provided the string to save, now the path demonstrates doom. Into the typography, out to the syntax. Even if the moment is fabricated the sensation satisfies. Free the association and then let the ceremony pretend that it doesn't exist. Too late to recall the monstrosity. Leave symptoms on the credible sidewalk which governs the wet leaves. Not this moment, but one which surpasses simultaneity. Never wanted to tie the telephone blind. Sure that muscle seems developed, but what about the capacity? Spelling with one's eyes closed. Given that this occurs, what can be concluded?

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Natalee Caple Into the Ocean I wanted to create a contemporary poetry that impressed the importance of nonsense upon the reader. I wanted the reader to see something of her own consciousness flashing in the flesh of the text. I wanted to demonstrate that reading is an active and collaborative process. Reading is a writing performed by the reader with the text. To do this I needed to establish a form that was clearly influenced by stream of consciousness writing and yet incorporated the chattiness, the organized rhythms of free verse. Automatic forms of writing are radically available for personal interpretation because of their oneiric use of language. Contemporary free verse forms make familiar use of punctuation and voice, inviting the reader's plunder as a peach pie beckons from a picnic table. The final book illustrates my own travel through other texts to arrive at the one that I wrote. The individual poems, being somewhere between found poetry and automatic poetry illustrate the way that sounds and ideas stick with me and trail in my consciousness, as if as a reader I function as some sort of golden goose assembling an entourage of ideas by attraction. As if every reader is another goose with her own entourage, reflecting back to her her own desires. In order to write like the bastard offspring of post-war Europe's educated, politically radical, young male writers, I had to emphasize the intertextuality of my project. I had to represent my voice and my time as having followed from previous literatures and previous worlds but having been distilled in the present. This is how A More Tender Ocean arrived. I wrote A More Tender Ocean over five years. There were really two tender oceans, the "More Tender Ocean" that was a general poetry project, and the final book that was excised from that project. It was never my intention to publish the body of the project. As a project the pages swelled. I would often write five to ten poems in a sitting. I developed a method of generating poetry to fit my own preoccupations. The exercise was based on two models: 1) the story of the blind men seeing the elephant. A group of blind men come upon an elephant. Each man feels a different part of the elephant and they argue together about what they have found. The man holding the elephant's trunk thinks that he has found a snake. The man feeling the elephant's side thinks that he is touching a wall. And 2) Daniel C. Dennett's description of consciousness as being like a film. Just as a film is produced by thousands of stills that appear as a moving whole when they run together, consciousness is produced by a non-sequential barrage of signals which appear rapidly enough and close enough together to generate the effect of a continuous and meaningful reality. 62--------

It occurred to me that a book is a kind of mind and so I felt that the exercise should be like a thinking process. Reading generates noise, and writing organizes the noise. By quickly stringing random sounds and nouns together to resemble poems, I mimicked the way that over the course of a day my brain sorts numerous pieces of information to resemble thoughts. Neither my brain nor my hands assemble complete thoughts or poems more than a minor percentage of the time. But by increasing the flow of information and making sustained effort to think and write, more complex and interesting information patterns tended to appear. The exercise was simple and fun. I would take a book of poetry that I was unfamiliar with and flip through the pages quickly stopping at a random point, and glance down at the page. Then I wrote the poem that I thought I saw there. Sometimes I would catch a word or phrase or the rhythm. It's difficult now to say why one poem appeared to me the way that it did. I am being facetious when I say that any poems appeared to me at all. The act was so quick and unguarded and I was actively attempting to misread. Of course, the poems that I saw I never really saw until they appeared on my screen. I tried numerous variations on the exercise. I worked with more than one book at a time. I looked at several pages quickly before beginning my hybridization. I glanced at the page upside down. I looked at the page cross-eyed. I included fragments of conversation or noise from around me with the fragments I perceived on the page. I used poetry that was not written in my own language. But, surprise! The poem I saw was always in English. The poems "Normandy," and "Spain," as well as others, represent this variation. Working this way had unexpected benefits. I disrupted my usual lexicon. Usual and unusual words and word combinations common to other poets entered quite naturally into the overly comfortable subverbal patterns of my writing. This particular effect suggested to me that language is not as universal as we imagine. Every individual tailors a private lexicon from the myriad of lexicons available to them to reflect, or perhaps even to create, a version of themselves within language. Each individual has her own English or Romanian, and these languages interact separately to the interactions of individuals. Confronted by a more formal or more esoteric version of their own language, most individuals will automatically adjust their speech slightly to interact more directly with the speech of others; but they will always remain firmly within the comfortable structure that is determined by their own image in language. In addition to becoming aware of the articulation of my personality within my use of language, I noticed that my stanza patterns were also loosened or dismissed as other patterns were presented in the unravelling lace of the texts. 63--------

The page suddenly presented itself as something animate that could represent itself. My own stuttering or stiffness, my habits previously invisible to me, became present like aching muscles happy to be exercised. I braided poems, writing a suppressed poem in the empty lines by writing what I imagined to be every other line. I wrote poems in columns that could be read backward or forward, diagonally, horizontally; these, I think are the most democratic poems in the book. I felt in love, happy, and playful while I was writing. Poetry became love chatter between my language and myself. It occurred to me that every poem contains the thousand poems that it never became. Whole libraries could be written by the person able to read these elided texts. Readers could each have a different book indefinitely if readers and writers could engage in a less protected way with literature. A More Tender Ocean revealed to me the empirical control that meaning has over sound in literature. The necessity to deliver an easily deciphered message to the reader transforms the pleasure of the text into a chore. Meaning makes every statement into an instruction. We are under so much pressure in our regular lives to fulfill instructions that we have become suspicious of nonsense. The nonsensical adult is pathological, in love, or insane. It cannot occur to the indigenous worker how informative these non-productive conditions may be. Rationality has limited the literary arts in a way that it has not limited the other arts. Readers dismiss poetry most often because the meaning of poems seems opaque. We fear the unmet message. But we are not bees before ballet, reading a map in the movements. We do not strain for the hidden instruction in bars of music. We do not try to sort a grammar out of paint. We automatically include our sensory responses in our aesthetic assessments. Our pleasure, anxiety, and ennui are all less empirical but equally professional evaluations of success in the other arts. Poetry is beyond the regular economy of language in part because of its non-sententious construction. There is no need to add the words of a poem to evaluate its ultimate value. The value tends to be dispersed among the syllables. The tactile shapeliness of letters might inspire a yearning for Hs and Zs. The scattering of letters on a page might suggest objects, sensations, or sensibilities. Poetry should disrupt the senses. It should be difficult to read a poem. It is easy to read advertising. It is easy to read propaganda. It should require different parts of your brain to listen to and read poetry, just as it requires different parts of the brain to listen to music. There are as many kinds of poetry as there are kinds of music. Readers should be able to read diverse poetic forms with the same promiscuity they employ when scanning the radio waves. There is a strong correlation between the brain's response to nonsense and the final product of consciousness. Turing tests demonstrate this correlation by ----64----

attempting to simulate the human capacity to respond to unexpected or unintelligible information. Computer designers hoping to fool human judges, build programs that can respond to inappropriate statements with appropriate statements: "Why do you have a duck on your head?" "I don't have a duck on my head. Up the dosage, weirdo!" Physicians treating coma patients read nonsense aloud while machines scan the patient's brain to gauge whether or not the patient is conscious. The brain responds with excitement to odd combinations of concrete nouns like "diamond gingerbread" or "Alligator Pie." The importance of nonsense shouldn't be difficult to grasp. Nonsense stimulates the brain to make sense. At the earliest point in cognitive development all language is nonsense. Nonsense is natural speech for children. Children regularly make fantastic statements and transform daily objects into magical set pieces. Adults appreciate the energetic wistfulness of this activity but for some reason refuse to engage in it. For children to dismiss nonsense is a catastrophe in the learning process. For adults to dismiss nonsense is bizarrely wasteful. I wanted to write a book that would be like a tiger's dream. I wanted to find a way to read where every word I read made me grow. The words I handled joined the electrical storm in my brain. The poems I wrote provided multiple entries into a chambered living language. Automatic writing stresses patterns in language over meaning. In cognitive terms the value of nonsense is no less than the value of sensation in your hands. Without abstract sensation there may as well be no objects. Without nonsense there may as well be no meaning. Nonsense enables consciousness. It is nonsense that moves us, as we lie afloat on our rafts, awake and human in a more tender ocean.

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from A More Tender Ocean Andre Breton You Never Think This hand is your brother's The sun rising out of his palm You are jealous The swinging blades of many things alive in your head The moon, the assailants fire in your hands Who can forget the story of the criminal making love to a very young girl in the elevator of her parents' apartment building? Andre Breton Stripes going all the way down through his shirt to his organs Cables aching and creaking in the shaft And she, pressed up against the buttons, half kicking, half crawling whispering to him: 'You. You.' What goes on seems ordinary. And when she lay in bed that night, beds and night meaning something new She touches her mouth again and again She feels the unwinding the unravelling inside of her Something long sleeping beginning to wake as it wakes beginning to cry out She falls on the floor She prays And he wherever, sleeping, sleeping as her body howls: 'My love, a wild dog tearing me to shreds. Leaning over me as I gasp and I am gasping and bleeding away Not meant to be quiet and good between the sheets growing gradually softly, and smiling 66--------

I am shaken I die in its jaws, holding onto its muzzle crying: I love you I love you I love you.' The emptiness, what goes on and on knowing someone

This is all that there is to

The city unfolding to hide him The criminal calm of his arms, his legs, his back undirected, absolved, deep into another elevator, waiting in the dark I wonder if she will ever recover him

The Shadow of a Fish The shadow of a fish weighs what does the shadow of a man Likewise for the fish's dreams if he has any hopes those too The man believes in the fish but the fish does not believe in the man and the water knows nothing of either of them The grass holds a mark and a smell of whatever lays there but cannot be said to know These are complicated relationships These are lonely things and if thinking should be light the lungs do not hurt for breathing the way that they ache for thought

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Six Pears Six pears like sleeping children by the riverbank Dance like a swallow in the night And in your yellow dress so beautiful and vain your frigid breasts held high to show the moon Happiness is simply the trembling skin the frozen moment of her forehead The wet vowel in the middle of a word suddenly hushed A small sound instantly forgotten

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Margaret Christakos Company If, in walking home from a reasonably helpful armature against density of warmth and mess I'm not quite sure of yet to forego the lineup for the long night during which a blinkish exercise that stimulates why I am two years behind, saying morning to various listening, a listener reading, will these three short complicated personalities with everything shut down, bereft multi-pocket organizer holding all I broke and then took off to their respective classrooms, and decided not to dispose of the still-warm, admittedly acrid hands moving on the keyboard to this vehicle, vessel, not entering the house, its recapitulating book of which I am touched much nor enough over day right into the wainscotting, my childrens' school, having dropped the chaos of the physical expensive Starbucks coffee in favour still glowing on though my home with blankets tucked up three years ago, whose lid works fine and looks nicer checked with the office about the ambiguous salvageability of partnership, it is not fakery, deciding about typing yet it works, its inevitable sorry tattered state, two instead of four and my coat on the double world in my consciousness, piling around their

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shoulders, looking about to, and besides on some figure collapsing the notion of updating their DPTP-MMR immunizations and perfectly when our friend dropped back and might still want some or maybe he doesn't manage to hold and is hooking my hat on the other parent-adults whose names don't know the first thing we are all so attached to be an image of no new replacement, not needing our various mitts and hats then, I constellate a reader studio assuming I will be a half, to find this husband has left for the shuttering gaze from screen to coffee sitting on the automatic times and besides he was stuffing my gloves in the car or mini-van to attach the second floor and the drip hotpad in my kitchen, was moodily separate again, my population? Will I want or want to leave the house bitter, boiled coffee in the way being the low way, being drivers and having a cup hook I shoved one about how we have not keys to screen to keys, good since it filled in my husband, well, I call myself and the remaining majority so proud, and I said need this company? Which company our children migrated beds several of the longer daycare days up working late and I have come to work, my blue and grey teapot which they still 70--------

appreciate the ride of the piece, which was longer by the twins but homier, if I pour the sleep over and he arrived in percussive ingenuity since I room and turn on my third floor to my writing and scarves, overflows but does again the screen and my morning we had his children of course not to worry him my partner, gave me the Melita coffee pitcher that syncopation of thought useful for stroller not needed really any more than clear, brown-ringed antecedents, to school, while his wife, my friend, was in the plum IMac system and regarded one really as the pot to help escort them off coffee and head up to states doing research for her moment of ignition, if, sh/e be sentenced as you or me or some palindromic ago and we still have but it was a year here now if, in walking home from my childrens' school, having dropped these three short complicated personalities off to their respective classrooms, checked with the office about updating their DPTP-MMR immunizations and why I am two years behind, saying morning to various other parent-adults whose names I'm not quite sure of yet it is not fakery, deciding to forego the lineup for expensive Starbucks coffee

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+in favour of the still-warm, admittedly acrid coffee sitting on the automatic drip hotpad in my kitchen, still glowing on though my husband has left for the studio assuming I will be back and might still want some or maybe he doesn't want to leave the house with everything shut down, bereft about how we have not touched much nor enough over the long night during which our children migrated beds several times and besides he was up working late and I was moodily separate again, my way being the low way, entering the house, its recapitulating density of warmth and mess hooking my hat on the cup hook I shoved one day right into the wainscotting, stuffing my gloves in the multi-pocket organizer that holds all our various mitts and hats and scarves, overflows but does manage to hold and is a reasonably helpful armature against the chaos of the physical world in my consciousness, piling my coat on the double stroller not needed really any longer by the twins but we are all so attached to this vehicle, vessel, not being drivers and having a car or mini-van to attach to, and besides on some of the longer daycare days they still appreciate the ride home with blankets tucked up around their shoulders, looking about two instead of four and a half, ----72----

to find this bitter, boiled coffee in the blue and grey teapot which my husband, well, I call him my partner, gave me three years ago, whose lid I broke and then took to be an image of the ambiguous salvageability of partnership, its inevitable sorry tattered state, and decided not to dispose of the piece, which was good since it filled in perfectly when our friend dropped the Melita coffee pitcher that morning we had his children sleep over and he arrived to help escort them off to school, while his wife, my friend, was in the States doing research for her book of which I am so proud, and I said of course not to worry but it was a year ago and we still have no new replacement, not needing one really as the pot works fine and looks nicer than the clear, brown-ringed antecedent, homier, if I pour the coffee and head up to the second floor and the third floor to my writing room and turn on my plum IMac system and regard again the screen and my hands moving on the keyboard in percussive ingenuity since I don't know the first thing about typing yet it works, has come to work, my

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shuttering gaze from screen to keys to screen to keys, a blinkish exercise that stimulates syncopation of thought useful for the moment of ignition, if, then, I constellate a reader listening, a listener reading, will sh/e be sentenced as you or me or some palimpsestic figure collapsing the notion of myself and the remaining majority population? Will I want or need this company? Which company—

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Mark Cochrane en train de: (his little fraught patriation of forms

Flatcar This land emaciates in January, the taut carcass of an Ellesmere Island mammoth, or a farm dog that roamed too far. In ripples of vertebrae the shield erupts from the frostbit skin of fields. A grit of snow, squeaky as starch, pools in stony haunches. We are fortunate to know topsoil at all in this country. Hills pass by. Fetal, like sleepy vagrants against the wind, a thousand lives squat in bungalows. A line of fence vanishes in perspective with the next, spokes from an invisible nexus. A party of Rorschach Holstein, steamy as teakettles, blow rings from their nostrils in the city of silos. Our engine rails: an animal hooked to slaughter. Frozen with blood, my pantlegs knock & sway. Then a mirage, dissolving like a flashbulb on the retina: on the groomed face of a pond, its cattails shorn by skates, a table stands company with an uneven chair. God as witness, in this place, we never cheat at solitaire.

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Branch Lines Over a bed of arrowheads, crossties, flagellant with fox tails, deliver the bands of nationhood to Yellowgrass.

Or: Rusty rails, steely as dimes on top run tandem into town, elevators & poplar, & converge eventually, Einstein insists.

Or: An iron-shod buffalo has trod this fallow in the night. No:

Conceive instead three pairs of tracks. You & I pace the fretted rostrum of a flatcar, unmoving on the centre set. On each side, an infinite train of flatcars blurs past, contrary & urgent conveyance—one eastbound & one west. You say: We must escape this static stage, plain on the horizon of event.

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I agree, toe the old hitch with my boot. The sun collapses its bourne. I lick the sweat from my lip. Agreed: we are frozen on the flange of a great dearth, swallower of light, upturned bowl of sky & swirl of earth. This relationship is dead cold. A real nothing, but I love you. A void, sucking time to a stop, but me too. Maybe we should see other people. Actually I have someone in mind. Actually I have someone in mind. With gravity, we link our fingers. Jump?

An uncertain snap at the end of the arm & we twirl / like galaxies vanish in each other's distance (one eastbound & one west.

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roSe of that iteM nation The one fact of these word priapics in heat; kabob on wet laPels, caught.

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Ngland For L

cerebrospinal spam travels by migrant striation litigate King's Cross playstation. caesar, you're a stuttered accoutez Elizabeth an utterly bearded vogue for Cowper's milky canalboat charters. sebum later, realmed peers, I dripped on the Act & knapped snoozers by shingle flint on the inside is not what we mean by Hastings at all.

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Wayde Compton Self-Interview (after Ishmael Reed) Wayde Compton: So how do you like being an ethnic writer? Wayde Compton: It's all right. I mean, the up side is everybody wants to know what's going on inside the ethnic head, you know, like what's the word from the subaltern, so to speak. The great thing about that is I get to be a spokesperson even when I'm just talking about what happened to me on the way to the supermarket or the dentist or something. I like that, it makes life much more, I don't know, defamiliarized, I guess. You know, like Shklovsky. WC: Who's Shklovsky? WC: A Caucasian. WC: Speaking of Caucasians, in one of your poems, "Where Heaven Lies," you have an imagined headline that reads, "Hell freezes over; white people discover empathy." Has anyone ever accused you of being a reverse racist? WC: One of the really great things about being mulatto is you can't be a reverse racist. It's kind of like that unstoppable force/immovable object koan. [laughter] WC: Those silly liberals: what'll they refuse to think of next! [more laughter] Who are your influences? WC: When I was writing 49th Parallel Psalm I had just finished my undergraduate honours thesis, which I wrote on voodoo in black literature. I'd taken a course with George Bowering in which he taught Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, and reading that book just put me on the floor. I'd never read anything like it. I instantly clicked with the voodoo thing, politically and culturally. My dad's from the South, and talks about voodoo sometimes, so that contributed. I was looking at Rene Depestre, Kamau Brathwaite, Ishmael 80--------

Reed and Jewell Parker Rhodes—if I was doing it now, I'd throw in Jacques Roumain and Nathaniel Mackey. Of that lot that I studied, Brathwaite resonated the most. I had to read The Arrivants out loud to myself. That was important for me, looking closely at someone doing sound and rhythm really well, and it being something that worked on the page too. After that, I started looking for black Canadian writers and found George Elliott Clarke's Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. That book was about the best example I'd seen of someone doing what I wanted to do—write from within a black Canadian community that wasn't Toronto, and a region that had seemingly few literary precedents. I was zeroing in, closer and closer to home, and so started looking to see if there were any black B.C. writers. I found very little at first, but started reading about the history of black settlement in this province. Crawford Kilian's history of the black pioneers Go Do Some Great Thing was a fine resource. People tend to suggest there are no black people in this province, and I, at least, wanted to make some kind of mark, some kind of statement that we've been here a long time, and that we aren't going away any time soon. WC: When I read 49th Parallel Psalm one thing that stuck out for me was the final image in the fairy tale. The protagonist is staring, one eye forward, one eye turned in on himself. It made me think about the W.E.B. DuBois bit about the veil and double consciousness. Is that what you were getting at? WC: When I saw Henry Louis Gates launch Colored People in Seattle a few years back, he pronounced it like "Do Boys." He said, "W.E.B. Do Boys." I didn't know Americans pronounced it like that. Or maybe just Gates does? WC: I don't know. Did you get to talk to Gates? WC: Yeah, I got him to sign my book for me. Man, he's a snappy dresser. Then there was this time I bumped into Cornell West at Bukowski's on Commercial Drive. WC: Get the fuck out... WC: I shit you not. He just kind of sauntered in while I was hanging out with some friends, none of whom knew who the fuck he is, and I kept thinking, damn, that dude looks like Cornell West. But I didn't want to go up to him and say that in case it wasn't him. You know, I didn't want him to think it was a you-all-look-alike moment.

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WC: Blacks are sensitive that way. WC: No shit. I nearly had to kill this kid once who came up to me (it was in Bukowski's again) and said, "How're you doing Ellis?" and then wouldn't believe me when I said I wasn't Ellis. Thought I was giving him the cold shoulder. But I did eventually introduce myself to Cornell West. WC: What did you think of him? WC: He was real nice, a smooth character. Bought all my drinks too. WC: Now that's some Christian Marxism for ya, eh? [laughter] WC: Speaking of Americans, some people say you read your poems in an American accent. Are you American? WC: No, I'm mulatto. WC: Is that why you pronounce "muthafucka" as "motherfucker"? WC: Let me put it this way: hip hop is the black lingua franca. It's our intercontinental cultural trade language. Our Esperanto. You can't really make cultural sense in the black community without it, if you're under 40 years old. It's funny how the same people who are quick to say that we should all abandon our cultures here in Canada and "just be" (i.e., multiculturalism; i.e., whiteculturalism) suddenly become purists when someone like myself says he needs to use a sort of dominant language (albeit a black one) so that I can make myself understood to my own brethren. You could say that black American dialect is piggy-backing on American cultural imperialism, but if you do say that, I'll answer that I'd rather kids in Capetown start talking like Tupac Shakur than like William F. Buckley, you know what I'm say in? Hip hop is theory, and the theory fucking applies, so deal with it. WC: I see. Is that what you think KRS-One means when he says, "I grab the air and speak through the code the devil cannot see through"? WC: Yeah, well, the devil has X-ray specs these days—you can order them in the back of Archie comics—but sure. You have to watch your back in this day and time, because one slip and you can get your ass authenticated right out of ----82----

existence. WC: Authenticated, hmm. Why do you use the term "mulatto"? Isn't it archaic and offensive, a vestigial slave term? Shouldn't it be junked along with stupid words like "negro" and "oriental"? WC: I like it because it's quicker than saying, "half this, half that, blah, blah, blah." I'm not half anything; I'm an entire person. "Mulatto" is one word, one thing. It's like a particular ethnicity within the larger category of "black," I'd say. I want to reclaim it, dubious etymology and all, if only because it's so precise and economical. Without it, it's very difficult to identify my lived racialized experience. There are things that happen to me not just because I'm black, as such, or some unspecified "mixed-race," but exactly because I'm seen as a perplexing shade of black and white. Like when someone looks at me and sees this sentence: "A black person slept with a white person." Those are mulatto moments, and without that word, it's hard to even articulate that they're happening to you. Naming an oppression, or a response to it, is important. I'll keep the word, thanks. WC: Greg Tate says that the black man's job under white hegemony is to cause a maximum amount of confusion. What do you think the mulatto's job is? WC: To divide that confusion by .5. WC: I hear you're working with turntables these days, even pressing your poetry onto vinyl to mix it and cut it up. Why would you go and do a thing like that? WC: Frederick Douglass said, talking about the earliest African-American slave songs, "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I myself was within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see or hear." It starts there. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston wrote from the blues. Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed wrote from jazz. Kamau Brathwaite writes from calypso and reggae. Yet, to paraphrase Aime Cesaire, black people get perpetually told that they invented nothing. Now, I'm no boogedy-boogedy Afrocentrist who's going to tell you that blacks invented electricity, the submarine, the automobile, and the sky hook. I won't even tell you about the pyramid in northern British Columbia or the sphinx in the Northwest Territories that the CIA doesn't want you to know about. But I will say two things. One, that if whites can call themselves "everybody," we can damn well 83--------

call ourselves "we"... WC: Preach it! WC: Gonna make me get mad... WC: Go on, get mad then! WC: Two, that it's our responsibility and our right to create from the foundations—the epistemologies, really—that the ancestors have stitched together for us like samizdat talismans. WC: Huh? WC: We didn't invent the gramophone, but we made the machine worth plugging in. WC: Well, amen to that. Flipping through it, all in all, I'd have to say your book is pretty weird: voodoo, fairy tales, stuff written backwards. Were you on crack when you wrote it? WC: Not really. The way I see it, we're all encased in these discourses and languages—the Bible, fairy tales, the lyric, multiculturalism. Those languages have us. Like Ben Okri says, "We are part human and part stories." The only way to change our conditions, which is what should motivate any cultural producer under a system like this, is to find the fissures in those languages and systems of thought and bust them wide open, expose them and their assumptions. Judith Butler talks about how normative systems of gender make it so that inter-sexual people are basically rendered "unreal." You could say the same for inter-racial people, I think, or even black Canadians, in a less immediate way. I'm of the opinion that there are no unreal people. I want a world like that, one where nobody gets purified into inarticulation. This comes back to Kamau Brathwaite. In his latest works, he still treats Caribbean dialect as his subject/form, but he's also been fucking around with concrete visuals, computer poems, inventing his own fonts, intentional typos, that kind of thing—trying to break free of the book, get up off the page. I think he's trying to break out of standardized typography and the standardized colophon the same way he's trying to dislodge standard English. It can be part of the decolonization process, toggling the received forms, and the received avenues of paratextual dissemination.

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WC: I can dig it. W.E.B. DuBois said, way back in 1903, that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the colour line. What do you think's going to be the problem of the twenty-first? WC: The hook and sinker.

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from The Reinventing Wheel: A Turntable Poeml A. The reading of the Red Sea bleeds into me as parable. The parabola of the word crossing water: Kamby Bolongo. The perambulation of call and response, the word made vinyl. The Nile, like the culture, overflows. The line secedes. Jordan, like papyrus, tears or folds. "Snatch It Back and Hold It," Junior Wells told us, and Arrested Development sampled it. The passage is collapsing and Moses' magic for passing as African is the fashion (among blacks). The lighter skinned, the damnednear-white among us, blush with pride when called "nigga." Flushed out. Snatched back and held. Elemental. And all there is to say to that is, "It be's that way sometimes / cause I can't control the rhyme." Or that's the way the wave breaks, homes. Moses, says the speaker, lead us from here to authenticity, take us home. Old restless spook, speak us out of this mess, this unpassable test, this pattern. Hold it back and snatch it. Fix that word, cause the shit is broke. Write it in stone. Xerox the tablets. Cause Lord knows the author got to get over. Take us home, keep it real, word is bond. The age demands bling bling not Mau Mau, but I'm still down withl.D. I'm out of sync with the attrition, Sisyphean, perpetually beat juggling History and Ethnicity. From Hegel to turntablism, revolution to fusion, the fall of the Soviet Union is what really blew up Chuck D's spot. Hip

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hop is black Canada's CNN [sic]. Talk stops for no border cop. Black slang is the new cash crop. One-drop half-castes can't cope with that. (Motherfuck Ebonics, I'm reverting to scat.) [SCAT ACAPELLA] Translation: The mulatto will not be metaphorized. But will a word be live? Is the hole in the machine ghostly, the lapse in the record? Is there breath in its backmask? Schrodinger's cat cast out in this infinitive synthesis. The drum has gotten ghost, but where was the death? No throat was cut or hide disrupted from blood. No body was hided, no matter, no breathing skinned. The drum is the black hole of this constellation, the collapsed lung of us, the fissure, the shape shifter, Osiris, the dee laved dee cay The rupture is the inscription, the brokenness the tradition, the repetition the affliction, the body the preserved fiction. The script the friction. It's Shango who performs in RCA the peristyle, his arms reaching, pointing: Remember. It's Shango and Damballah too. You can blame all ignorance on the failure to feed the ghosts in these Technics. There is immortality in the track; there is permanence / dismemberment as the snake eats its tail, as the groove seeks text. The descendant speaks his ending as he unsheathes the record like the shedding of skin, like the donning ----87 87 ----

of a mouthless mask, asking: Remember. Legba's original cock-rockism, forever without climax. We are conscious now, aroused, no longer novocaned, now we have beautiful monuments to our pronouns, carved from rock. We are awake. Now we have records and evidence. The ancestors we have honoured will be born as our descendants to remember us. Now we are awake, we are conscious. As we speak our names, so we live, we don't sleep. We drop silence. The cock has crowed, the chickens are home to roost under eves. We are awake as surely as we speak our names.

Bluer Blues the water in which you wade is holy, drowning under the mountains and their wishful blue, where the gods live, where the birds hang, fore they turn back, looking. glass case: please break in case of caste discrimination, and if one more some body asks me where I'm from today I'm gonna offer, 'out there in that ocean where you left me when you drifted away. I got no'

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better response, see, as kids we spun the globe closing our eyes, going, 'here gonna be my home/ globe rolling on a plastic axis, finding our little digits dis appointedly in the middle of the ocean, later and I'm still ambiv alently coloured and liv ing in Xanada, trying to spell and accent Santeria and Aime Cesaire, trying to prounounce houngan, trying to try, trying to care, whispering red into the embers, fading, late. CPT. trying to keep my self smouldering, thinking, 'Halfrican' at others in cafes, the talented tenth of a percent, trying to keep anchored, above the line, to keep a language living, envying patois or nation language, or anything, the Asians. trying truly to truly try, trying to keep the third world in mind, trying to riot, trying to buy it, trying to put it together and get it undone, clocks set at set trip on some nigger mumbling mumbling chicken blood, flicking chicken blood at the white page, spelling, dialing, dilating the accent, eccent, afrocent, ricity, outward, goose stepping still is goose stepping even done to call and response, trying to call Amiri Baraka Leroi Jones in my time of casting away stones and gathering together, some time after and above Watts, or when ever when ever. ----89----

meeting on the corner a voice without a body. 'even echoes got echoes, yo. in the mixture, in history, a la Ali. mess with me and we'll be gettin it on like Frantz Fanon. because I'm pretty, teach you the Ten Point Program the hard way. with revisions too. point eleven: just leave me alone.' Lou Reed on the tape deck, Ishmael Reed in his black leather jacket pocket, in the back seat with Debbie counting her freckles and the fractions and the nature of white rhythmlessness, meaning she's late,

and he's thinking, ain't gonna be one gram of African in that child, dying, drowning in those eyes, and it's unspeakable, how much the pieces mean, doing long division, spreading out and creating a little love, which is what the world needs now, as they say, or something close enough, the almost off spring sings, the on-the-head-of-a-needle Coulda-Been will take us home, softly now. musing. 'spectrum comes through re fraction, Damballah and Ayida Wedo copulating, circling, staff to myth; sticks to getting; stoned to tripping; it's all. no. good, spinning. Southern Comfort; west coast ease, sugar and shit, like love, pressing play on my tongue like a snake, listening. seeing, with its tongue, re winding the magnetism of poles making the lights dance like night club strobes, running, north, loving seeing 90--------

breath making solid the cold, a seen soul. sold, getting a decent day's pay. getting to heaven, which was what I was after, after all. over the rainbow, sevenly shaded blue, exact hue of an already sky/

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Jeff Derksen "because capitalism makes the nouns / and burns the connections": Notes Towards an Articulatory Poetics1 When Ron Silliman contends, "Poems both are and are not commodities" (New Sentence, 20) he opens the poem up to a range of possibilities beyond his original problematic "that consumption for further production is a moment of production itself—it is action" (30). Firstly, this is a curious enjambment of an avant-gardist position with the cultural studies' position of productive consumption. Curious given cultural studies' emphasis on mass culture and its wariness of avant-garde formations. Secondly, Silliman's positioning of the ambiguous commodity status of poetry is not only a gesture to the political economy of poetry (not of publishing) but also indicates the pressure of what Leslie Sklair identifies as the "culture-ideology of consumerism" (291) in globalization. Because of this pressure within globalism, can we ask if resistance to a consumerist ideology —the recognizable avant-gardist position—has now shifted from a residual strategy to an emergent tactic for cultural production within the temporal and spatial dynamics of globalization? Has the narrowing of culture to merely an aspect of the economic sharpened a role for the cultural within the social? The refusal to be interpellated as a cultural product whose use value is determined merely by its ability to be transformed to surplus value can be rearticulatory of the role given culture within globalization. In addressing the notion of a crisis in culture and in a methodology for reading culture within the relations of globalism, Hal Foster proposes a contextual option for a neo-avant-garde: [T]o rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a heroic avant-garde outside the symbolic order but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde within the order. In this view the goal of an avant-garde is not to break with this order absolutely [ . . . ] but to expose it in crisis, to register its points not only of breakdown but of break-through, the new possibilities that such a crisis might open up. (Return, 157) For Foster this move away from a transgressive model of the avant-garde is also away from "grand oppositions to subtle displacements" (25). A further move from "subtle displacements" to a forceful poetics of articulation would give a stronger, more tactical role to cultural production. Cultural ----92---

production could be imagined as a practice which does not find value in transgressing boundaries per se, for what is the discourse of globalization if not a discourse of transgression—particularly the spatial transgression of national borders and of local boundaries. What form does an antisystemic cultural practice take when it is realized that there is no oppositional outside? How are "resistance/' "struggle/' "opposition," or "transgression" refigured within a discourse of globalization that moves simultaneously toward spatial and temporal expansion and compression? Imagined as a discursive element in an overdetermined social field, where contradictions overlap and determine each other in multiple directions, what tactics and strategies does cultural production take up? This is also a return to the problematic of cultural studies' formulations of resistance on the side of cultural consumption. I am interested in the speculative function of cultural production within the framework of globalization: this shift in (articulated) levels does not cancel out effects at another level. Both the production side and consumption side of cultural dynamics must be emphasized. Speculation does not exclude forms of cultural praxis and indeed must be thought of as a necessary moment which is linked to a reimagining of the shape of the social. Articulation is usefully defined by Lawrence Grossberg as a series of linkages: "Articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these links themselves are articulated into larger structures, etc." (We Gotta, 54) As part of the social, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe give articulation a more transformative function: "We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice" (Hegemony, 105). Articulation functions within the social to form the contingent connections that give society its shape; not, however, as a seamless totality but, as Laclau points out in earlier work, as an "impossible" formation ("The Impossibility of Society"). Stuart Hall adds a cognitive function to articulation: Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain circumstances, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (Critical Dialogues, 141-42) As is characteristic and valuable in Hall's work, he moves from the structural to the subjective in his function of articulation; thus articulation describes how social discourses cohere but also how these discourses have an ideological effect on a subject. Grossberg's perception is that "the concept of articula93--------

tion marks Hall's unwillingness to accept the necessity of either correspondence or non-correspondence, either the simple unity or the absolute complexity of the social formation" (Critical Dialogues, 156). This is particularly valuable within a theory of globalization where the tendencies can be to accept the simple (homogenizing, totalizing) unity or the (mysterious, immaterial) complexity of globalization: either acceptance leaves little place for agency. Cultural production as an articulatory practice can also operate on a variety of levels and intersections; ranging from the structural to the subjective, from the discourses of the social to the positions of the cultural field. An articulatory poetics is based on a poetics of conjunction, of showing how discourses and social formations are themselves articulated. This does not imply a unity within the text—the conjunction can be between disjunctive elements, materials, discourses, histories, etc. How does cultural production react to the culture-ideology of consumerism, to the restructuring of the subject into a neoliberal individual, to the discourses of globalization which pose the end of history in the inevitability of globalism (and along the way, erasing the nation-state)? How do these works make the ideology of globalism visible? Broadly, how do these works engage with the world system? And, what world do these works imagine in their rearticulations? Obviously not every work can do—or try to do—all of these things. In reading the ideology of form and of aesthetics, even the most formally engaged works are also an engagement with ideology, with the shape of the world. An extremely clear statement of such a methodology, despite attempts to define a cultural poetics from within the literary field, arrives from the field of architectural history. In this passage from Eve Blau's exemplary study, The Architecture of Red Vienna 19191934, substitute (for a moment) "poetry" for "architecture": Yet revelation of those conflicts of social and architectural ideas and of the ways in which ideology operates in architecture does not account fully for the architecture. To do this requires a different historiographical method, one that takes into account the operations of both ideology and a form of knowledge that is particular to architecture—that allows us to ask not only, What is the ideological content of the architecture? But also, in what ways can architecture (filled with ideological content) be instrumental, operative, strategic? Where, in effect, is the locus of politics in architecture? (12) Blau's emphasis on the temporal (historiographical) and the spatial (built space/the locus of politics) finds a way out of attempts to formulate a cultural poetics in which context is approached as something "behind" the texts, as ----94----

if determinants and their mediations are the scaffolding of the text which will be revealed in an informed reading. Further, this context is often understood as synchronic and static instead of open to the flows of history as well as the constitutive hand of historiography. While Adorno's bleakness on the consumption side of culture sometimes obscures his analysis of the determinants of production, it is useful to introduce his concept that: "The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not" (Notes, 39). The tension in Adorno's observation is in his shift from author to reader; from that texts (texts themselves?) "give voice" to what ideology obscures, and that their "success" lies beyond the text's intentionality. He does, however raise the question of what culture can say beyond itself, rather than how culture speaks its context. A poetics of articulation is not merely a semantic expansion of putting "the world" into a text, but an attempt to link cause and effect, rather than catalogue the effects of bad history, or imperialism, or globalization. Through Bruce Andrews' short Bildungsroman in I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) let me give an example of how this poetics works on the three levels. My graduate education, most of which I devoted to thinking about neo-marxist theories of capitalism, and imperialism, was entirely financed by a grant, awarded under the National Defence Act, NDEA, which was passed in 1958, in reaction to the Soviet Union's triumphant launch of Sputnik in 1957, putting a satellite in space ahead of the U.S. So: thank you, Nikita! (180) For Bob Perelman, this is an example of the "cultural aggression" in Shut Up: an aggression aimed at "the proximate target, the autonomy of the self" (Marginalization, 105). Yet, in Andrews' work, the self—the subject or the national citizen—is not a proxy target but a material construct of an immaterial process—capitalism. This immateriality, or sitelessness of globalism, can be read as the ideological effect of globalization itself. This effect renders globalization as an omnipresent yet ungraspable structure and causes the misrecognition of globalization's articulations. Theories of globalization work against this to locate globalization in its material sites in order to resist or deflect it. Saskia Sassen finds globalization materializing in the control sites of global cities; Neil Smith places the effects of globalism within urban textures and the shape of cities; David Harvey locates globalization in its reformations of the geographical landscape. ----95----

Andrews, in his work within the field of political science on the world system, materializes globalization in the descending articulation of the nation-state, domestic and foreign polices and the national citizen subject. The "proximate target" of the self is therefore not a stand-in or convenient silhouette to blast at, but one of the articulated sites where globalization materializes in its denseness. Andrews' Bildungsroman traces a path of geopolitical and geocultural articulation from outer space (Sputnik) to the national subject (himself?) in which global and Cold War contradictions, intentions and ironies are embedded. Literally you are your nation's foreign policies. For the U.S.'s Cold War policies and the "Space Race" to have dominance in the technoscape and mediascape, and as part of the positions war of the nation-state in the world system, a national scholarship was set up. The scholarship, set up to vault the U.S. ahead of the Soviets, ends up in the hands of a student who spends his funded time "thinking about neo-marxist theories of capitalism, and imperialism." I think two aspects of Andrews' poetics are at work here. One is an articulatory poetics which joins cause and effect, policy and subjectivity, national and geopolitical—a poetics which doesn't allow capitalism to make the nouns and then burn the connection. Andrews' impulse in this is shared by another "totalizer," Fredric Jameson, who also looks for a "cognitive mapping" of one's place within the world system and the geopolitical aesthetic. Another aspect is a humourous (and not bitter) irony: the person who received the NDEA grant spent his time thinking about neo-marxist theories and imperialism, likely U.S. imperialism. That the end of irony was recently proclaimed by the dominant media in the U.S. in the week following the attack on the World Trade Center shows its political function is not underestimated there. This semantic content points to folds within globalization, within the total that Andrews looks to grasp, where agency can do its sneaky work of nonaccommodation. Rather than attempt to dislink from certain bad relations in an attempt to get to a spacialized aesthetic outside, an articulatory cultural practice attempts to articulate links where they are not immediately evident or where they are obscured through ideology. This is the cognitive function of articulation that Stuart Hall identifies. It is also a counter or reaction to the discourse of globalism as it conjures itself in the cultural. Notes 1

The specific echo here is to Bob Perelman. In "Person," Perelman provides an apt description of ideology as such and the relations of production in globalization: "[. . . ] blizzards of chance down upon the fountain of youth / all without a verb / because capitalism makes the nouns / and burns the con96--------

nections." (First World, 51). This is a productive metaphor of "textualizing the world" which foregrounds language within the production of the social. This is also a description which aligns with the role I identify for the cultural within globalization: if capitalism burns the connections, an articulatory poetics points to the ashes. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature. Vol. One. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Andrews, Bruce. "The Domestic Content of International Desire." International Organization 38.2 (Spring 1984): 321-27. I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). New American Poetry Series 11. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992. Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna: 1919-1934. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Stuart. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and KuanHsing Chen. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Jameson, Fredric. "Cognitive Mapping." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-56. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1987. —. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. Phronesis Series. London: Verso, 1990. Perelman, Bob. The First World. New York: Roof Books, 1986. —. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: The New Press, 1998. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 1987. Sklair, Leslie. "Social Movements and Global Capitalism." The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 291-311. Smith, Neil. "New Globalism, New Urbanism: Uneven Development in the 21st Century." Working Papers in Local Governance and Democracy . 99/2: 414. ----97-----

Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically The misery of millionaires shows it is a classless society. It's harder to be happy geopolitically so new restaurants are reviewed quickly before they close. "Strange to" remember or reach a point past when I had more nouns in my life than pronouns but that's just capitalism's way of saying "I hear you knocking, but you can't come in." So stranger still that there has not been an immediate poll to polarize positions. But here I merely talk to myself as if all is textual, as if I am a lyricist of late capitalism walking back into the streets of a city fixed at a fin de siecle in the hands of inevitability and the gloomy vision of cultural analysis (industry) and anachronistic nation-states (stoops) backed up by all the lovely possible positions we can come to understand (slackened out). I now address the "bifurcation of space" as the world is anew in old relation, which drops like a half-sack of part-time jobs into your lap (did I mention that it is an awful world and pleasures are few and hard to talk to?) Dipping into the notebooks of the past, where firm beliefs are up for loan (loam) or are an approach to products (formerly "things"), tear ducts taped up and wind whipped. All week saints die ----98----

which will help Elton John and the flower industry of Tenerife. Dad, the car is screaming in an uncanny return of cams as if I can feel the sizzle of metal of short on top, long on the back. I've arranged a clean modernist space to work in with the addition of French plastic furniture. It's uneven development without the human edge: you can't ask so don't ask. Suharto pepper spray competition (his son's on the run). Still planes rise and merge, slide down corridors of nonplaces to natural unemployment levels slaking generational career expectations (slacker) across borders through which people pour (the politics of water). The trade irritant of oysters (culture), an Expo, world-class and huckster hoopla penetrated by a pencil. Balanced by practical fanny packs for mini-van nights on the highway to bilingual roadsigns. Don't Hilfiger my hegemony. Drippy pavilion paved with anvils and the anger of all the urbanists bundled into a bundle of broken previous "textures" and the good life opposition sticky gooey stuff of living alzheimers. Come feel the malice as town planning bursts from a psychopathology of a mayor ----99 99----

in the discourse of dimes. Don't spit from the viewing platform for heroes. I take that as an insult to my own brand of hostile stupidity that I have bred in the petri dish of anxieties cut free for economic determinism—you vulgar glaring rung nudger! Now that Algeria alters France's social space. Writing can no longer be adult wet ones as it was once so easy to please with pines. Let's go Toronto Jumbotron! (a nation mourns, a city is supersized). To placate a deeper description a bitterness shared between friends (hosed over after) carried through the years patched up through emerging technology and plummeting long distance rates. It's an aching slow burn why " deficits are unethical" and surplus is celebrated not celibate—but better that it's batter up when the stocks are down. But a worn (warm) swarm cuts the last limp into eligibility and ligit mimicry cries out of a pout. Reach out and salt the wound—that's what corporate good neighbours are for! A little bit country a little bit button-down (whose kind of town). Dear dreaded enemies powerful neighbours, cultural buddies, product knock-offs in whose house I dwell, send the cheque in Euros or I'll kill myself and then slash your tires chronologically to counter gestures down the wing into a neutral space trap (neural). Never ----100----

trust the driver—he's drunk or power blind like a pig with pork. The human sparkplug of radical civic engineering requests a pluralism (team logos). Applause in the manuscript for Fidel's 1979 "new world international economic order" pre-embargo speech. Now the patriotic right has taken over. Even the "radicality" of shopping anti-freeze is sweeter than wine (and now I live there!). How whales "make their living." Strip mall bricolage logic is travelling culture (refuted in subsequent essays). I'm trying to work against (within) how this city (boom) humbles humans as ornamentation (honks, yaps, moulds, jibes, whines, bludgeons, hail storms, awful architecture). Lowest per capita education spending gets you more "liberal" gun laws. Carried like eggs in your wallet. Where can we get an Ireland? In the tension between universalism and particularism there's an impulse to buy not sell. Real relations hover over workers' gloves on stones of Expos inflated in Osaka. Work is done as if by itself and returns as something alien: imagine saying, I made that toilet paper! "Skateboarders are people too!" Looking good! The song now becomes beautiful as determinations move toward blunted bans

— 101 —

on foot-activated shrapnel. How is this "my world" any more than the typeface of the Boston Pizza logo (mimetic) or the eggman (realism) of Humpty's Family Restaurant? Is it because I hate you that I think of you? Are pronouns rude or just unfair? The alleys (elegies) filled with crappy cars, a rusted out Monte Carlo with Cragar mags, mattresses, the imprint of a dumpster burnt into the dirt, a Civic on blocks, that's entertainment of the ink fading into the blue, a watery murk on the door of a Ford F150 stuck in the historic sand of necessity (Mr. Majestyk). In the summit for funds, grassroots juvenile detention camps to supplement the tourist economy like leakage or trickle-down to lower (the affluent society!). Good design! Upper-case me dot so I can get "the fuck out of this town" via pavement and crooked rain. I'm doing a total Yeltsin to intercept this broadcast for a message from my liver, from a modernism when bodies could talk and say something like "the age of." With air conditioning $298 a month and a pack of Gauloises. Memorial police helicopter thumps. Third International Brotherhood of Grinders. Now that an Algerian-born footballer alters France's cultural space he has become — 102 —

French! Boom, a town amongst "jittery Asian markets" as "Russia unravels" correlated with the return of "cronyism" and classic cocktails: rusty nail, manhattan, whisky sour, and the social acceptance of the crantini. Clean sightlines, bauhaus bathrooms. Korea (which one) is tricky. The Duma is acceptable. Currency, it cancels us. I'm harping, I'm thematic, hit me with a study guide! Go gothic! The ads are compelling in that they speak to me. Affairs (flairs) of men like he is drunk on the power of potatoes (when I say "potato," I mean "vodka," when I say "vodka" I mean "fictive ethnicities"). Is there now a place for outrage, a glaze for lags, a flag for flack? Distinguish (extinguish) ourselves on the world stage imperative from the faceoff. Bullies, we need you now (marxist funk). World service summaries tool each day to awake bullish or bound to unseen forces that, to quote the poet, linger like liquor on the breath of the portrayal of former Soviet leaders. That said, join me in front of the cold screen for hot media as "the tip of the iceberg" from "Teenage Tina." Transient "cultural workers" reunite on ice. In this sweaty sexualized struggle of the global and the local where discounts are deeper elsewhere — 103 —

dialects dial in in summary mode and architecture answers. Which may ask can we really know all this relativity or even the Swiss? "Speedskaters of former Yugoslavia unite under the flag of fetishwear for return of the repossessed post-NATO realignment lines combined with panic-attack currency kebabs" is the kind of sentence I am thinking about. From the excesses of my youth to the excuses of both, to free-floating formal quotations so little moments of appropriated pleasure are nowhere near enough to be filled with alarm of life lived to max capacity that others recognize where democracy dwells demos of singular stand-ins. In these internationalist moments I open my sleek modernist arms to you as a gesture of howdy that you don't have to leave the house for as long as the goods (spackle, salt salsa, concrete poetry video clips, particular olive oil, bootleg Chinese CDs that threaten an emerging market, preselected wine delivery, halogen bulbs, tansy buttons) pure products gone goofy on behalf of world citizens fully represented and ready to go with interventionalist billboard projects. When the world intrudes on you is it "the world" or the sharp shapes of early determinants — 104 —

mom's refusal, dad's approval or vice versa with the kindly or harsh grandmother, summers in nature and urban winters then on to your studies duties classical philosophy (music) arise now as "key" negotiating points in the contract (contact) of "all that is you" interiorized and made material in labour. My friends, my endorphins. I'm drying out, help me to Hyundai out a website such as "Sven's Canada Page" or "Opel Manta Through History." At last (least) that's a surplus self-worth you could spread around. My grandmother's vodka pneumonia is settler literature curriculum reevaluation and immigration is narrative's unmoored rumours of more. Getting beaten with a long rubber hose is an innovation of flexi-post Fordism. Jerk! Chicken! These missed moments of capitalism like a detective novel for textual genitals. Or better, is he drunk or just a business man with plural futures? (Paid Plaid) Said the new human mayoral candidate to the megacity. Cuban pajamas in Walmart make me bring it on home in that pick-up (purple and mine because he died). What makes you think you can behave like the sole superpower? To vote, think only of yourself — 105 —

in relation to yourself, others are fucked so fuck them (also helpful for the workplace). But tomorrow is a new day of entry-level middle-brow appreciation formerly called "culture" now a.k.a. "polish my pistons loser." And the return of quiz shows. Rambo 1: First Blood was filmed in the small B.C. town where my grandparents farmed rocks and bootlegged fish, now I live in the nation-state origin of Arnold Schwarzenegger, although I can't support his presidency. Hipster pumps and corporate humps. Exaggerated American leisure, detonated tonalities ting a roti (etceteras). The leading wedge of baby strollers and the barge of twin bundles. I have dwelt in the felt of feelings and felt the weight of dwelling, now the blight of bleakness is less than the atonal noodlings of a Korg or Moog which spring into melody often "surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions." Is it the rub of culture that blisters or just the newfound possibilities of ticks and ties and DJ kicks when it gets so easy to universalize? (fly flicked into keyboard, "heart burst in the back of a taxi.") My own nationalist thought is flooded with diodes and odes at odd with the complex bracketed connectivity vital — 106 —

extensions sent to futuristic cities of bubbles, globes, and domes hotwaxed to our decks. My journey wearies me thus I dock in your city to take provisions of new music, books and clothes before I move on to lands as yet untapped with the timelessness of Cat Stevens (circa Harold and Maude) and with the sadness of architects who watch homes built without them.

— 107 —

Tess Fragoulis Damsel in Da Dress When I was asked to write a piece outlining my poetics, I found myself unusually unable to put anything down on paper. It was as if I was either entirely resistant to the idea of defining my poetics or I just did not understand the question. Like a bad student, I let the first deadline pass, made my apologies and silently hoped that the whole issue would disappear. But a serious proposal, unanswered, can linger for a long time, especially when an unfazed editor keeps sending you polite and cheerful reminders of your commitment. I thought up various ways to approach the subject. I began a semi-lucid essay that outlined the possible reasons for my resistance, which eventually (d)evolved into a list of all the reasons—good and bad—that I write, including love, play, escape, vengeance and seduction. I then decided that a piece describing the development of my musical taste, from KISS to Greek hashish songs of the 20s, would be more relevant to my poetics than any serious discussion of literary influences and theories. Unfortunately, the dram of inspiration I needed to begin just never seemed to come. (OK, it came once, after a late night walk in the park with my dog, but I was feeling lazy and I just let it go.) So what I'm finally submitting is the conceptual art version of my poetics: it represents something other than what it is. And if you use your imagination, perhaps you will glimpse my poetics, like a flash of cloud-to-ground lightning, out of the corner of your eye. Or if you're very lucky, you might even be struck.

In the dream I am dressed as a Victorian lady: long white frock with high collar, hair rolled up around my ears, and big hat. I don't know the reason why. Maybe I'm from that era and have gotten lost in time, maybe I've been thrown out of a period costume party for lewdness, or maybe I've finally taken my love for vintage clothing too far. This is not important. I must be on a highway, though there is no indication of this visually—no empty, yellowing fields, no stretch of road, no traffic whizzing by—because the next thing I know is that I've hitched a ride on a truck, and not just any truck. This one is big and bright and filled with pinball machines flashing girlie pictures on the boards, as well as other anachronistic games, both from the point of view of my Victorianess and from this present retelling. The driver is a member of the Hell's Angels, at least that's what he looks like, and if that's what I imagine him to be, then that's what he is. Carl Jung, I think, — 108 —

would agree. Who else but an unshaven denizen of the underworld would be driving around with a truck full of pinball machines? For all I know the machines are stolen. The driver—let's call him Bubba—does not comment on my attire one way or another. This may indicate either that he is a typical male and has just not noticed, or that he is on drugs and thinks he's hallucinating. I sit beside him in the cab, though the scene where I lifted my skirts and hoisted myself up onto the stained, brown leatherette, is missing. One minute I am looking at the girlie pinball machines, the next minute I'm in the cab with Bubba and we are on the tracks of a rollercoaster. How we got onto the rollercoaster, not to mention how we got the truck through the gates of the amusement park, is also a mystery. Though if you think about it for a second, a truck full of pinball machines may very well have been on its way to an amusement park, where perhaps through some fraternal relationship between the Hell's Angels and the Carnie's union, Bubba gets to ride the rails for free. I watch us negotiating the wooden coaster from inside the cab, the tracks sloping up and down in front of us, looking too frail and narrow to support the truck for much longer. Then something happens. Once again, this scene is missing, but my conjecture is that at a sharp curve the truck fell off the rails and we, Bubba and I, managed superhero or sleuth-like to jump out before the mass of steel fell to the ground, killing several of the implied amusement park visitors (and perhaps one or two employees) before bursting into flames, the bells of the mangled pinball machines screaming, "Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!" Because now there is no truck on the coaster and we are standing at the top, looking down and wondering what to do. If there is a possible way to walk down the steep bank in a long skirt, pointy boots, and a corset, it doesn't occur to me, and if you ask me how I fell, I do not have an answer to that question either. A minor earth tremor or a blast of wind might have rocked the wooden coaster, causing me to lose my balance, while Bubba, who does not turn out to be such a bad guy after all, caught me with one arm. There I am, suspended in mid-air, petticoats ruffling in the breeze, saved temporarily from certain death. I was going to initially claim that both Bubba and I fell, hence the story about earthquakes and strong winds. But it was just me who stumbled, my dainty Victorian boot possibly getting stuck between a slat on the tracks. And it is because I fell that Bubba fell while trying to rescue me, his "damsel in da dress." Then by some deft movement that took place when no one was looking, I grab onto the scaffolding, and now / hold onto Bubba's arm, and his life is in my hands. Bubba is at least two and a half times my weight (not just anyone can push pinball machines around all day), and I feel my arm getting weaker and weaker, my will to keep holding being defeated by my physical pain, — 109 —

which is why people will say anything when they're being tortured or are on the verge of certain death. But neither Bubba nor I are talking. He is not admitting his name is Myron and that he still wets his bed during thunderstorms, and I'm not admitting that part of me is considering dropping him because I can, or because I'd rather save myself than some mama's boy with a pot-belly who needs a tattoo of a skull with a knife between its teeth to feel like a man. I let go. Bubba falls to the ground but does not die. We were closer to earth than I imagined, a short jump away. I too land safely, but what we do next, I can't say. Maybe our mutual near-death experience took us beyond appearances and into the soul of humanity, bonding us for life. More likely he called me a jinx and I called him an asshole for driving on the rollercoaster in the first place, and after we each gulped the dram of whiskey the amusement park manager gave us for our nerves, we walked down the highway in opposite directions and never looked back. But this is not definite. Due to some outside noise that woke me prematurely, this story remains unfinished, and the outcome (despite my suggestions) is left totally in the hands of the reader. Which, in a way, is like going to a shrink who never gives you the answers you've paid for, but instead just rephrases your questions: "Well what do you make of the Victorian dress, the biker, and the roller coaster? What do you think they all mean?" If I knew, I would never have asked the questions, and if I know, I'm not telling you.

— 110 —

Soul Man "You need thirty thousand dollars to buy someone's soul," the skinny man in the powder blue tuxedo and pink ruffled shirt announced as he downed his third martini and tossed the glass over his shoulder. "I should know," he told the bum sitting next to him at the bar, then showed him his empty pockets. "I bought five souls today, so how's about buying this old devil a drink, buddy?" "Show me the souls first," the bum demanded. He was looking for a way to turn this conversation to his favour, and what his own pockets contained had even less value than emptiness. There were things in there people would pay to get rid of. But he wouldn't mind seeing a soul. He thought it might look like a piece of chewing gum, all pliable, soft and pastel coloured, and smelling of mint. Like the soul man. He smelled of mint, though it might have been stale Aqua Velva. He was moving in on the bum, mouth open wide as a whale's, ready to swallow him. The bum backed away, inserted his thumb into his mouth, and two other fingers up his nostrils. "What'cha moving away from?" the soul man slurred, then opened his mouth even wider. The bum saw seven gold fillings, black tonsils, and the curve at the base of his throat that sloped into the darkness of his body. "Look," he said with his mouth still open, but it came out sounding like, "oohk" (more seal than whale thought the bum and was suddenly less frightened). "Ehr ing ere. I allod en." The bum didn't understand the words, but a small motion at the back of the soul man's throat caught his eye, and he was compelled to lean in closer, to see what it was. There was something in there, transparent and light, like a detached spider web floating around in the man's mouth. "Man, you've got spiders. You'd think the booze would kill 'em." The bum wiped his fingers on his pant leg. "Oohk oser," he insisted and the bum felt unable to resist. The soul man's breath didn't smell of martinis, the bum noted, nor of smoke that had anything to do with cigarettes or even the fat, black cigar that was sticking out of his tuxedo pocket. It smelled like plastic on a campfire in there, or like a crematorium. The bum had an intimate knowledge of crematoria; he slept in an alleyway behind one because its brick wall was always warm, winter or summer. Sometimes in the summer, it almost sizzled. "Smells like death in there," he said to the soul man, who nodded and reached into his jacket, producing a pale green business card with red fancy lettering that spelled "Hubert Devil" and nothing else. The bum looked at the card, then back at the man. "Hubert, you smell like a funeral parlour." Hubert winked at the bum, popped a complimentary pastel mint into his mouth and finally closed it. — in —

"What do you think souls smell like, roses?" He gave the bum an incredulous look. "No, my friend, sometimes they smell of piss, sometimes of feet, and sometimes of candy apples, though I don't get a lot of those. It depends how old they are, and how many sins they've accumulated." He signalled the barkeep for another drink, but didn't offer one to the bum. "What about confession?" "Doesn't work." Hubert took a swig of his drink, swallowed the olive without chewing. The bum watched it travel down his throat whole. "I'll bet your soul smells like armpits." The bum made a face, sniffed himself. "No man, Hubert. Those are my armpits. Haven't had a bath in a week. Afraid I'll catch cold if I give up all my germs. You know what they say—the devil you know..." "And what would you like to know, my dear chap?" Hubert had suddenly developed a British accent, but it sounded fake to the bum, who had been to England during the war. "I'd like to know if he gets laid from time to time." "From time to time," Hubert echoed, but the bum was not sure if this was actually an answer. "And I'd like to know if there's no beer in heaven, can you get a pint in hell?" "Certainly," Hubert replied, indignant. "But it's piss warm," he mumbled under his breath. The bum heard and made a disappointed face. "It's martinis we don't have, much to my chagrin." Now he sounded French as Pepe le Pew. The bum rolled his eyes. "We can't get the olives. They just shrivel down to their pits. It's a large price to pay for martini drinkers, but they don't call it hell for nothing." The bum sucked the salt off a bar peanut then spat it out, poked through the ashtray for a promising butt. "So where exactly do you find these souls?" He had nothing better to do and it was cold outside. Maybe if he showed some real interest, he might get a beer, or at least the dregs of a beer out of this. What would he do with $30,000 anyway? Hubert smiled and brought the tips of his fingers together in front of his face. "They always find me, my good man. Anyone who talks to me, who engages, is in his heart of hearts ready to sell his soul." "No way, not me, buddy. Couldn't play harmonica without my soul." He pulled out an old rusted harmonica from his filthy jacket and blew a note that sounded like a snotty nose. "You can't play it now, friend," Hubert pointed out, his voice and eyes sympathetic. (louche, the bartender wanted to say, but it came out as touchdown! and the dyed blonde woman he'd settled on taking home after his shift gathered her — 112 —

purse and the tip she had left him and walked out into the crisp and bright January afternoon. This small drama was not taken in by Hubert or the bum, who were otherwise occupied). "Think about it while I go to the can. There's $30,000 in it for you, and a beer." The bum sat up straight and smiled at Hubert for the first time. "Barkeep, pour my good friend a beer." Hubert hopped off his barstool. He was a lot shorter than the bum imagined he would be. Long in the torso, short in the legs, like a corgi. His feet must not have even reached the middle rungs of the stool. "I thought you were broke," the bum yelled after Hubert, who was limping towards the washrooms, stomping his left foot occasionally as if it were asleep. "Always more where that came from. I shit gold, like the golden goose." He gave the bum a thumbs up signal, then disappeared behind the door marked "Ladies." "He certainly has a high opinion of himself," the bum told the barkeep, who just shrugged. He had heard many more absurd conversations in his time. No one told any form of the truth in hotel bars. Why bother? "Sante," he said and pushed a frosty pint across the wooden surface of the bar. The bum hesitated, then wrapped his dirty hands around it. If he did not hurry, the wall outside the crematorium would be lined with those crazy kids with the spiky green hair who kept trying to wipe down his glasses. He downed his beer in one long and grateful gulp, and did not wait for Hubert to return with his bag full of shit or gold.

— 113 —

Michael Holmes Notes Towards an Operational Poetics 1 Beowulf is the first timeless English poem of the first millennium, CE. DeLillo's Underworld is the last of the second. (They're remarkably similar.)

Fake dog shit, Kubrick's 2001, "London Calling" by The Clash, the Broadstreet Bullies of 1973-74, processed cheese food, and Frida Kahlo's pinioning, blueslate New York and Dorothy Hale (yes, the sanguine text is Spanish, but the paint's as American as Lucky Strikes and "La Vida Loca") are among many, recent, others. 2

The great, successful experiments of modernism—whether surreal, symbolist, imagist, or bibliomaniacally fragmented in mock epic ruination—are the screaming heebie-jeebies you get from lyrical overexposure. (Who says psychosomatic illnesses aren't "real?") Postmodernism, then, is pure nostalgia: a good long sulk for iconoclasts with nothing new to tear down. (At the very least the great experiments of modernism enjoyed a modicum of success, a soupgon of cultural relevance. What's porno done for you lately?) 3

In the lyric, somewhere, is poetry's redemption. 4

Ubu-like, as a contemporary simile, is ridiculous and a bit sad. The idea of good or important Dada-influenced art created any time after the start of the Second World War is both ridiculous and offensive. 5

Canadian poetry has succeeded in minutiae, character, and redress. Rare funny bits have been good. The "sick," too. Our best poets have been reviled and, worse, ignored. Our critics are sometimes cruel, sometimes wilfully ignorant, sometimes inexplicably bitter. — 114 —

Often they're all three. (These are the reviewers of poetry who get to write for newspapers.) May God have mercy on our souls. 6

Canadian poetry has failed. As experiment. And as dominant, popular product. Myriad failures there, of foresight and tone. Many of our prize-winning poets have yet to write their first poem. Too many books of poetry have been published, both generally, and by individuals. (I'm sorry, but who said it should be fair?) Stop. (You know who you are.) Before it's too late. Good poets might not reside in each of the provinces and territories. That's okay, there's probably not a decent poet in each of the fifty states, either. Things are worse over in the fiction camp. Complacent, overfed, slow: there, there's hype to believe. 7

For Christ's sake, learn the difference between rhythm and metre. Consider form. And what about rhyme? Huh? What about it? Only a handful of Canadians know the first thing about poetry. Sadly, most of them aren't poets. Go back to basics, always. Read first. Run like hell from workshops, MFAs, Banff. (When your spouse says they're going to Alberta to improve their writing what they're really saying is, "Honey, I'm not satisfied; I'm going to have an affair.") Live some. Write last and as little as you can. Getting better is as possible as getting worse is inevitable.

— 115 —

from Centences 12

Alice Cooper is choking 111 put pennies on your eyes— creepy comfort to his child's falsetto—and as Alice cries Steven, so does his friend Steve Henderson, foetal, on Donna's parent's living room floor; tough, and almost seventeen, the horror's too much, even for Steve, after so much beer, smoke and windowpane—it's like Welcome To My Nightmare just broke over him how the storm's breaking outside, howling, jagged crystal funnels of snow swallowing him whole: thank Christ this all changes soon; spinning, immaculate, it's sad-embarrassing, he thinks and bends, fingers strobing over stylus, needing to hear how it ends. 13

Ninety-three years, sixty known only in between fits, wheezing laughter that propelled stories with juiced flecks of White Owl skin and eyes that were always dancing blue fire—he's been thinking about the time his grandfather gave him, that after every intervention he remembers so few hours he could store it all on one video cassette, and that each scene would be, essentially, the same—magical, that man, to him: always sitting close, listening, on the couch, or a lawn-chair, or fishing, he'd receive intricate histories of irreverence and sprawl, of his city and its disappeared, pulsing within it all.

— 116 —

14

Less a day: he understands, now, how cruel it is to take away something definitive and concrete; that twenty-four hours is an eternity of uncertainty an instability as terrifying as it is seemingly insignificant when years are spent splitting hairs with false hope, like a forgiven day means time might pass more gracefully though the sentencing we accept is not ours, ultimately, to control; push back the head and a Fez pops out, another springs up in line—a few heirs to his grandfather's sad estate are like that—to wait their time; he wants more, not less, a clean slate. 15

It began decades earlier—something in the frail grey fall of full, perfect hair; the responsibility a boy feels, rapture, when he believes he's the only one listening—with measured breaths and memorization, as if the search for judicious summation, fitting last words, must amount to something more than his memory, something final; but he's making no promises now—all he can defend himself with is a fear of closure— because the elegy he began composing while the man assured him it was premature, if not unnecessary, resists any conclusion that does not assume he was more capacious than this.

— 117 —

Adeena Karasick Ambit. Ardour. Orders: A Poetics ofPolymedial Pasties Huddled in the shadow of these syllables, dwells the troubled grammer of so many sentences

I Tucked in torque wick slick serial surfaces like chic smut fluff my foofie fois glas grammars flummoxed in the festering folly. And, i zip my salience sexing my shimmy-shimmy sassy flagrance flounced with rotting fissures / in aplomb puffery, stigmata fat lattice souflee riffin' in the filly fallow filters, famine laminate filaments,

in the neolyric acrylic frill fandango -

ii And as i flex my raspy sass silicates my heaving lexicon like giblet niblets awash with wanting — not the sentence

— 118 —

as the base unit of construction but seeping strictures swaddled in a caesural whirl of molecular synnexes, annexes, a nexus flexin' in a dactylic dictic marinated with a shmear of supple asphodel. My aesthete thickens singin' fee fie fiddly i yo mama 'cause i love tnatshaggy bag syntax, frilly zyzygies embossed with sumptuous punctuates like sulferous dust, the dried blood of glutted glub flubbery which flips out. So, i say: Lick my finial tickler lacquered in the blurring errata of adagio flange festina and, feel my cantabile billowing in the blustering ballast as my atelier alia dips into heaving debris — twirlin' in the vestige of a hyperousia hard-ass louchely luna hoola groove in integument angles, zipless variance which lolls sloppy in my giddy glibly.

Ill

And, as hunger thrums sumptuous in the flushed pulse of — 119 —

swollen hoops croon in the burnished glimmer, my granular slants rouse in the slacken ashes shrouded in spurious lips, rotting diction which throbs in the bobbing stamina laminates / and the buxum lust of throaty fetters.

So, when my C-osi fan iutti fantl&iigo /

angles in the spurious glut of hybrid grid riddled in syntagma magma my frosted syntax sucks in knotted tuft puffery in the flux of fat lustre —

IV

And, as this cathectic fetching frets in the giddy flotsam flecked in the flexed nexus of bruised qualms pursed in the hegemony of labial maybes

i say suck it up in the tic tac torque of pang twang twitter languid luge swagged by flexible accessories, in the succulent — 120 —

span, the sopping fraught folly which ribbons my interstices

"cause i take my momentita frita,

wrapped in a twisted grammer rammed in the stippled polish of puckered pronouns while my girly whippet wrought in flapping lust, languishing in the sultry luxe of sinuous rigour.

V

So, gnawing in the tutu soubrette trimmed with geflugel hooligan glitzy kiss-kiss prolix,

wliy dom t you slip info something more complex

like the glis. glas glassary rasps lisped in disjunctive measures mounting in the throbbing impetus of mucilage, fuselage

— 121 —

furrowed fractures, sucking absences constructed through both aleatoric and deterministic methods—an overlapping hybrid and extendible terrain of plump pickin's pasted as an inter-intentional porous praximile / lewdly nuanced like a blousy blow text foaming in fussy clusters

And when i appear as a heterog/ossi/ and overproduced fontophiliac, a flurry of probity strobes, in the frilly pellicule of strappable meaning,

rnij moistened tinctures weave the suave gauze

(of saucy swagger aggregates), and flutter in a flageolet pageant flanged with rubbing florets in the glam laminate, animate contaminants, saluting the flimflam flummox

of

metriculous feryour

VI

So, cosy up to my hexasticha pastiche postulate, plump — 122 —

suckling, 'cause my glossolalic flailing matrix an aleatora furora, febrile sombre bombast, & my intransigent antinomian milly-millenarian mystically loving you through a lingering linguarum of a prissy precinct a sexy sinq a succinct, a decolette fret in the dusk flung seeping.

Hug my cumulative glottis collosus pro quo a-go-go for, there's a tempest in my bemoaned monad middling in the verbal effusion of this tic tac talkative tactility of tupped uppity fop toppling enscrypted in the pothery swamp of textualis, malice, solace, bolus, silos. So, don't talk to me of textual excess, lexical access / or feckless exits, just text me & milk my multeity in the parlance of sweet affliction chiselled in the sly benignity of cool-rooted fleur flagrance weltering in the succulent swill of musty punctures like wrinkled variants, rollicking in the coif fed sleek clamour of decorous hysteria. — 123 —

VII

For, in a heuristic cystic vestigial still code, a coterie of haute calico iliac contours, i am not participating lately, in the language game of giving information, but in a yada-yada hoodoo you do campy go-go pop cultural vocative votives, motives mutants, my surface is disturbed and hums in labial abeyance, an epistemic interzone of pursed interstices. A purring surface of perky insertions

which gather in the horror / of an illegitimate idiom — a glossolalial malea of luscious scud scars; like a pixilate syntax in swank circuitry. My suffer spate unctuous ripped in the gossamer gloss of the shimmy chamois sharagano, the adage brioche cache which imprints itself (like a foment moment ferment torment) upon the lattice tain silica contours (counters), the kinky concourse of a relentless ipseity illeity allays and dwells in the secret tracings of all that is debased and spectral, mad and extravagant, palpable, painful and sometimes hardly legible. And, as i bear witness to,

— 124 —

a hoochie koochy fete sweat, elaborate syllabary which turns and returns as a tourniquet torque torrents into

a poetics of tingly singlets which DOESN'T limit itself to systemic restrictions DOESN'T assume any onto-theological or consumerist notions of Truth, Testimony, Transparency — a transcendent empira-lyrical ambition towards a non-reciprocal, evaluative centrality,

But, in the curly swirly sling-back hurlin' syllogistic slimy-vinyl stingy nohow; in the fussy flourish with all that's pulpy and monstrous itching in the stubbled splotch slit-brackish fracas of rhetorical floral, i worship each letter, each erratic & arbitrary, hideous, misshapen and intolerable syllable a-go-go and the prayer of these words and bind myself to the interval of the palimpsest and the obligations contracted by that, i remain faithful to every graphematic matrix, each prix fixe pixi prolix -

—12^—

soakable vocables glistening in a sticlcy dickey tuktuk dichtung tongue suck spurs, a locus of imbrogliotic static and the isosceles sauce of sissy fit surfaces, the solace somnambulance of a sassy fascicle dripping

in the dissimulated secret of yr restant flaunt flambe / mamby pamby ambient mycelium swell

WHICH ASSAULTS THE POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL NORMS AS WELL AS PERSONAL AND SOCIETAL ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE SYSTEMS AND THEIR USAGE —

And frolics in a confluence of consignatory sonorities conjugated at the threshold of dissociation.

— 126 —

Catherine Kidd Happy the Ghost-Boy Could we with ink the ocean fill And were the sky of parchment made, Were ev'ry stalk on earth a quill And ev'ry man a scribe by trade, To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry, Nor could the scroll contain the whole Tho stretched from sky to sky. —Rabbi Mayer (Written on the wall of the mental institution in Germany where he died.) This is how the story goes. The squiggly lines in my mind, the ones my mother was certain were hysteria or something more sinister, gradually migrate like faraway geese heading south, down into my hands, where they perch and become restless. They slap their leather feet into the meat of my palms, and peck along the small bones of my fingers. I feel them ruffle and settle themselves. I see their footprints, and know them like the back of my hand, their webbed toes figured in bones on the back of my hand. I become extraordinarily conscious of my hands. I wring them, wring out diapers with them, rub ointment into their knuckles, which are red and cracked like udders. I hold baby Rose and her stuffed giraffe in them, pace the floor, stop suddenly and weep for all and no reasons. I am seduced by a goosedown comforter, but seek out a mummified storage closet instead, and start hauling out boxes. The back of the closet is full of giant insects, spindly broombugs and bucket-beetles, and a machine which cleans carpets with its million legs, and a plastic cocoon to wrap up my mother's head until it is dried and set. Finally I find it, the thing I didn't know I was looking for. That large black beetle of a typewriter my father used to tap out his god-words on, his weird little parables about leeches and what all else. I pull the typewriter out of the closet, then have to reach back into the mustiness to feel around for one of its feet, which has broken off. It is very surprising to find my father's old typewriter here at my mother's place. I don't understand why it's here, moldering in storage, instead of with my father. There comes a mute anger, that he'd be so pathetic as to leave his favorite thing behind. Similar to my mother's annoy — 127 —

ance at him for adopting so many three-legged hamsters. We never heard the end of that. Your father is one of those men who believes it's morally superior to have only three legs, even if you're supposed to have four, my mother would say. He seems to think handicaps indicate depth of character. That hamster is no' handicapped, my father would defend, it is merely challenged. If a thing which is missing is exchanged for a thing which resembles it minutely, it is unlikely that most people will notice the switch. This was why my brother Gavin believed our parents were actually aliens, and why every hamster who ever lived at the house on Dormier street had only three legs. Because the first one had only three legs. But I always had to wonder how my father managed to corner the market on three-legged hamsters. Discovering that he had left his typewriter behind, though, I did feel a bit of my mother's exasperation. Her fury that he had found so much beauty in challenging situations, or especially hopeless ones. Not taking his typewriter with him, as parting gestures go, was a pretty hopeless one. It was even more hopeless than not leaving any good-bye note. As though there were something very noble about leaving behind the one thing which embodies your whole dream plan, my father's highest aspiration, his typewriter. Still, I wouldn't have gone through the whole storage closet looking for that spidery old machine, if I didn't half-expect to find it there. I wasn't sure whether this half-expectation was a form of disrespect or a form of understanding. People's expectations can cause dizziness if they are too high, but they are crushing when they are too low. People's expectations can be like second-hand snow suits, which don't fit you particularly well and are ugly, but sometimes you're forced to wear them anyhow. On the other hand, my father's typewriter could only be here at Salmon Court, if my mother had taken the trouble to bring it with her during the move. Instead of liquidating it, with the rest of my father's leftover personal effects, when she sold the house on Dormier Street. I am a bit surprised that she kept it. She never mentioned there being any typewriter at all at her place, obviously, since I was not to overstimulate my brain with things like words until I was quite quite well again. But back to the original hand, I wouldn't have found the typewriter at all, if my mother hadn't for some reason decided to keep it. My father had abandoned it, deliberately or not, then my mother had preserved it, deliberately or not. Then with some small deliberation it became compulsive to recycle it, the cumulate process calling in all other hands. So I am learning to type, Rose. Hands have their own memory, and are hopeful. They reach, they hover over keys trying to remember, they find their — 128 —

pace and scuttle along with purpose until they hit another glitch. But I notice there are certain words which my hands insist on misspelling. Mother, whenever my hands try to type it, always comes out mouther. And father, when I have cause to write it, comes out faither. The typewriter ribbon is bichromatic, bisected bilaterally in two colours of ink. I turn the spindles upside down and type in red, to see if this changes anything. Whether typing in red opens more direct channels to the heart of the matter. Matter, fodder. I set up the typewriter on a yellow milk crate, on the kitchen floor, in the faith that planting myself on the ground will help me connect with what everything is built upon, where everything finds its roots. I have to keep my mouth shut about reasonings like these, having learned that people don't so much care what private eccentricities you cultivate, but they do care if your reasons for cultivating them are too unironic. My mother assumed, for instance, that the row of drying apple cores on my bedroom windowsill was simple depressive messiness, until I told her that I planned to collect three hundred of them and plant an orchard some day. Now the row of apple cores is like a pentagram on my door, and my mother suddenly develops superstitions about every living thing in the house. There are suddenly more mothballs than I've ever seen in the hall closet, and my daughter Rose has a fortified yellow net over her crib, so no cats will steal her soul through her mouth. Mouther. Faither. Once it is warm, I move the milk crate outside, behind the trees a bit, so my mother can't see me as I watch her sitting and coddling Rose, and breathing in my daughter's breath. The milk crate makes harlequin patterns on the grass. The froth of spit bugs, and the furred helmets of tall grasses brush my bare legs. My little brother Gavin and I used to fight wars with those grasses, the ones whose heads could be struck off when you whipped them with another piece of the same type of grass. It had been a bit of shock to be holding forth your bobbing head, then suddenly be struck and left holding only the stem. The heads had snapped off so cleanly, like asparagus. Mouther, mother. Faither, father. U and I. Those are the extra letters, the ones my typing hands fill in as a joke on my two half-brains. Faith, the awareness that one's thoughts and activities participate in a pattern, perhaps even that meaning can be discovered, or invented, by paying attention to the pattern. Faith, like the rhythm of pulse, or the sound of my father rowing back and forth on his rickety rowing machine in the basement. Pull, release. Mouth, an aperture, a simian crease. A dragon's cave where stalactites and stalagmites grind themselves in sleep. The dragon-tongue lies coiled, licks fire, spits sparks. It plays with the place where a tooth is loose, the chink in her armour. Mouth, the eventual gateway of utterance. Faith, the rhythm of pulse sustained. — 129 —

[The appearance of patterns is inevitable. Patterns become visible insofar as we are conscious, but also seem to evolve insofar as we are not.] [Shut up, dum-dum head] A boy leaps back and forth over the yard, swooping past my yellow milk crate. He may be four or five, wearing a thick woolen balaclava despite the August heat. A hood of winter white, with windows for his eyes and mouth. His father has gone away to Los Angeles for the second time this month, while his cedar-haired mother is inside and sullen, her fingers working at macrame wall-hangings which resemble owls. She has been going to church lately I think, or somewhere else on Sunday mornings, with white stockings to her white pumps. Her boy dressed up in a corduroy blazer, and her two girls, Regan and Megan, in matching yellow frocks. Her boy, whose name is Happy, swoops about in his winter hat until his mind melts in rivulets behind his ears. Hey you, crazy fellow, I call to him from behind the trees. Why's that hood on your head? Parce que je suis un fantome, he calls, and swoops away behind the hedges. Ten minutes later he comes back with a jar. A masking tape label on the side of the jar bears his older sister's name, Megan, in black felt. There's a popsicle stick taped across the mouth of the jar, with a string dangling inside. It's a science experiment from his sisters' school. What begins as merely a jar of very salty water, is transformed into an elegant string of salt crystals, like impatient diamonds which don't cost anything. Happy the ghost-boy and I look at the crystals for a long time, all expanding time, sitting there on the grass. We put the crystals to our tongues to taste them, and he laughs at tasting salt. He laughs, just because he tastes something. It's good that your sister is learning about things like this at her school, I say, lying on my back in the grass, my eyes melting in warm rivulets behind my ears. It's so important to know about how things are formed, and how they change form, and how they do these things all by themselves. It's so important to pay close attention to things, I keep saying. Now I turn my head and look back toward the student housing unit, where I've been living with my mother since the birth of Rose, to see Mister-Mister the neighbour across the way with his permanent sprinkler fanning back and forth across his lawn. He is out today with a big box of salt, petrifying slugs in his rhubarb patch. They shrink like sore eyes, I've seen them. They die of — 130 —

dehydration. But if he lets them live, they eat his rhubarb. It's so important to pay attention to every single thing, I say to Happy the ghost-boy, who appears to take this as self-evident. Dit moi un histoire, he says. Do I even know any histoires? Well, there was that story my father once wrote me, about a giant leech and his two daughters, based on a peculiar Bible verse from the book of Proverbs. The horse-leech has two daughters, Give and Give. That was the original verse. In my father's version, the horse-leech sucks up the world until there is nothing left, then the daughters swim into his body through his ear, to restore the world to itself. But now I must keep rewriting his story again and again, giving thought and giving time. Finding that to give is to take, and vice versa. Versatile vice becoming vicariously virtuous, when giving and taking form one curve. The horse-leech has two daughters, I tell Happy, one being older than the other, who is younger relatively. The daughters both have the same name, and are governed by properties of self-similiarity, so that every limb which grows on one is mirrored in her sister. Their limbs become strong enough to break clutches, to flee and not look back. And they don't look back, they live to learn to not look back. They live in a cave with their father, and feed him a lot of wine. Their father once had a wife, who was their mother, but she had those eyes at the back of her head, so she couldn't help looking back. Then she was turned into a slug by Mister-Mister over there, sprinkling his box of salt. And she stands there to this day, she stands there still. Sont-elles mortes aussi, les deux filles? No, there was more, another part which came before the cave. Their father, the horse-leech, was visited by fairies, who came to warn him that MisterMister would soon drain the pond. So the horse-leech took his two daughters, Give and Give, and fled to the cave deep within the earth, from which position he consumed it. The whole earth, folding it back upon himself and swallowing all time. Then the two daughters, Give and Give, saw how the world was gone, folded in upon itself, soon to become a sparkling pixel and fade to black. And they understood it well, that the only hope of restoring the world to itself required some intimate communication with their father, some essential information, so that they could go forth and rewrite his story well. So they drugged him with a lot of holy water til he slept, then swam into their father's body through the cochlea of his ears, through sinusoidal spirals to his place of story-origin. They swam to the swamp at the bottom of his body and found his beating heart there. But they left his heart where it was, like a furnace in the basement. Instead, they brought back buckets of primordial — 131 —

mud, with which they made face-packs for themselves, then wrung the rest out and dried it to make paper. Then they built a paper boat, filled with paper animals, and set it asail. J'avais un bateau, moi, mais il est sombre, says Happy, dans les egouts. The other day they fitted baby Rose with a small pink hearing-machine inside her ear. It doesn't look so bad, you can't even see it unless you're looking for it. It is exactly that shade of dusty peach which used to be referred to as flesh tone, though no body's flesh is that colour. The same colour as that giant Barbie head I fell so madly in love with when I was seven. I used to dress up the head in a blue chiffon nightie, kiss its plastic lips, and dance pirouettes about the room with it, to music in my own head which the head could hear not at all. Here we go, sweetheart, I say when I insert the device into Rose's ear. Let's put your shrimp in your ear. Are you ready to wear your shrimp? Since the birth of Rose time has remained pregnant. Many times during the day it occurs to me, Shouldn't I be doing something? But I have been forbidden to do much of anything, even anything much to do with Rose, until I cease to manifest these symptoms of what appears to be essentially boredom. But looking inside, I am doing millions of tiny invisible things, imperceptible changes which must eventually yield some thing. The splitting of parts into new and independent entities, which form more of themselves, without conscious effort. Sometimes choices are conceived by a nudge from the outside, some penetration of the personal by the extra-personal. But other times they seem to begin inside, and by themselves, like parthenogenesis. I am surprised to find that perhaps choices are meant to be gentle. So I have secretly begun writing these letters to my daughter, in case I am not allowed to keep her, or in case she becomes unable to hear, or in case anything else happens. And I find that just about any house-cat or gum-boot or bus-stop or petting-zoo is able to mate with the private cells of a person who is writing, and conceive something. Which is exhausting, to be so vulnerable to fertilization by every single thing one sees. When every sense is a voluptuous organ drawing the world inside. It seems as though I've been pregnant for years, in some sense or another, but didn't get the metaphor until it came true literally. I remember my Great-Aunt Hilda teaching me how to blow eggs, the pinprick apertures she made in both big and little ends, so that the contents could be expelled like scrambled jazz from a saxophone. I must have conceived of myself as a human egg ever since. There seemed to be some fragile fault line which I always thought would rupture, somehow, if I didn't learn to hold things very cautiously inside. — 132 —

Or perhaps the world was just set up that way for little girls. In such a way that a sense of self-containment became something either too gelatinous, or too brittle. In such a way that it might either crack from lack of flexibility or be too porous, allowing a million willful little arguments to wriggle in, and alter the way a girl conceives of herself. She may learn very early in life that self-containment is something too easily ruptured from without, as though the whole big sky were a phantom-lover who flies through the night, ravishing dreams. Even dreams build up over time, like gathering cells, and finally something must come from them. Something must be brought to issue, after what seems like a lifetime of gathering material for the task. So what am I learning, by writing these letters to you, Rose? Sometimes whatever-it-is seems to stick like peanut butter to the roof of my mouth, not digested yet, not sunk to that visceral level where nourishment can actually be derived from it. Things newly learned ride about on high horses in the head, for a time, before they can finally descend to the heart where learning becomes sense, becomes of the senses. Perhaps by that point there is nothing more to say of them. But now these pink pills they pander make my memory slow as a slug, and I am tired. And uncertain what will be left of me, Rose, after you and these pages have become their own entities in the world, quite distinct yet not quite separate. It appears to be basically true that what you dream happens, but also true that you choose the meanings of your dreams. This may be true of memory, as well. There is the sphere of what-actually-happened, which is unrecordable because of its myriad possible interpretations, and so it becomes fictional. And then there is the other sphere, the fictional one, which is meant to stand in for what-actually-happened, which fiction then becomes real. What memory chooses to select becomes what is real, even when it contains only a few scraps of the original story, from a skewed perspective. What-actually-happened is a primordial swamp of possible stories. Natural selection favours certain single cells of memory to evolve and grow legs, creep from the primordial ooze, adapt themselves to the demands of survival in their habitat. Memory decides which parts of itself will be thread with the evolving story, and which parts will remain buried as fossil fuel.

—133—

Ryan Knighton PULP GIMP: A POETICS Mummy asks the young Lyric to turn off Speed Racer. You know how you asked about your dead daddy? A dim curiosity lights his face because the olden days look tasty on theme menus. You know, Planet Hollywood & The Hard Rock. Jackrabbit Slim's. Of course the young Lyric would rather watch Speed Racer than learn about nationalism, but Sgt. Coons is played by Christopher Walken, so the young Lyric listens more intently to him than the story. Cool uniform. Wanna be my dead daddy? Sgt. Coons bellyaches. From him the young Lyric learns the story of his father & grandfather is about doing one's duty to history, & doing it hard. He learns they died defining borders around Pappy's racial slurs, they died blind in the pit of economic subtexts, the flabby growth of capital & the marketplace, the arthritic nation state, & how he, this young Lyric, is the sole flat-topped offspring of that flat-topped heroism, that patriarchal charge, & how he, the young Lyric, is to be the guardian of a shitty watch retrieved from the asses of men. This means time crapped out some time ago. There's the set up. Now it's a question of cinematic form. Like all young Lyrics these images will come back to haunt him at the end of his line. That's his punchline. It's why the young Lyric will grow up from his flashback to be a boxer. His arms & legs grow firm. Some hair falls out, but the rest remains cropped close to that shining skull. Meathead's ready. Next scene: the older, contemporary Lyric wakes up & prepares to cash in. Gloved & robed, he thumps himself in the head a couple of times before the fight. A tender Lyric. Cut to motel. It's the morning after he beats the odds & he's going to make a clean getaway. What time is it, what year is it? He rummages for his old man's watch. Frustrated & unable to find it, the Lyric throws his usual tantrum & smashes the TV set thinking this will make him feel better &, more importantly, make his expression of feeling clearer to his frightened French girlfriend. It does, but, more annoyingly, it prevents her from watching the piston-screaming climax to The Losers. I'm sorry, baby. Viet Cong & Hell's Angels go on chewing the earth, the Lyric's old man's ashes kicked up under their motorcycle tires. Chopper, I mean. Choppers, choppin' up daddy-o. Cut to soundtrack: Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." According to treatments, the Lyric's character is such that he must make his feelings clear to everyone & make them believe his sincerity. Sincerity means you are "without wax," so his story shouldn't be mistaken for a wax museum with a pulse. Beside his feelings he stands like Vanna White with her hands on — 134 —

a vowel. Look, he says, & draws his hand along the edge of his feelings, look at the grandeur of my emotion, babycakes. They consider the grandeur of his emotion for a moment, then he apologizes to his girlfriend & notes, sincerely, it was his fault for not having illustrated the personal significance of the watch to her when she did all the packing & left it behind. So much personal significance. Close up on the Lyric's serious brow. Here comes the centre of gravity. Off to his abandoned Tex-Mex apartment the Lyric goes to retrieve his father's watch & all its private meaning. Be sure to confuse private meaning with history. Great personal risk is apparently involved in retrieving personal significance for the contemporary Lyric. But little does he know, among others, I'm hanging around, waiting just down the road. Not his hatchetman, not exactly. Enough Travoltas gunning for retrochic around here. The question is what would the Lyric's story be without a blind love interest, a dumb fetish, a grinning leather hangman? Cut to the seventies, off-screen & into another. I've been on set as The Gimp for over twenty-five years. You may have seen me on the porch that nasty summer by the river. Pig squeals in the woods. Someone raised me by the river Little Father Time with this banjo swinging between my legs. I was always there, gimped, a knot on the porch, swinging my banjo, playing with my time for you. My character persists in staging time's incest, an ominous inbred lust for a unified world's drooling & expressionless face. All helix-limbs & DNA, degenerative verse I am. Once I played a wicked duet with the men who developed our land into real estate & thought they could develop me out of there. But they didn't heed my limbs. Me & Zed & Maynard stayed long after the flood &, when the city grew up around us, we opened a pawnshop, waited, paid taxes, & waited some more. Zed traded his horse for Grace. We waited some more. & then, as the script promised from the beginning, the Lyric came looking for deliverance. In the back, by Russell's room, the boys strung me up. On hot afternoons Maynard sometimes let me loose for an hour to run around the parking lot, maybe grab a Twinkie & a Coke. Once he said to me, I say goddamn, you some ugly, boy! He said, you dunno if you're a comin' or a goin'! I was stretching my calves, leaning against the skater tagged wall. Well, that's just what betrayal looks like, isn't it, Maynard, you dope. Don't you fret, it's your turn soon enough. The banjo's gonna use up your body, use up your language, too. Just you wait. Whatch y'all mean by that? Maynard asked. O, Maynard! I lyricized, just look at me! It's melodramatic, I know, but this is Maynard, after all. Look, I said, time fucked me up, big time. You're its parasite, too, Maynard. It's a dogbite, Maynard, & it's coming for you, too. Uh huh. Yes he is. Then there's Zed. Whatch y'all talking about? Fresh from the butcher, a — 135 —

couple of thick pork chops swung from his clammy hand. Zed, do you think I'm the logic of development? Think about it, man. I'm unchecked growth, reproduction. Eros of the economy, that's me. The inbred conclusion of sustainable development. Thanatos growing in the skull. You know what I'm sayin'? & that's what you get off on, don't you? I mean, you string me up, caged in the back, fetish of your fear & desire, boys. What would you have me do? When you look at me what would you have me do? Cut to soundtrack: Countiriflowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all... Today, when the contemporary Lyric stumbled ham-fisted into our pawnshop, he didn't know if he could survive the torture, just like his old man in the war. When the inbred narrative comes around to repeat itself there's an annoying stutter in the room. Because Zed & Maynard are shortsighted, they only wanted to get off on the Lyric. Obviously he was beautiful—firm limbs, a broad back, definition & line, that closely cropped skull, a specimen of order & discipline—so they saved him for last. Look at the next frame: pause on a man tied to a chair with a red gag-ball jammed in his cakehole. Now he's an apple-mouthed pig on a spit looking for the Deliverance set. That's the way heroes go—looking good, looking tasty. & this? This is my eulogy to him, to the Lyric. I want to know why he didn't see that his old watch crapped out? The nation's boxing ring went to market & The Losers is on TV. His old man died to bring him Speed Racer & a Honda to crash. Teriyaki Donut tastes good, motherfucker. Pork chops taste good. His father's watch wasn't looking out for his best interests, but 7 was. Come & look at me, I said. Come here & touch my joints. Let me show you the connections, daddy-o. In the final treatment some would say the Lyric rode off into the sunset with Grace. But that's bullshit. Grace is ignorance, just a thug-jacked chopper. What really matters is he abandoned me off-screen along with everything I wanted to show him. Brandishing a Samurai sword he became a global hero without a twitch of brand recognition in his face. He postured a Pulp Lyric without a nation. Not the Texas chainsaw, not the All-American baseball bat, not the lone gun justice. Where would a western be, anyway? Before it all went down I came out of my cage. Zed said, bring out The Gimp. I wasn't asleep, like they thought. I was patiently waiting to meet the contemporary Lyric. My job was to watch him while they did their business. & I did. He was muscular, shapely & serious, & I was The Gimp who watched him get away. The ropes snapped from that beautiful boxer. I laughed. Why didn't I think of that? I've never tried to snap my dumb DNA. O, Zed! O, Maynard! — 136 —

The pleasure in watching him bust hog-wild out of there! Disgust & desire. I called through my gag. I wanted to go, too, I wanted to steal away wherever it is Lyrics go when they go home. But you know what happens. I'm The Gimp. How can things develop between us when I'm the end of the line, when my image is the remainder? Carry over the remainder, right? That reminds the audience: punchline, motherfucker.

— 137—

five stories JESUS BUILT MY HOTROD

In my family's limited religious experience, born-again Christians, in that moment of a divine howdy-do, are not necessarily all that ostentatious, at least not as much as you might expect given the belief in having just swapped spit with Christ himself. My grandfather quietly pulled into our driveway, parked, strolled to the back stairs, petted the dog, said some doggy-like things, climbed the stairs to the back door and knocked. Shave and a haircut, two bits. We watched him from the front room picture window wondering why the hell he chose the back door. Nobody ever went to the back door. Before opening it, Ma said "Hello, Norm" through the door's freshly cleaned window. It framed his head like an honorific portrait of any smiling grandpa, or any family godhead. "I have some news," he said dourly. "Oh no," she replied and

unlatched the chain. "No, it's the good news," he grinned. She opened the door. He took her hands in his. "I've found the Lord," he said. An uncomfortable pause parked between them. "Oh!" she feigned surprise, not sure how to take this in through the door. "He came to me and entered my heart and is with me," he said. Ma smiled. "Well, then I guess the two of you are welcome to come in for coffee." Ma can be like that. Razor sharp. Haircut and a shave back at ya. From that moment on, despite the well of compassion and Christian charity that theoretically deepened over the years, my grandparents both nursed a cuddly affection for Rottweilers. That was their new family, outside the church folk, and well beyond us and our burning atheistic ways. To accommodate this new family of hounds they bought themselves a nice baby-puke coloured Minivan. Good news in the front, bad news in the back. It always stank of wet dog and the benchseat upholstery took on more of a hairshirt look. What's more, the windows were really something out of this world: God's wrath manifest, the stinking rain of wormwood, the real fear made flesh colour. Manna from heaven has its run-off, and I suspect it looks something like a half-decade of Rottie spit and snot and goop and guck collected on a Minivan window. So, legend has it my brothers were in the back once with our cousins, not exactly long-lost cousins, but very newly acquainted with us and our grandparents. The dogs were at home while my grandparents took my brothers and these cousins out for lunch. The kids in the back decided to play truth or dare, truth being the best way to get to know each other quickly and in the most interesting ways. I'm not sure what my brothers asked, but my cousins chose dare. "Okay, lick this square of the window," dared my brother, Mykol, and he scraped a neat little square outline in the most bubbly and primordial yellow patch. "No way!" the cousins squealed. — 138 —

"Ten bucks," my brothers offered. How much is ten bucks to a twelve year old? Apparently it's enough that they did it, did it for ten bucks, and they licked that Minivan porthole clean. Gracious hosts my grandparents were, they took it for good clean fun. Welcome to the family van. Meet this side of your makers.

BIG YELLOW CAB In those days we had Pub Night II: The Sequel. The authentic Pub Night had long vacated the Cecil. In time, the owners grew weary with the artsyfartsy crowd so they tried to scare us away with serious country and western music. It didn't work, but the strippers later trimmed the numbers back, mostly because it was unfair to Blind Willy. Pub Night II was held at Shenanigans between the voulez-vous dance floor and Vancouver's finest ESL students. Playing cards were stuck willy-nilly to the ceiling for some reason. Blind Willy was always there first, Blind Willy Trump with his two glasses of beer at a time. Don't ask me why. I heard it had something to do with the physics of keeping beer cold. Trumped again. Not long after Allen Ginsberg died, Stan Persky organized an immense reading and memorial by various local poets. Pub Night II was adjourned for the occasion. Because the Western Front was so packed with listeners, there were many breaks and many beers to fill the breaks. I remember Gerry Gilbert read a poem with the line "where there's fries, there's The Province." A lot of terrific jestering like that was in the room. Four of us finally squeezed ourselves and my hiccups into a cab. We turned east on Broadway when the cabbie looked at me in his rearview and shouted, Hey, I recognize you! From hiccup where? I asked. You were in my cab last week! Uh, hiccup, no, I don't think hiccup so. You must have me hiccup mistaken for somebody else. Hiccup. He turned around at the next red light and looked at me hard. Ya, it was you, I recognize you! You stiffed me for twenty bucks! You gimme my money now! No I hiccup didn't! Yes you did! No hiccup I didhiccupn't! It went on like this for eight blocks. I thought this taxi driver was going to clean my clock. Always taxis and their clocks. Let's just calm down, I said. He was a big bearded man with a Buddha-belly wedged under the steering wheel. In cartoons you're supposed to rub an angry person's belly to soothe them, but I thought better of it. Are you sure, I asked, you had a blind, bald and tattooed man in your car last week? Why the hell do you think it was me who stiffed you? No answer, then a polite, How are your hiccups, sir? Huh? How are your hiccups? Uh, gone maybe, but why do you... He slapped his hands on the steering wheel and laughed. I scared 'em out of you didn't I! I knew I could scare 'em out of you! Wits, I'm telling you, a town — 139 —

of wits looking for a fix.

WRITING KITT A lot of people my age remember David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider, a picaresque 1980s TV series programmed somewhat between a secret agent adventure and a tender bosom buddies romp. Hasselhoff played mysterious crime fighter Michael Knight, and a black Pontiac Trans-Am played his faithful sidekick, a friendly black Pontiac Trans-Am. Everyone in the know wanted such a car by the age of twelve, particularly one with a customized steering wheel with only enough wheel to grip at 10 and 2 o'clock. But the thing about that car, the car called KITT (an acronym for the Knight Industries Two Thousand), the thing was KITT talked to Hasselhoff and kept his jaw-jutting machismo company on their various car-oriented misadventures. If Michael Knight got in hot water over his mullet, he could just call out to his Pontiac cavalry for help and KITT would drive real fast to rescue Hasselhoff in a car-oriented way. Often this involved running over a menacing gang of unidentifiable Eastern European conspirators. Then a woe-begotten Michael Knight would get inside his warm sidekick and KITT would say something comforting and witty in his fatherly British way, something like "Michael, it's about time you called for help! I couldn't find you anywhere &, indeed, my bio-radar and heat sensory systems were overloading with worry." I never did get a Pontiac Trans-Am, but I got the next best thing in being blind. Instead, I have a computer who talks to me, at least with some similarity to KITT. I can make him say witty and comforting things like "Indeed, my bio-radar and heat sensory systems were overloading with worry." I can make him say witty and comforting things as often as I like. I'll do it now. Listen. Witty and comforting things. There you go. And, like Hasselhoff, my computer voice keeps me in a pretty decent job. I don't kill off evil people with my trusty traffic violations, or anything vigilante like that. I just mark literature essays through my computer voice, which I suppose is its own specious brand of violence in the name of the law. KITT was really good at helping Michael Knight with important issues such as where they were heading, mapping things out for him, identifying ambushes and landmines down the road, that sort of thing. That's because the car had this red Cyclops eye on the grille which looked back and forth, looked ahead and side to side, very much like a Cylon in Battlestar Gallactica. My computer sidekick is called JAWS. What JAWS stands for I haven't a clue. Maybe something like "Just Another Writing System." You'd — 140 —

think with a fishy name like JAWS he would want to keep moving, writing and reading ahead, telling me where we're going and how to get there safely. But no, JAWS tells me only where I've already been, what's already been said and done, and not in an accented British or fatherly way. You'd think if they can design a car like KITT, or make a voice of hindsight for the blind, you'd think if they can do all that then it wouldn't be all that fictional to imagine by now some corporation like Knight Industries would have triumphed with a better solution for moving the blind through this unflinching and rigid world. Nobody has yet improved on swinging a very unsexy white stick with some red tape from side to side. I'm not complaining. It's just that it's as far down the road as I've seen technology go in my time.

WHY DON'T YOU GO OUTSIDE AND HELP YOUR FATHER WITH THE CAR Summer holidays were always high-maintenance for my parents. Having four kids and three jobs to manage between them, there wasn't much time or energy unaccounted for. What little energy remained, my siblings and I wanted sent our way. I seem to recall my strategy was to hang around the kitchen and complain of Absolutely Nothing To Do in order to get an inroad with my dad. If it worked, poor Ma would finally coil with frustration and say, "Why don't you go outside and help dad work on the car?" Yes. Now I couldn't be sent back. I had permission and a signed passport by the appropriate authority. My siblings and I always had a keen understanding about the transfer of power in the family structure and we did our best to coax it to our favour. Now that I was allowed to work on the car, my brothers might chime in with their can-I-toos. But that would overwhelm dad and simply move the whining and nagging from the kitchen out to the car. The goal was to occupy us separately, to diffuse the collective boredom of four kids. I knew this and played it right so I got the good gig and nobody else would fit. In our driveway at that time was a lime-green Maverick. I didn't know the first thing about engines and it remains that way. This isn't something I'm proud of, like some eggheads are, but I've never been able to move beyond my hazy sense of the theory behind an engine to its manipulation and repair. But I was a curious kid, so I went outside happily on several summer afternoons to work on the car, or find out what that meant. Although I was curious, I still suffered the distractions of early-teen image-consciousness, so in going outside to play mechanic, first the image required I go downstairs and unhook my Realistic brand ghetto blaster, choose a handful of decent, male-bonding tapes and take the lot outside for reassembly. I suppose in my imagination I saw my father and I with our grease-smeared faces under the Maverick's rusting hood, tap— 141 —

ping screwdrivers in time to Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell." Maybe he'd even share a beer with me as we discussed the possible origins of a phantom noise. And if it was a particularly long and problematic job, dad might even dig out some of his old tapes, something like The Eagles or The Doobie Brothers, and tell me how one of the songs reminded him about the time he flipped his car upside down in a watery ditch. Cars always require music, be you in them or under them. In my imagination, the music and curious pose over the engine would inevitably lead to the kind of secret knowledge and horsing around I'd seen between my dad and the other men he worked with in the machine shop. But leaning against the car in the hot sun, I'd watch my dad for a good hour feigning my comprehension. All I could ever grasp was that somewhere deep inside the coils and iron and pipes, deep down were several small explosions that were harnessed and sent elsewhere. A system of conversions which ended in the tires rotating and you off on your clutch-dumping, tire-burning expressive way. And that's where it all stopped. Later, or, rather, recently, my dad and ma attended a handful of my poetry readings. They've always been supportive like that. I suspect they didn't want to go all that much (and I can't say as I blame them if they didn't), but the early drawings on the fridge and the Christmas concerts became, at least, a first book, books of poetry and atrophied experience. I'm sure I caught my dad kind of digging it at times, drinking beer with him in the back alley and smoking cigarettes, talking art, kind of. There he told me how he gave my first book to his boss and his boss said, I don't get it, but I'm impressed. I like to imagine them looking at it in the shop, trying to figure out what the big fuss is. I always was impressed, too. The engine always turned over. Always to school on time. To work. Cars and poetry and their phantom noises. That's the difference, the question of family.

FROM MELVILLE TO HAMILL

It has been observed that a Harley Davidson ceases to be a means of transportation when it hangs from a theme restaurant or bar rafter. This is not a power particular to, say, Arnold's bulging and stogie-chewing brand name. Any old wall or rafter translates the chopper fine on its own. The Harley then announces its character in the theatre of a culture's mythology instead of its tenacious ability to move a passenger from point A to B. Moby Dick, I suspect, makes a similar case for the whale. I've never read the novel and remain embarrassed to admit it, but I did sit through Corvette Summer at least half a dozen times before my teens. If you don't remember this ungodly movie odyssey, it starred Mark Hamill of Luke Skywalker fame shortly after his XWing fighter celebrity sputtered and crashed somewhere just shy of the — 142 —

Universal Studio gates. If memory serves me correctly, Hamill played an aspiring and gifted teenage grease monkey. An Einstein of shop class, together with the minimal assistance of some buddies, Hamill built a super-fantastic Corvette of indescribable aesthetic failure. This thing had pipes and intakes and chrome and all sorts of shit popping in and out of the body. It looked like a car had crashed into a novelty body shop and come out the other side. It was the Platonic Corvette, the Corvette from which all other permutations could be derived. The dramatic arc of this story begins when the car—let's call it Moby Dick—is stolen from Hamill the first night he takes it out on the road. The journey to find this stolen beast then takes Hamill across the country to Las Vegas where, after a series of rumoured sightings and phantom glimpses, he finally finds Moby Dick in a Vegas showroom, slightly altered and painted a clean, shining white, but unmistakably the overdone labour of an aspiring and gifted teenage grease monkey. You can imagine, I'm sure, the rest of this tale which involves crooked Vegas businessmen and the righteous wrangling of Moby Dick by his true owner. I can't quite remember now, but I'd bet my last Vegas dollar the car is destroyed in the fight for ownership, only after a few good car chases of course. I'm only so sure about this because a car ceases to be a car when it is put inside a recurrent narrative, and the point was to make this car beyond car-ness for Hamill. The myth of it precipitates a low-fi lighting out to see the country, to go west, young man. So he can't find the car in the end, because it was never to be there in place of the story. I've explained this movie to a number of my bookwormy friends, some of whom have read Moby Dick, but not one of them recalls this flick or its tale.

— 143 —

Jason Le Heup and Chris Walker Poser

1A. IT WOULD WISH TO SEE

— 144 —

15. AND LAUGHTER THAT IT TOUCHES, INVENTING DESIRES

— 145 —

1C. BUT SEDUCTION ITSELF

— 146 —

1D. DESIRE OF CERTAIN OME

.... 147 —

1E. NOTHING SATISFIED TO INVOKE CURSES

— 148 —

1F. NOT HARD TO HIDE ENOUGH

— 149 —

1G. SATISFY SO MUCH

— 150 —

1N. SHOCKS MEMBER THAT RELAX

— 151 —

1I. LIKE FINDING

— 152 —

Gil McElroy (The Function & Field) Of Speech & Language

i "An honest man has fingers, can add when he tries, & can peddle vast sums of the butter-cool earth in spite of gods, seasons, & the rain." Such an amusement makes an early & unjust claim, & I am a man of staring emphasis. My botanic brow is furrowed by the work & wedge of opinions, & it is my hands alone that encounter the whiskers that a man must simplify. But I will prescribe limits to the rub of my sex, to the little heres & theres of gender & furniture, & I will take my seat upon these things. I have chair enough. Let the bells make a day of it.

It is trust keeps a child slumbering on the far side of life's little picnics. I was ignorant of those little puffballs ornamenting the ground. The brushy depths of the waters & muds of privilege had stripped me clean & given clear contour to my heaviness, the high & alpine hump of allergy evicted the old & vertical standards of my breath & its influence. I find it hard to think of myself as fallen & ripe (though I have a sneaking sympathy for the gravity of the matter), but it is at the navel of things, & it is in the truth of my fingers learning more than mortar from their encounters with the seams, the leaks, & the floods of fact. Though the facts of our feet daily kiss a ground now cooled & replete with roads, our youth of tides had the singular advantage of vulgar tons of water. At that tucked-in age of periodic lands & seas, the earth-oyster undulated with history. — 153 —

We have a habit of history. It is the price we pay for coarse glasses of enlargement, a radius recognizable from a distance, &, methinks, our love of novelty. Intoxicated with the known humours & piled, as they are, upon our loins, our heads maintain a strong sense of the monuments & misgivings we would reerect but for mere spoonfuls of fresh light. Sometimes, unaccountable regrets kindle in feverish minutes of an afternoon, only to be plundered for their reckless qualities & coals. One's nostrils are then limited by a smoke one is obliged to admit exists. Prehistory may so be a perishable thing, but the old landmark now has a slick, stone counterpart & the industrialized aspect of an estranged place. Viewed from a great distance, it & the moon of much-needed rest magnify all the rubbish that recedes into it. But to fall back into myself, I will prod out some of the transient facts & surfaces I am supposed of: I have pets beyond bearing, & agitations about the right hats; the politics I harbour amuse me with misadventure; I feel it fitting to collect wit, & so gift my sisters & cousins with the crocks & fragments I rescue from years of two-reelers; from my mouth come disbeliefs & the dry rattle of my incurable addiction to language. My complaints, too, lack any visible evaporation. I am devoured by doing nothing—I would observe curtains had I no Moon— & so have a visiting sort of life gratified by shrines, carvings in which faces crawl, & those undated graves & marvels remaindered to the wool-covered consumers of meat that we are. I maintain my pastimes, & the memory of their varying lengths, but there is this one thing for which the words can gather me by my very lapels with their eye-to-eye importances: a story, told me with all the common embroidery & antique perambulations of those organs enticed with indulgent roles in life. A growing son of absurd old dreamers, & distended by nothing else, I had charmed it, you see, out of a colony of rubes with a concave scheme of goggleeyed movements & painful nonsense (and there are, I know, muscles in even the eye with far more important functions).

— 154 —

Miles of curvature from the cumulative perils of our geometry, the earth had been, the story goes, of very small creatures burrowing here & thereabouts; vagabond monsters sandwiched between the simple thrust of bread-&-butter nouns, & a language of flat stones & intervening waters. Their needs had been thus deposited about them. Condemned to digging small holes in a hard world, the copious ores they tripped up provoked eventual outbursts of justifications & time spent in their dense & glowing cookery. Now, I have cooked all around, & I have a strong sense of the salt demands of appetite & the natural positions of liquids. Courier days melt into middleaged achievements. Lives become hard & scorched. In due time, death. If other words are used, & now not the literature of that metaphor which chokes me, I give you evidence of creatures & the Sun they solved tolerably well. Above their petrified hills of metal & masonry, the darkness is iron-clad & absolute. At night, I awaken choking on inertia, & on the ball of that particular Sun I swallowed when young & hungry. At night, I am engulfed by a thumping.

2

"A small book of stories, athletic themes, & fundamentals is a common requirement of beautiful places."

Going to bed in winter, there were nights when I read this quite differently. It had the vocabulary of a flood, but the inclination of a lake (the water there reflecting all the evaporations & dissolutions of experiment). In a nutshell, it had all the uneven images & beliefs for which we created facts. The warm pressures of its palate, & its meagre allotments of untragical moods were thus burdens I bore aloud.

–155–

I can quote yet another of its blindnesses: "The goaloriented stone shall fall because it shall have occasion." Now, we have a taste for klieg lights, evangelists, & wild honey individual to our craving for cause. Had we supernatural followings of free-wheeling little demons, blades of grass & the meaner sorts of bulrushes would everywhere be matched to the brutal lacerations of lightning or comedy. Seized by water, boiled & subdued, this wedlock would be a thing we would drink. In dissenting kinds of equilibriums, small & magical objects would be tossed into the lonely aether, that they might freshly plane the worn & westward parts of the horizon. Saturated with the sweet gum of creation, we longed to move in either way. But seeing us thus voting upright into the atmosphere, the plush & skimming wind went about the bitter business of reality. Our tents & banners, we lost the very walls of their use in our encounters with the chariot regions of air, so in this kind of romantic time in life, we reached for the practical conclusions of rope. The hair of the thing was this: having walls within earshot, we could learn only of the astounding size of silence, & of having chairs enough to dwell within it. Indeed, there can be an austere & wonderful purity in puttering about such a house. One only vaguely senses the thin & vaporous nutshell of neighbours, or the fearful abysses that can dimple an afternoon. Now, I have a taste for hollow kinds of neighbours, & for the housekeeping of superfluous guestchambers. 'Midst this, I can make quick surveys of all the stupider fictions of hygiene, & I can build myself even coffees. By night, I can be bothered by uneasy beds & sheets, & by the impossible twists of a stomach that crowds the particulars of mine imagination. I play tangos for my tummy, & perch on the ladder of these, my narcotics. — 156 —

And my imagination? I would shed its winds, & the patterning insanity of its rains. But my children pluck at the implements of its fables, & I sweep & clean its filth, & yes, I have heard something about exhaustion. I was once pretty game, stood up to my shadow. Probably I did something, broken by all the sunshine. Now, I keep my musicbox shut. I fear my thoughts, their boggy ways & muddy, dark-green comparisons, & I border them with little gardens of a despair I tasted once. Through such terrorisms, the margin of my method is faint but still silvery, & I have a heart that still quivers with atoms. I can, yes, imagine them all: their reasonable regions of time & space; their nightmares about extrapolations, & the choking geometries of exotic constants & slight departures... Being of a height & hairlength, the familiar words I have acquired can fashion myths of such an immutability, but my lower jaw & I share a fear of justifying ourselves that is somewhere relative to the tides. The dice & I try to resolve around it, animated by the one absolute proof of my hands. I weigh enthusiasms, & the things overturned in the sky, but it is hard, indeed, to keep one's crackpots clean, besieged, as they are, by heavy breathes gone astray, or the bloated air of dust. The runny world of my calendar hangs in young republics of ragweed, so I am run invisible in those places once enjoyed by my enlargement. An endless chemistry of little blue pills of weather can bring some images back to application, but I am already reduced by those factors of an empty & sterile space that is an overstatement of nothing but a vacuum. So much is prodigal daughter gets nothing. The towel of consistence is square of nothing. A petty stream of language might smooth down all the verbs, but the images in my speech will retain the familiar ambulations of pictures unduly used.

— 157 —

My sisters & cousins, they will continue to talk in sentences. The predicates in which I will be described will remain immune from possibility, for it is a small & cautious language they share, & the vocabulary of views that can be expressed has a decidedly charitable ring. I will be absorbed into the world this morning, into the nonmusic of its facts & the temperatures that fill its weighty reasons. I have a right to its certain poisons. I am a man of formulas.

— 158 —

two poems Ground States A

A normal reading of words offers, at best, timid glances down Newtonian successions of corridors. The cause-and-effect of letters and newspapers following one upon the other is an idea devoted to reproduction (or to what exclamations really look like). Handfuls of order are measured in such a way. We want a custodian, a hired perspective, Ibs. of absolute and everlasting solidity. (Resilience is indeed considered a perfectly reasonable way to total ruin.) In a place so organized, the container of traditional questions, answers, and achievements daily exemplified by names comes to seem incontrovertible. But the membrane of metaphor is permeable. First of all, one must fit.

B

The present grammar has rocking chair meanings. The little maelstroms of poems wrinkle of conversation and the humpty-dumpty of things. Entire utterances devour the smaller things that move (the mere sensations of language, the unpointed vowels, the asylums of syllables...), swallowing each pregnant bulge of creatures. This world is new and unalloyed, but in any geometry something is always given. Here, it is in a diminishing that readers, all with parallax, have the anatomy to attack: a cone, the base of which is given to the more widely used dimensions, the apex a point somewhere sudden and intrusive amongst the very basic clumps correlated outside of the teeth,* letters typically and tightly buttoned by words.

though the palate brings us their names. — 159 —

c

Raw and quivering to the touch, these comparisons (so made) are invented in a manner I can only describe with all the inadequacy that words, sailing down without context, can imply: we write, posturing some arguable ideas; we read, embodying an upright condition. We have these definitions retained in parallel, but we have the accidental in common (the same water of escape). A stone can dive no deeper.

Topology

i "Vacancy, it," is a sign subject to the frogmouthed "ways of faith." The "symbol is a shape filled with sunrises," emanates from "the head itself," & the noisy "& shared concerns of the absurd," has an inner "core of assumption." "Weather like this," is not insane, yet it is "the maker's care," that impresses. 2

Every child begins "indoors," with the title "page use of posterity," a slight "wobble of touching silliness," some "honest expenses," & "a fuel easily extinguished." The most bewildering "bodies move in circles," is rounded by "the time, by the clock, that Rousseau threw away all of his canvases," — 160 —

"stars," "silence," & "paralysis." "Principles," fills "them all." 3

My "feet absurdly leave the room," has an uneasy "and sluggish length" fringed with "mirth," & "a colleague disarmed many," of "my patients," is riddled with "common translations," & the rather popular "forms of rioting." How much caffeine's in "this morning's coffee?"

4

17 "schemes of things," 5 "perfect histories," & 1000 "expensive cellars." A number of "gods bubbled & broke." A cotton "number of days," & piles & piles of "westerly winds." "Misled by words," alone.

5

"Daughters," as an afterthought.

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from The Book of Knowledge "When a piece of seaweed feels very damp, it tells us that there is a good deal of moisture in the air, and rather more moisture than the air can well carry, so that it is glad to unburden itself into the seaweed so far as possible. Now, that means that the air may very likely unburden itself soon on a bigger scale by means of the rain. "When the seaweed is dry, it means the opposite of this." from The Book of Knowledge

Easy and Useful Rustic Carpentry That part where all the best seeing is done is packed with cones and nothing else. Do not think, however, that we are entitled to blame our eyes and eyelids and say that they are not what they should be. They sometimes fumble and tangle things more for a time, but the gathering together of cones in one place is so for the purposes of practical living. There are many fairly good reasons why some coins should be made of gold. The other kinds of spots before the eyes come and go. Lines with Letters above the Loops Though it was formerly much more used than it is now, the name for this particular kind of line is so important that, though it is a rather long name, I must tell it to you.* Some people have said that the use of this line is to give us a better hold upon things, but if that were so we should have to say that they are scarcely worth having. Of course, the wholesale removal of "macadamized road" is not recommended, but by keeping our eyes open, even if they sink in and look untidy, we may often come across a specimen well worth adding to our collection.

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*If we peeled off the crust of the earth, as we peel an orange, so that the glowing centre or glowing core of the earth were exposed, we could see it to read it.

Fur-land

In a conservatory in this beautiful country, which the writer knows, there are watertanks to which the frogs go. The most wonderful thing to do there is climb a smooth tree and walk head downward on the underside of its big leaves. About the middle of November, in the colder parts of the country, the small streams commence to freeze-over, and there is an occasional flurry of snow. But the chances for enjoyment do not vanish with the coming of the frost; the mountains are nowhere more than fifty miles from the coast and are easily seen from a coastal steamer. Here is another summer picture of Fur-land. You can tell from the slimness of their trunks that the men pictured are in the sub-Arctic forest. At mid-day, when they pour out to luncheon, the high, canyon-like walls look down on a wonderful sight. The men are puzzled by the disappearance of terrible giants which formerly lived, and the growing up of types utterly different from those which, in the long ago, had the globe to themselves. Perhaps you have seen them, painted on the ambulance sides.

Three Wonderful Gases

When we are taken captive by intense laughter, we cannot hold tightly to things. We know that the necessary muscles are there, but they are generally inoffensive. Occasionally, however, they become as weeds, large as ever, and so we may be sure that the explanation is somewhere else. The map is still filling up.

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The Beautiful Green Stuff The green stuff that we know so well in plants is made by sunlight, and it is made in order to use sunlight after it is made. In the autumn in the plant, the beautiful green stuff made by the sunlight changes and goes. The Catherine Wheel Whatever the nature of the wheel, poor Catherine was bound to it.

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David McGimpsey Sweet Poetry or Mystery Meat? Here's one I like: Cut it thick like a steak Slightly grease the pan Fry it for awhile Then eat it like a man. It won't hurt your innards It will slide right through Baloney is best fried I'm passing this tip to you. By Anna Livia, this poem not only passes along uncommon and practical advice, it does so with good humor and helpful rhymes. What more could you ask for? Of course, not everything I like is so concerned with the gross stuff of innards and whatnot. Here's something else: It's all about something tasty You can mix it with macaroni Put it on a pizza, eat it with a cracker Man, we're talkin' 'bout Yale Bologna Written by songwriter Dan Hall, the jaunty lyrics of "Talkin' Yale Bologna" were composed in celebration of an annual Bologna Festival that takes place in the small town of Yale, Michigan. This yearly fete, where no aspect of local sausage production receives neglect, boasts sidelights that include bologna ring tosses and the nomination of the town Bologna King & Queen—how could a lyricist not be inspired? Hall's words, though undeniably cured-meat positive, are more social and promotional than Li via's, more directly concerned with the precinct of Yale, Michigan. Near or far, it's true too that there are many poems I admire that do not rhyme and, truth be told, a sizeable majority of them have nothing to do with bologna. And let's be sure: the clarity of rhyming, populist poetry about luncheon meat doesn't make such poems any more well known or liked than the poems in Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979. In fact, Bishop's kind of poetry, whatever her occasional plodding, her delight in making reference to things like sighing dolphins, or her total disregard for snack food, still 165 ---------

seems like the respectable way to go. Or, when you want to help other poets develop their craft, you'd definitely want to pay attention to the complex ways poets use the materials of poetry, as Bishop does, rather than just focus on the ironically slim Bolognic Verses. I don't write poetry for respectable reasons. By that, I don't mean to suggest I'm some kind of rebel, writing things so beyond the norm that traditional niceties and conventional rewards leave me unimpressed. On the contrary: whatever hokey, half-baked, self-aggrandizing, obscuring, mythologizing, self-defeating, daydreaming, flaky, effacing, please-love-me, log-rolling, "I'd like to thank the Governor General" sins that are alleged to plague poets, I'll cop to those same sins and more. I guess what I mean is that I'm still not entirely sure why I write poetry. After a long time writing the stuff, some days it doesn't feel worth it, some days it still kind of feels too personal to talk about. Though, unfortunately for my friends, some days it's all I can talk about. I agree with Tennyson when he famously said "I sometimes hold it a sin / To put in words the grief I feel" (181) but, as with so many sins, I haven't let guilt stop me. Poetry is still wonderful, isn't it? I do know that as vocations/occupations go, poet is well shy of rock star or even Regis Philbin sidekick, but still a sight better than working in the retail or service industries. And, to be honest, the dread of working "May I help you, sir?"-type jobs is a large component of how I became interested in the literary arts and the graduate study of them. As for writing poetry, what can be said about something so profound yet so ridiculous? I assume that in summing up my own poetics, it might be difficult to make it all sound anything but obscure and not quite grown-up. But I don't want to just make it up—now that I've finally been asked—backforming my unshakeable faith in the study of the genre, pretending it's all good stuff, suggesting my way is the way to go. I'm sure a self-based analysis about the "labour of my craft" would make me, and any sensible reader, barf. Of course, poets are generally not so reliable when it comes to revealing a critically functional poetics. In developing their logic about their own way of approaching the gentle art, poets often carefully edit out their own stupidity, their own hidden personal motives, their own disappointments, and how these things helped make them the a) defender of the ancients b) creative writing class pet c) the wildheart of the spoken word scene. A long time ago, a dear friend of mine published an ambitious essay about the nature of empathy in modern verse; an essay which included many clear beliefs as to what poetry should be as well as one nifty translation of the German term Einfuhlung. I wrote lots of things in the margins of my friend's essay, offering my own self-evident counter-poetics like the only thing a poet should do is write — 166 —

poems! But, what I never noted in all this shadow engagement was how jealous I was that my friend was already having his opinions on poetry published. A strange omission considering that that initial jealousy was probably the thing that most energized my response. Of course, the fact that upon seeing the word Einfuhlung I immediately started singing the word to the tune of Jethro lull's "Aqualung" should have told me that I wasn't quite ready for such exposure and perhaps I'm still not. What would I know? Randall Jarrell once noted that as far as a critique of poetry and poetics was concerned, the literary critic had pushed the actual poets aside, with Jarrell using this meaty comparison: if a pig wandered up to you during a bacon-judging contest, you would say impatiently, "Go away, pig! What do you know about bacon?" (66-67) 1 grew up loving the Confessional poets, then adoring Tennyson and Yeats, and I habitually listen to Country & Western music, so it's probably not surprising that I value poetry that commemorates emotional experience through an accultured, personal sensibility. All that rag and bone shop stuff, all that "pick me up on your way down" stuff. I also grew up closer to the television than the library and am a bit of a buff when it comes to Pop Culture. So, 1 often try to write poems that encounter the prosaic aspects of our culture (the malls, the khaki pants, the concert you thought would change your life, the TV shows, the baloney and the bologna, the dieting) and see into them a reflection of our most hopeful and tragic selves. In some ways it's a poetic of the American working class. Or even still: a material dreaming of entering the American middle class, a phrase that unfortunately sounds like I'm working on a collection of poems about golf. Though, what I'm usually up to is perhaps just a seven iron shot away from that—maybe even a nine iron. It's peculiar insofar as the American (and by American I also mean Canadian) response to poetry is fairly uniform: the good people can't stand it. Now, I have no illusions about or desire to reach these nay-sayers. I'm sure they're all nice but, really, when did their Forrest Gwmp-loving asses mean anything to poets? Poets ought not write with dreams of Survivor popularity and US Magazine acceptance, though they ought not to pretend that those popular things do not exist. I understand the peculiar burden poets have to be "of the people," I mean, who wants to be an old stuck-up academic snob? Who wants to be that pitiful literary crank who complains all the time about how the kids today don't respect "the craft"? But, isn't the idea of a people's poetry a sad Marxist will-o-the-wisp? An externalizing of the shame about poetry's sensitive complexity and lack of commercial value? Why is it that nobody ever demands there be a people's trigonometry? There's thousands of wonderful, immediately accessible, uncomplicated, straight-to-the-heart, plain-speaking poems, and these poems are just as ignored by the people as the complicated — 167 —

ones that habitually refer to Antigone and Creon. Poetry itself is an indulgence and the indulgence of obscurity is, for me, one of its sweetest peaches. The allowance to say complex things, without any apology to the dumb-down demands of conventional media and commercial fiction is a rare gift in today's world, perhaps available only in the literary margins. And poetry need not be embarrassed for those who found the subject too onerous and too poorly taught in High School. Those citizens, attractive and kissable as they can be, have little to no interest in reading poetry and they probably never will. So what? Poetry can't make you popular, so you couldn't ask for a better vantage to contemplate the popular. Poetry has been so unpopular for so long, you'd think we'd all be over it. Still, every few years or so a new hope glimmers that poetry will be able to right itself in the commercial arts. Especially since MTV's Word Up series, there's been a lot of hope invested in slam and spoken word poetry scenes as new and hip forms that might finally bring poetry to the people or, at least, "the new generation." Of course, I have nothing against spoken word itself, and greatly admire many of its practitioners; as gathering terms go, "spoken word" obviously is no more or less ridiculous than "The Kootenay School" or "The New Formalists." But spoken word artists, however dressed for Starbucks-era success, generally work on the same pay scale as old fashioned "poets" but are defined mostly in terms of a market-inspired division ("spoken word"—desirable demographic, "poetry"—out of the desirable demographic). As Michael Holmes said in his introduction to the anthology The Last Word the phrase "spoken word" is "critically barren: a safe, meaningless phrase intended to take the stigma (the craft and actual magic) out of writing poetry."(6) Though I love reading my poems in public performance, I've simply aged beyond where I could be considered "spoken word" and must, with the same sake of propriety that cautions a man my age against dancing in public, embrace being just a poet. Regardless, when a customs agent or a police officer asks somebody their profession, I'd like to meet the wing-nut who'll say "poet" or "spoken word artist." When Groucho Marx hosted the game show You Bet Your Life, and one of the contestants identified himself as a poet, Groucho immediately said: "In other words you're out of work" (212). And despite this truism, and its more mean-spirited formations, poets persevere and still compete with each other to get their work published. Every year, more and more talented young people are lured to the deeply rewarding and ancient literary art and, every year, they seem to get better. Whatever the popular lack of appreciation, ask anybody, even poets, if they think there're too few poets in the world and I'd be surprised if you got many yeses to that one. The shame of poetry is strong enough to go around; strong enough in the hearts of poets and poetry-lovers —168 —

themselves. If, God forbid, a book of poetry did become popular, as Jewel's A Night Without Armor did, it would undoubtedly be lined up and critically slaughtered; laid among the corpses of Patch Adams, Touched by an Angel or any one of Celine Dion and Rene Angem's weddings. Ah, sweet delinquency. Oh, Poetry. As Jewel herself has said "let us raise ourselves / like lanterns" (6) and let us continue to write poems. For when it comes to revealing universal truths and eternal beauties, to steal a line from a classic jingle, "Poetry has a way with b.o.l.o.g.n.a." Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Boston: The Noonday Press, 1993. Brockwell, Stephen. "Empathy in Modern Verse." The Insecurity of Art: Essays on Poetics. Ed. Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1982. Holmes, Michael. The Last Word: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1995. Hall, Dan. "Talkin' Yale Bologna." Dan Hall: Yale MI, 1998. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Jewel. A Night Without Armor. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Livia, Anna. "Baloney is Best Fried." Collected from private files of newsclippings. Marx, Groucho. The Essential Groucho. Edited by Stefan Kanter. New York: Vintage, 2000. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Poems of Tennyson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editons, 1958.

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three poems

Sister Codeine I'll write you a long letter explaining why I threw an orange at your nephews but, for now, I'm really kind of sleepy. I'll listen to that story you know, the one where your parents take your dog to "live in the country" but for now I gotta lie down. Where have I been, Sister Codeine? Was that me who took a nap in your neighbour's front yard? Can you remember if I still have a job? I'll drive you to the station as long as you take care of the steering and the braking; as long as I can lie down in the back.

Kaloo Poseidon did that a lot those days— you know, when you get the words mixed up? There's never any good cities in this restaurant. The ungrateful of today are so young people. But, through our 7-11 summers, his sea-killer wisdom was a needed opiate, stuck as we were in the drear suburbs of Mt. Olympus. Who knew what he was doing there besides air guitar on a trident and Slurpee slurping, / left this just for home? — 170 —

Why can't any of you instruments play punks? Gods do not answer letters, nor do they move to help you convince your parents to dip into their vacation funds so they can buy you a heavy bass amplifier.

Wayne Gretzky is Sending Signals From the CN Tower that Make Me Do Crazy Things. It's surprising there aren't more hockey poems considering how many interesting words rhyme with puck. Sure, Gretzky was good, but was he better than Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze in Youngbloodl Now that was hocke! Now that he's retired, shouldn't the airwaves call a moratorium on the Wayner's puss? I mean, haven't we, as Canadians, done our time? Will the sting of those old GWG ads ever fade? Hockey can never be the same unless we, as Canadians, find new reasons to hate the Russians. Somebody may end up the next Paul Henderson but who will be the next J.P. Parise, swinging a stick in their faces? Who will be the next Ed Van Impe, mercilessly crushing the next Kharlamov to the ice? No matter how much beer we drink, It can never be the same. I love a good groin pull as much as anybody but I'm only interested in victory. — 171 —

I keep playing my Andy Griffith Songs of Faith album and keep praying that we will do what it takes to win. There's always the fledgling World Cup of Hockey. As a BBC broadcaster once said about football's World Cup, "It's truly an international event." Now, at long last, the same is true for our game of hockey. Bring on those Swiss bastards!

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rob mclennan Ottawa snapshot: a quick poetics "However, this much we have observed: good or bad, schools are insurance companies. Enter their offices and you are certain of a position." — Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara, 1952 1.

The poem I am writing now makes leaps of logic that the reader is left to bridge, or miss. I really don't mind. Walk down & up the other side of the mountain. This is about process, after all; in poems that work toward being more emotional through their sparseness, & to strip away those things that are unimportant, writing to bare bone. As well, coherent narrative is arbitrary, & nonsequitur leaps are deliberate, holding the connections in unusual ways. It means more, if the reader is left thinking they came up with it themselves. Recently I've been reading the work of American poet C.D. Wright, & am heavily enamoured, for the same kinds of reasons. The serious strength of her lines & unexpected turns, every word & phrase as a separate heartbeat, pounding nails on the page. But at the same time, unable to deny the strengths & uses of a poem by, say, George Bowering, D.G. Jones, John Newlove, Erin Moure, Robert Creeley, bpNichol, Margaret Christakos, Gil McElroy, Jennifer Moxley, Natalee Caple, & that's just what I've been reading lately. I could fill a whole volume just naming my influences, & not just other writers whose work I've learned from. Yet I understand that my influences & tastes can sometimes contradict. I am fully prepared for the consequences. 2.

For years, writing complete books more than individual poems, & partial to the fragment for some time, working different ways of building a full collection of poems. In many ways, my first "collection" was my second book, bury me deep in the green wood, published in 1999 by ECW Press; poems that identified with a place, & personal space, but not always the specific. The green wood that Alan-A-Dale cries for, once his love is left, taken. Somehow, early on, I twigged on the idea of the long &/or serial poem, & stuck there. I haven't written an "individual" poem in years; they all end up — 173 —

being "part" of something book-length. For this reason, some pieces appear more fragmented than others. How is a poem or a book supposed to be built? How is a poem or a book not supposed to be built? This is the question. To be, or not. How context supplies as much meaning as anything. There is no way a poem can live on its own. A few years ago, working on two different poetry manuscripts concurrently, I tried to see the book-length from two different directions—paper hotel & what's left. The first, elements of the short & sharp, of D.G. Jones & John Newlove, seeing what I could do with a collection of smaller poems; how much I could get out of the least, & doing away with sections. The second, rife with Robert Kroetsch & Barry McKinnon; long lines & extended play, taking it from the other side, a specific longpoem broken down into pieces. 3.

the other side of the mouth: postscript. As Fred Wah says in Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer College Press, 1987), "a critical practice that sees language as the true practice of thought." In his brief introduction, Wah writes of drunken tai chi, of learning to have control over the moves even with a lack of control. To let unpredictability take over, & thus make him a more formidable opponent. The intuitions. For me, writing has ever been an intuitive art, of simply starting & seeing where the piece ends up, & then going back over multiple times to edit, one piece at a time. Some pieces going through ten, twenty, thirty drafts or more. The first draft of the other side of the mouth was written during a particularly intense two-day writing session, August 27 & 28,2001, with a typed version completed the following morning. I deliberately waited until I had a first draft of the manuscript finished before I went back to reread & edit. This is a book of responses, where each section of ten poems is a response to a particular work, what books I wanted to return to, or had influenced me at the time: Lip Service, Bruce Andrews; Moby Jane, Gerry Gilbert; Pillage Laud, Erin Moure; zygal: a book of mysteries and translations, bpNichol; Wood Mountain Poems, Andrew Suknaski; The Collected Books of, Jack Spicer; Lost Language, selected poems, Maxine Gadd; The Holy Forest, Robin Blaser; nemesis, lew daly; Stranger, Victor Coleman. — 174 —

4.

Much of my approach, to see what is possible, & include new options in my direction. New reading. Where some make leaps, I move slowly up the slope. Reading & rereading are the key. An intuitive art, sure, but still. Before any book or poem starts, a sense of where I want it to go, the shape; more time constructing, & setting rules before I set out. As I continue, further along. Not a set of absolutes, but suggestions. Guidelines. Any piece, still a collaboration; between what I want, & what the poem wants. Better to leave things open than direct them.

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Juliet is the name of a wound there are letters written never deep enough, the gold of her bracelet insurance men put their recycling at the curb is her "straight to hell" even better than the original would you see me screaming crazy train is nothing more frightening to a 14 year old boy than a 14 year old girl, especially when shes angry when the name is no longer the bullet not the word but the softest look

from stone, book one it follows that in so there is no antique store, tools in the shed, buckets & taps the sugar bush, forty years or more, why do i miss that piano, did everyone have one. visiting a friend & wondering where his. before i knew, the rain so brief, look straight him in the eye. or eyes, a step to the right, she plunges the backstep. where the kitchen door, never trust a city boy, her mother tells, whod always appear, the unused front.

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there are no windows do we know what we remember, we know, the rain before it shows, what fields to plant, & when. makes a shape of mouth, the sounding of birds, tells a different story, the language of bees, tells me hes better than that, shed say yes. the vote of rain, dust kicks up beneath your shoes, more when youre dancing, sings her songs now. not too hard to share, after the rain, how do the trees.

one untranslatable song of that generation, gender or class, a hesitation, to draw breath, an outgrowth of the past, advocating by turns, & past, when words fall, smiling, everything is personal, push away what youll never learn, older than these norms, elastic on her dress, critically aware of ways, back home, forays into speech, a stillness, a stone, the colour, however. a stretch, what her own voice doesnt always attain.

provisional styles of finished work, of craft, telling me what do to or like, versa vice, a big headed endeavor, leaning out the window to the stars, second storey of brick, from the log house can you see. foundations set in grass, the plow hits, sparks, breaks a blade by bits, the last night under the sun. the implications of the green comforter. relying heavily on her tempo, what has never been. — 177 —

from the other side of the mouth the other side of the mouth 19 valentine 01 became who belongs to who marvellous to sleep & seem leftover songs & dogs, & dreams of sex my own presence here is not required & neither is yours, then the patience of charlie chan, nick & nora slide under the foreskin of the fraser it seems shes lost

the other side of the mouth 72 among the olives, christ speaks slowly over the sound of an earthquake the fold broke out, a tale of translations a pool of water, of blue & white enamel streams are visible, & speak — 178 —

of what contained there from the black-fire a steam, or means the immortal post outward, a distance

the other side of the mouth 83 so i left my quarters, & explained a tunnel in the sun, east to west & cannot rest is not the matter, or matter it will change your character as you understand the rooms wealth of code & index a contrast to strength where there is a walk & train, a certain dead pulse & praise is more developed

— 179 —

Shane Rhodes Holding Pattern Most of my poems investigate boundaries. Boundaries between the fantastic and the real, between language being used by us and language making us, between an older lyrical tradition and a newer experimentalism. They combine a discrete personalness and habitability with a speculative edge, with a need to break language down from simple narrative use. But they also take on many forms and tones—not so much to keep up with a shifting content (though this seems a factor too) as to waylay the idea of the single writerly "voice." Poetry is many voiced: polysemic and polysonic. But it is also a bringing to light of that which normative discourse does not want to hear. It is demonstrative and demanding, messy, untidy, imperfect but undeniably human. There is breath there, breathing. I understand poetry as another sense, as a way of stitching the unknown to the known, as an investigative tool. The worst piece of advice ever is to write about what you know. Write about what you don't know instead, or write about what you know only in a way you don't know it—this is the precise space for poetry. It drags us into unknowing, into different realms of comprehension. But even that is wrong, comprehension or understanding is not the end product or the desired end. There is no end. We are going nowhere and have been doing so for years. The road through a cloud chamber. The horizon is always out of reach, level, it seems, with your bottom eyelid. It is the going, the moving, the getting-to that is poetry. The infinitesimal and infinitive gerund of being, to say it pompously, an unendable conversation we are having with the end of things.

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two poems Day and Night the Sea Whispered Thalassa She called to say her mother had died earlier that day. In her voice there was no quivering but solidity as from one who has found the flaw in matter. Somewhere distant lilacs and purple thunderheads opening over grasslands. The start of losing her was knowing what could be missed: a movement of hand, snapdragons in the window, a way of occupying the gaps between the times she wasn't noticed — which are lust, are presence, the one way time finds its way home. She promised the day before she would soon get better and so the start of fiction. I can't remember what I said but whatever it was is unimportant — language coiled in silence as, on the coast, small pieces of glass worn by the sea are called "Angels' Tears" for we think grief the permanent state of the godly. Sitting in a room with the afternoon light falling through the window — which was everything between you and what you wanted to get at — her mother's body grew cold as love can, as a thing being written about can. Flowers on the table dropping white petals to the pastel rug, not losing them

— 181 —

symbolically but, as in real life with real flowers, one by one. How quiet stillness waits yet how ceaselessly we pursue it. How quiet. How helpless. A smell in the room not of death but of things to be remembered: hair over forehead, an empty glass of water. There are few times we appear human enough for paintings but death is one of them. I hope, she said to me, her voice over the telephone distant, as from one side of a wound to the other, / hope, — the syllables coming down from the wire, dismantling into hope as if they and soon and her

were sounds of another language that would have to be washed, dressed and put to flame, the words becoming the body lying there now dismantling protein, now a certain thickness of light as it digs itself out of colour, now the unbeknownst heroine of a story she is instrumental to yet not a part of, separating, separating . . . As if something was leaving, was building its own ending apart from all of us — the imprint on the sheets, the verbs cooling down into nouns already, into the body, spirit and breath which the Incas would draw as scrolls of paper hanging before us all rolling into an ending, now, more complete than — 182 —

even the end of words or breath which especially now, with the light lost in trees and snapdragons stubbing themselves out in the window, where even the notes, the early evening dew on grass, the spirit rising with the thermals from the sun-baked ground, even the sky which has fallen, is falling, will continue to fall, even the crumpled pieces of paper sown into the cuffs of jackets (especially the crumpled pieces of paper sown into the cuffs of jackets) that Pascal called his inimitable proof of god, even that, burning off into denouement now, into unending thrust, into funerals and eulogies, into the cakes and sandwiches eaten after, after all, after that, after this, after she said, 7 hope, and it need mean nothing more than itself, the simple need for finality, like the one cleaning up corn husks after a great meal, but it was more finished than even this or an ending could rightfully be, / hope, she said to me over such long distance, / hope they soon come and get her.

Embodiment The contours of the room have taken them to this beginning and they are frightened of it, living on corners where the world drops off. They had not realized such simple touching would lead them here, that the gaps they had lived upon so long would bring such pleasure. His hands on a smoothness that reminds him of nothing but his need to go further. -jg3-

She is that hollow that forms on the emptiness. He is a whiteness the waves have left her with. They have gotten into the ends of things and don't know how to get out. Even the question takes them further. Ice on the rain barrel outside, apples husked by frost — anything to take their mind off it. A radio somewhere plays The Lemonheads. What is the word her mind has etched tonight on this couch with him? What is he stroking now, he can feel it, a newness that diminishes and remakes his every entry to this place, a taste like blackberries? They are laying the meanings down, one by one, in something that has, as its reward, no essence. This is the pleasure. That they have somehow stepped beyond the peripheries tying the night to them, tying tree to tree, coffee table to coffee table. That their bodies have mended a small piece of the world and their hands are its attendence. We have entered the scene, just like them, unawares. Outside, the lines lead to a landscape far beyond weather. Their bodies are combustible with use rimed with sweat and salt.

We will practice together, then, they think, in this work and understand its splendour. They move into each other and further into it. There is no extremity.

— 184 —

Ray Robertson Good Golly Miss Molly: An Autobiographical Poetics Neither of my parents having attended high school and no heady reading material lying around the house handy (save for the Hockey News—still a staple around my own home now), I have no tales to tell of reading Rememberance of Things Past by the tender age of 18 or composing amateurish but endearingly precocious sonnets at 12. I can recall listening to my father's large collection of '50s rock and roll 8tracks over and over again in the green carpeted spare bedroom and forgetting myself for several pleasant hours in the verbal wizardry of "Bebop-a-lu-la" and "Blue Moon" and, most forcefully, the wonderfully wonky harmonies of all those deceptively simple songs ("Lucille," "In the Still of the Night," "The Great Pretender"). Not Mallarme and the French Symbolists but Little Richard is responsible for initially enlightening me in the pleasures of pure sound divorced from purely representational sense. True to my early obsession, I have never found any piece of literature truly absorbing that was not written with a strong sense of individualized rhythm and evidenced by the author's simple joy of pure verbal playfulness. All of my novels are filled with alliteration, internal rhymes, and grammatically incorrect sentences, exactly the kinds of things the McCanLit style-police say you're just not supposed to do. Later, it was philosophy that brought me to the University of Toronto, not literature. One course, an introduction to American Literature, was enough to convince me that the whole subject matter as treated in academia was simply too dreary to allow for any further study in that direction (In 500 words what is Faulkner's Theory of Time? Are James' protagonists homosexual? What is Hemingway hiding behind his tough-guy pose?). Wrestling with the categorical imperative and Freud's theory of the unconscious directly sans the fictional coating seemed like the most honest way to solve the intellectual mysteries of 2,000 years of Western thought. Five years later, these same mysteries still safely intact, I emerged with the same basic beliefs as my grade-eight educated father but equipped with the ability to refute the ontological argument quicker than a Bobby Hull slapshot. The tens of thousands of dollars that went into acquiring my BA with High Distinction were not, then, entirely wasted after all. Still, literature was not absent from my life at this time. Excepting a handful of texts leaning more toward the existential theological than the analytical style of thinking that dominated the philosophy department, it was fiction and poetry that most engrossed my friends and I. By day and to our parents at vacation times we were sober-minded aspirants of the academic life, dutifully — 185 —

reading Hume and Locke and diligently working away on our truth-tables. By night and to each other over beer-bottle-littered kitchen tables on weekends at the house I shared in Kensington Market with two anarchists and a cat named Pushkin, we were poets, short-story writers, and novelists. The novel each of us was going to write was never spoken of, though, it being somehow understood that it was only a matter of time before each of us wrote our own version of the Great Canadian Novel—the Great Canadian Novel being something like the Great American Novel, but not as big nor as confident of itself as being all that great. Mostly, though, we were readers. None of us constrained by foot-long reading lists of novels and poems we were supposed to read or blunted by spending years developing the wonderful academic gift of deconstructing great works of art down to political jig-saw puzzles truly understood by those trained in French literary theory, we read what the hell we felt like reading. And what I lack today in breadth of literary knowledge (I regret to say I still haven't cracked open Piers Plowman) I made up for in closely and intensely reading—and, I see now, studying—the works of various authors not on the English Department syllabus but who seemed to share my interest in the wonders of language and the exploration of weighty themes, writers like Carson McCullers, Barry Hannah, and Thomas McGuane. For me, McGuane especially. Smart, funny, linguistically gifted, I'd never come across such a total literary package. Still haven't, in fact. And aside from the labour of sitting down and simply writing, the novice writer learns most about his or her craft by reading and aping in their own early work the style and effects of other writers. I'm convinced that my own style as a novelist was accelerated in its development by my being allowed to pursue in depth and at my own pace the writers I thought were speaking a version of the sort of language I myself was interested in one day speaking, and not those the academy thought I needed to know if I was going to be something called a well-rounded English Major. So: rock and roll; a formal training in philosophy; gluttonous reading of like-minded authors; two mental breakdowns and recoveries helping to build a budding novelist's faith in the shaping power of the unconscious; the youthful, sometimes painful friendship of Messrs. Beam and Daniels, taking me places and introducing me to people I certainly wouldn't have otherwise known; meeting my wife, a painter, the perfect live-in antidote to a worddrunk writer too often dangerously indifferent to the frugal beauty of a freshly sliced tomato or the shimmering contour of a perfect harvest moon: all have contributed to the development of who I am. All have contributed to how I write. All have contributed to the fact that who I am is how I write. And for me to write in a style that would betray who I am would be as fundamentally dishonest as a non-writer communicating with his fellow citizens — 186 —

in face paint and a disguised voice. This, in spite of the army of McCanLit critics and publishing types who would have us believe that there really does exist such a thing as a "correct" and "well-written" prose style (short sentences simply constructed that don't draw attention to themselves) and that to write anything else is to write badly. It also wouldn't be as much fun. Because to know that my soul is stamped onto every paragraph I send out into the world is to know that, with the composition of each new sentence, I hurl my own little spitball upon the soulless McWorld that every day more and more engulfs us. Not quite the sledgehammer that is needed, of course, but a wet streak of DNA-stoked ME that says I was here all the same. Just the same as any other honest author who aspires to make his or her every written utterance a direct expression of their own intensely personalized way of seeing, feeling, and experiencing the world. And Good Golly Miss Molly, isn't that what we all should be looking for as writers and readers both?

----"187----

from Heroes Chapter One "So I cold-cocked the Gook sonofabitch right in the face. And that, young man, is the name of that tune." Bayle shot the remains of his one-and-a-quarter-ounce bag of unsalted peanuts and considered his options. Telling himself that demanding thirteen baby bottles of Canadian Club whiskey and shouting ancient Greek maxims at whoever attempted to interfere wasn't going to be one of them, he forced his attention back to the copy of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism opened up on the tray in front of him. Only the feigned studying act seemed capable of slowing down his American aisle-side seatmate's steady flow of assorted tales of Yankee glory. He was, he let Bayle know almost immediately upon boarding during the stopover in Cincinnati, an ex-air force man of twenty-three years, had served three and a half of those years proudly defending the Free World in Korea, had voted for Reagan twice and would have a third time if they would have let him, and guessed that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ it sure as hell should be good enough for the United States of America. The man also let Bayle know that he was fairly confident of an ETA in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at 1:35 p.m. Bayle admitted that he wasn't sure what his own ETA was and tried to con centrate on the Empiricus with the explanation that he had to study for a big exam when he returned to Toronto. The man volunteered that Bayle looked a little old to still be in school. Bayle answered back a little stiffly that he wasn't just in school, he was in graduate school, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy with a speciality in Greek Hellenism, specifically the works of the third-century sceptic Sextus Empiricus. The man looked at Bayle like he'd just confessed to never having eaten a Big Mac or wanted to go to Disneyland. Therefore, he who suspends judgement about everything which is subject to opinion reaps a harvest of the most complete happiness. Brain, as usual of late, encountering difficulty sticking to the page, Flying is a lot like whiskey, Bayle thought. Stop right there; metaphors, no. No thank you, no. Always taking you places you don't want to be. The window next to him viewless since he'd pulled down the plastic cover immediately upon locating his seat, the other passengers surrounding him the same for their assorted food-and-drink-shovelling-and-slurping, paperbackturning, USA Todaying, and laptop-punching, Bayle scanned the plane for — 188 —

possible diversion. An elderly nun one seat ahead of him on the other side of the aisle absently fingered a small silver cross hanging from around her neck as she read from a worn, black Bible spread out on her lap. She lifted her head from the book from time to time to smile a soft smile at no one at all and everyone. For the official record, as far as Bayle was concerned, Christians were just Platonists with a bleeding cover boy, the very metaphysically mucky antithesis of the clean logical lines of hard sceptical indifference that world-wary Empiricus had laid down two centuries after the celebrated J.C.'s lifetime. Still, he couldn't help but envy the nun her slightly glazed state of happy labour. Bayle closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, not the first time in what felt like a very long time that a bad case of purpose-envy turned his thoughts toward immediate membership in that not-so-exclusive Canadian Club so often frequented by all those similarly anxious for two thick fingers of quick liquid meaning. Which is to say Bayle wanted a drink. Or two, or three. Or eight. In the eighteen months since he'd passed his foreign language exams and written his period and subject tests all Bayle had to do was defend his dissertation and he was done, would have his doctorate. Bayle, however, on the brink of official sceptical citizenship, felt like nothing so much as a swaggering secret virgin frightened out of his false macho bluster by a seasoned hooker's impatient command to either make it happen or to put it back in his pants. Whatever else in the past year and a half he couldn't put his name to, this, without a doubt: the dreaded shrunken truth-table; to wit, fear, for some reason, of the philosophical finish line. At the same time, power-drinking and resultant alcohol-assisted hijinks of varying degrees of self-depravation more nights a week than not at renowned Queen Street West dive Knott's Place, a practice that was doing absolutely nothing for his liver, his stalled interest in his work, or his relationship with his girlfriend of almost three years, Jane. Particularly vexing was Bayle's recent inclination for leaving late-night Empiricus and strong spirits-soaked messages on the answering machine of the early-to-bed and early-to-rise Jane, the former never failing to hang up when the latter managed to make it to the phone, Bayle—regardless of what Jane's call display might say to the contrary—never failing to deny afterward all knowledge of the calls. None of which should have necessitated that he travel a thousand miles away from home to write an article on minor-league hockey in the American mid-west for Toronto Living, a monthly magazine catering to the interests of young Canadian professionals. Except that in Bayle's case, it did. He opened his eyes to the warm smile of the nun, her pleasantly agescarred face staying with him even after she'd moved herself stoop-shoul— 189 —

dered down the aisle to the washroom at the back of the plane. Although Bayle and his sister, Patty, had been raised as good Canadian agnostics—"God is love," Bayle's father had impatiently answered his pubescent son's betweenperiods theological awakening, eager to give his attention back to the Maple Leaf-Red Wing playoff game playing on the livingroom television—Patty had undergone what their mother referred to as her Catholic Thing. By Grade 11 Bayle's sister had successfully convinced their recently widowed mother that the cost of allowing her to complete her high-school years at a private, downtown Toronto Catholic school—and not at the nearby suburban Etobicoke public high school—was well worth it, both because of the superior education she would be receiving and because she likely wouldn't have to spend the majority of her free time fighting off the sometimes crude advances of her male classmates. Even by her first year of high school, the hockey-playing, beer-guzzling Etobicoke boys never knew quite what to make of tall, brilliant, and undeniably beautiful Patty. Of course, to Bayle—and Bayle alone—Patty had immediately revealed her true motive: the wonderfully sinful thrill of reading the Catholic Church's entire index librorum prohibititorum right under the nun's noses. "But we're not Catholic," Bayle had protested. They were lying where they did whenever Patty really needed to talk, backs to the carpet on the floor of her bedroom, undergraduate university man Bayle making the trip back to Etobicoke because Patty had called him up the night before with "some really incredible news, Peter, I mean, really, really, incredible news." Their heads were almost touching although neither was able to see the face of the other, only the plain white ceiling up above. A record of Gregorian chants, another recent enthusiasm, moaned from Patty's SimpsonSears stereo. "Just think," Patty said, ignoring her brother's objection, "this time next year I'll be in the lavatory at Lorreto's smoking the day's first cigarette and cracking open Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet was on the list for years, you know." "Lavatory" was one of a handful of linguistic leftovers remaining from what their mother still called Patty's British Thing. This after, successively, the Kennedy Conspiracy Thing, the Punk Thing, and the Ecology Thing. A faded Union Jack and The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling lay cardboard-boxed and buried in the garage under their mother's broken sewing machine and Bayle's old hockey equipment, never spoken of between any of them. "Look, Patty," Bayle said, "I really don't want to be the one to spoil your party, but, uhm..." And he didn't. Not really. But he did. Almost always, Bayle did. From the womb, it seemed, Bayle knew that two and two were four and — 190 —

couldn't ever forget it, as fine a disposition as any level-headed logician or any pisser on any number of other people's parades of passion as could be asked for. But who really wants to be the one going around with a calculator reminding ten-year-old kids playing ball hockey in the frozen street all day that the odds of their growing up to be just like their hockey-playing heroes are just about as good as their being struck by lightning twice in the same afternoon? I mean, who? Who really wants to be that guy? "But what?" Patty said. "But what, Peter?" "I mean," Bayle said, "I'm not an authority or anything, but the way I understand it there's this one little thing you've got to have to be considered a Catholic." "What little thing?" "Well, God." He couldn't see them, but Bayle could hear his sister scratching away at the backs of her hands. Every one of Patty's new enthusiasms was born of a sudden burst of maniacal energy culminating in chafed red hands and wrists. Cortisone and—for brief periods, when it got bad enough—yellow dish gloves to discourage contact with the infected skin area helped, but only the inevitable loss of interest in whatever up to that point had absorbed her so entirely signalled the beginning of the healing process for his sister's rubbedraw skin. And like a lone teetotaller in a sweaty room full of raging drunks, like a voyeur standing around with his hands in his pockets at an orgy in full swing, when Patty was like this, at her scratching fervent worst, frankly she made Bayle just a little bit nervous. Might even have scared him a little. All right, she scared him. Scared the hell out of him. Bayle came to inherit a guilty relief at the sight of his melancholy sister's perfect white hands. Patty didn't say anything. After a while, she got up to flip over the record, the monks' chanting eventually giving way to the snap, pop, and dull thud that announced that the needle had gone as far as it could go, that the music was over. Worse than the sound of the scratching, Bayle hated to hear his sister silent. Patty flipped over the record. A hundred perfect voices of unshakeable devotion poured out of the cheap speakers. "Sometimes," she said, "I don't think you listen to me, Peter." "Quick little piece, isn't she?" the grey-haired man beside Bayle said. Bayle's frantic attempt to get the passing stewardess's attention and, at the same time, not appear as absolutely intoxication-desperate as he suddenly was, resulted only in the sort of wide-eyed and full-toothed smile that is usually accompanied by a caption underneath asking Have You Seen This Man? — 191 —

and advising the use of extreme caution. "Don't worry, though," the man continued. "She'll be back this way sooner or later." Just then the nun returned from the bathroom looking just as beatific as before. Bayle wished she was a flying nun and that she would take a threethousand-foot fucking leap out of his sight. No sister of mine. You're not my sister. "See?" the man said. "Here she comes now. Sooner than later, too. The little honeys can run all day but they can't hide forever." Metaphysician heal thyself, Bayle thought. Look the little honey straight in the eye and tell her what you want. Need. The stewardess stopped the cart in the aisle and rested her hands on slightly bent knees to better hear Bayle's question. Bayle looked up from his seat at the mascara and smile looking down at him and pointed out his heart's desire. The woman told him how much his drink cost and Bayle paid her. The grey-haired man had another paper cup of complimentary coffee, took three packets of sugar and two containers of cream, two packages of free chocolate chip cookies, and six napkins. The woman asked Bayle if he himself might like some cookies for later. Bayle shook his head, no, said he didn't think so, no, so the woman gave him two more packages of peanuts and three additional napkins instead. Each in his own fashion, Bayle and his seatmate set to work on their loaded-up trays. Bayle pushed the silver button on his armrest and eased back in his seat, sipping at his drink. Before long, the older man's alternating long coffee slurps and quick, rabbit-mouthed cookie nibbles sent him reluctantly forward in his chair and back to Empiricus. Leaning over the book, fresh sip of whiskey taken in and glass on its way trayward again, a single drop of Canadian Club escaped his mouth, rolled onto the topmost part of his bottom lip, held for a fraction of a second on the lower, and then splashed onto page four, a large liquid point of punctuation falling directly onto the middle section of Book 1, Chapter i:

We make no firm assertions that any of what we are about to say is exactly like we say it is, but we simply declare our position on each topic as it now appears to us, like a reporter. Bayle watched the wet dot slowly soak its way through the page, the whiskey's brown gradually turning into the page's white. A wet dot slowly soaking its way through the page, Bayle thought; the whiskey's brown gradually turning into the page's white. Period. Not a metaphor or symbol to be seen for as far as the eye can see. None.

— 192 —

Stan Rogal Poem as Collage of the Real Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. — Giorgos Seferis

The title is lifted from American poet Jack Spicer. I like it for several reasons, the main one being that the phrase is open to interpretation, not only "what does it mean specifically," but "what is real?" and "whose reality?" As well it serves to describe much of my recent poetic, both process and result. This, naturally, through years of searching and attempting to establish my own signatory voice. As this is an essay about process, I'd like to step away from the present circumstance and give some background as to how I actually came to write poetry in the first place. Like most kids I grew up with, poetry was pretty much something you took in school to augment your history lessons: "In the seaport of St. Malo, 'twas a shining morn in May, when the Commodore Jacques Cartier to the westward sailed away. In the shining old cathedral, all the town were on their knees, for the safe return of kinsmen from the undiscovered seas..." Why is it I still remember this when I've forgotten so much more? Add to this teachers who would practically warn us when "poetry" would occur on the schedule (as if to prepare us for the worst). Add to this my present belief that we were taught the worst of the great poets, or, at least, the tamest, the most pablumized, and given no access into their personal worlds, and it all comes out to a rather negative, dull study. It would only be later once I turned these spectral long-hairs into real people with real lives and real problems, concerned with real issues, and discovered a few of my own renegades (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Spicer, Berryman, Sexton...) that I actually felt at home with poetry. Enter a student teacher around grade ten. She was young, she was gorgeous, she was a bit of a hippie-flower-child and, because of a skiing accident, she was wearing a cast on her leg that was covered with best wishes and surreal/paisley drawings. I, along with every other boy in the class, was enamoured and we proceeded to give our full attention to her thoughts on poetry. What helped is that, rather than lecturing us, she put on a Leonard Cohen album and made the connection between songs and poetry. Moreover, the poet was living and a Canadian. I must admit, I didn't go and immediately become a poet, but at least my interest was sparked; I was more open. I did go and grab a copy of Cohen's Beautiful Losers though, which was another revelation — 193 —

in terms of literature. Could a serious writer really use these nasty words? Could sex be talked about with such candour? Wow! What bush had I been growing under all these so-called formative years? Time passed and I did the normal things customarily referred to as "gaining valuable life experience": went to technical school, flunked out as a draftsman/builder, got a job as assistant manager in a bowling alley, got married, got divorced, then pulled the rug out from under myself completely and went to Simon Fraser University to start over again as a student. Along the way, I dabbled in short stories a bit, took a few creative writing courses and read stuff that interested me. The surprising thing was that, coming from a very working class background with no one within spitting distance who was even remotely involved in arts or education, the type of works I was drawn toward I later discovered were considered literary. Even Richard Brautigan, who I read and enjoyed simply because of his spare style and humour, I later studied at SFU in terms of his post-modern approach. Fluke? Blind luck? Genes? Guided by a higher power? I don't know, and, to tell the truth, I don't care. I had some excellent teachers along the way. Poet/fabulist Michael J. Yates—a wild and crazy guy at the time, later to be shunned by both the literary and academic worlds, and so, driven to take a job as a guard at the former Ocala Prison in Burnaby—pointed the way to metaphor and presented me with a list of worthwhile reading that ran for pages. Poet/professor d.h. sullivan sharpened my objective eye and got me writing poetry as a way of paring down my prose. "What you want," he said, "is complexity, not complication. Complication leads to confusion." He was the type who asked for essays no longer than four pages. "You can say a lot in a few words. You just have to choose them carefully." He also presented me with a concrete example of complexity in a poem, an example which brought back memories of grade ten. He said that Leonard Cohen had two versions of "Suzanne." In the song, he ends with "she touched his perfect body with her mind," thereby completing the love circle, whereas the poem reads: "she touched her perfect body with her mind," effectively leaving the relationship between the man and the woman open for interpretation. Dorothy Livesay was writer-in-residence for a term and I presented her with a number of my poems for critiquing. She told me that while she found them well-written, they were a bit metaphysical for her taste. I nodded as if in complete understanding and thanked her, we talked a bit, then I rushed home to look up the meaning of "metaphysical." I hadn't a clue as to what it meant. Even after I read the definition, I wasn't sure how the term applied to my work. Later, I signed up for a Philosophy course titled Metaphysics in Literature. After careful consideration, it turns out that Dorothy was right, and I am only too happy to be a part of this group. As a matter of fact, Andrew — 194 —

Marvell was kind enough to write a foreword to my collection, Geometry of the Odd. I began taking theatre classes in order to feel comfortable reading my work in public. Once involved, however, I was taken by the form and, along with trying my hand at acting and directing, I started writing plays. I think that this has certainly influenced my poetry in terms of voice, rhythm and instilling many of the poems with a dramatic quality. At the same time, I was reading performance-type poets such as Whitman and the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, et al. Not all my poems are of this nature. Others are quiet, contemplative, imagistic and so on. The point being that I like to put together collections that have variety; I don't want to bore the audience or myself by repeating the same voice, the same poem, over and over again. To this end, as well as varying voices, I also enlist varying discourses, a subject I'll touch more on later. At this point, I'll merely say that all my studies, all my writing was a search for what one director/professor—Peter Feldman—called the need to develop a signature. This is a term which makes more sense to me than what is often called voice in a poet, as voice strikes me as more about creating a character or persona while omitting the more formal aspects of poetry—not just who puts the poem together, but how and with what. For Peter, signature means that the work is recognized apart from the creator. An audience sees a play or reads a poem and says, "This is the work of Stan Rogal." Or even, "This is Stan Rogal." Love it or hate it, there is no mistaking or escaping the author. Another theatre professor, Gary Pogrow, divided plays into three types: plot-driven, character-driven and idea-driven. It was his belief that the third kind was the most difficult to stage as it requires a lot more from the audience. Not only do you want them to be a part of the action, you want them to be outside thinking about it as well. Not only do you want them to consider the decisions of the characters, you want them to consider their own life-making decisions. Consider Bertolt Brecht and his alienation effect. I am definitely of this latter stream, which threads me back to Dorothy Livesay and her comment about metaphysics. The point being, I don't think I could change even if I wanted to. As much as it frightens me to divide the world simply into gross sections

(more frightening to know that everything can fit), I find that it can be useful. Like saying there are two types of people, essentialists and materialists. Essentialists are those who believe that there is some sort of primary "stuff" ("form" for Plato; "soul" for religion) that is beyond the physical. For materialists, what you see is what you get, or, having peeled away the layers of the onion, what you have is not the essence of the onion, but nothing. The onion only exists because of its materiality. I am of this second group and I offer this piece of information because it is an idea that drives me and my work. How — 195 —

much onion can be peeled away before it is no longer recognized as an onion? How much of a person? How much need be added before we misrecognize a thing completely? This is the peculiar realm of metaphysics. Obtaining an M.A. at York University in Toronto, I was required to take a course in Literary Theory, which opened my eyes to another whole new world: Lacan, Derrida, Barthes and, most particularly for me, a Russian named Viktor Schklovsky. In one essay he wrote: The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet... poets are more concerned with arranging images than with creating them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them. By "works of art" in the narrow sense, we mean works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible. These words were totally liberating. It meant that a poet was more of a maker, a builder of sorts, able to grab materials from anywhere and, by using various techniques or tools, create a poem that was at once unique and personal. This essay seemed to connect to Jack Spicer's dictum: "A poem is a collage of the real." It also seemed to approximate what I was already doing with my poetry. That is, attempting to load my poems with as much material as possible, while maintaining some sort of order and cohesiveness; attempting to make complex rather than merely complicated. I was already familiar with collage as an art form as I had been creating pieces with cut-out pictures and glue since I was a kid. The difference for me had been that words were somehow sacrosanct—it was one thing to cut up pictures from magazines and paste them onto a board and call it mine, quite another to take someone else's words and use them in various ways for my own purposes. And yet, why not? Language and ideas belong to the people who use them and these have been transferred and transformed through the ages. I realized that it was less a matter of plagiarism and more a matter of how much more-or-less was necessary to make the words my own; how much to add and subtract from the onion. Understand that I'm not talking here of taking someone's poem and altering the words to make it my own, though sometimes I may lift a line here or there. What I'm talking about is delving into other discourses: art, math, science, ecology, journalism...to create a new discourse. Reading the letters between Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, Lorine writes that "facts are beautiful in themselves." Not only did I find the line beautiful, I also agreed with the sentiment and decided not to be afraid to use a piece of information — 196 —

in toto if I found it beautiful. What else? Believing that the past exists as a very real presence, affecting everything in the present as well as the future, it becomes part of my poetic. This includes both the real past (that thing that's recorded as history, flawed though it may be) as well as the mythical past (which contains its own elements of truth). My language becomes a mix of past and present, sacred and profane, lofty and scatological, erudite and everyday. Jack Spicer said, "Things don't connect, they correspond." In other words, you set up a situation where things talk to each other and an audience; the reader gets in on the conversation, picking up whatever he or she can. This is one of the beauties of collage, it opens rather than closes the field. This is also the manner in which people actually do think and communicate—in a non-linear fashion. I'd say it's rare, if not impossible, that a person is ever thinking along a single track. There are always numerous tracks going on that create the consciousness. One may be stronger or more important at any one time, but that's all. In a collage, there is normally a major theme and the elements used to construct the piece serve to illuminate that theme. Naturally, the elements are not necessarily transparent or simple illustration. There is metaphor, there is allusion, there is the fact that two things put together create a third and so on. I mean, is it possible for someone to think about a love story without having Bogart and Bacall, Romeo and Juliet, Snow White and her Prince come to mind? Or see a rainbow without thinking of Oz? These are just examples and, while everyone carries their own personal baggage and history, many elements are going to overlap. Even someone knowing nothing about Freud can bandy around terms like ego, id and the subconscious. It is this way in much of my poetry. I have a spine upon which I hang things that depend upon a certain correspondence and while I have a pretty clear idea of what the poem is trying to do, a reader can go off in another direction for part of the way, perhaps even entirely, though I do provide signposts. In one sense, it's like jazz improvisation. There's a basic melody that everyone is familiar with, then the musicians riff on it, taking it out to who-knows-where, but always touching in and coming back to the original tune. I spoke to some students recently and said that in some ways, it's like the basic story is this: I'm going to the store for a loaf of bread. Now, along the way, things happen. I bump into a friend or I don't; a car almost hits me or doesn't; there are sights to see or not; I think about paying my bills, doing my laundry, winning the lottery, flying to the moon, getting laid. When I reach the store, there's all this other stuff around and do I buy something else or don't I? If I went for a loaf of white do I return with a loaf of multigrain or what? This, to me, is the way life works, not simple and straight ahead, but complex and roundabout with many distractions and detours along the way. A poet — 197 —

friend of mine, Al Moritz, once said to me: "I like your work, but I could never write that way; using that stream-of-consciousness style. I have to know why every word is there." He turned to someone else at that moment, so I couldn't respond that I don't write in stream-of-consciousness and I also know why every word is there. In fact, I am totally anal about knowing why every word is there and, having been raised the elder, most responsible son, I feel that the main challenge in my poetry is how to break the balls of logic, or, as I once told my former wife, my method is to write the poem out in a very linear fashion, then pervert it. She took offence to my usage of the word pervert and I then had to explain that the actual definition has less to do with sex and more to do with moving away from the norm and upsetting expectations. Again, a concept which serves to drive my poetic. What else? My chapbook, In Search of the Emerald City, compares the artistic journeys of Rimbaud and Van Gogh with the imaginary journey of Dorothy in The Wizard ofOz. In The Imaginary Museum I drew inspiration from works of art and art theory. Sweet Betsy From Pike began with a folk song and incorporated ecological issues as a main theme. Along the way, I introduced fairy tales, stories, transformation myths and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Lines of Embarkation grew out of my reading of Douglas Hofstadter's book, Goedel, Escher & Bach and included mathematical discourse as well as myth, Zen Buddhism, puns, palindromes, homonyms and anagrams. Personations had to do with exploring the experience of being male; exploring questions such as: can I accept my own gender/sexuality and live with it or do I need to enrol in some kind of 12-step Program to fully comprehend? Enter the Marlboro Man, The Duke, Hamlet, et al. Geometry of the Odd has to do with Chaos Theory. I felt that chaos was a terrific metaphor for most of us trying to live our lives, though maybe especially artists. I was also impressed by the fact that science was discovering that the world couldn't be quantified or qualified so easily and that images and metaphors were being used to describe the unknown. In fact, the term "Quark" was lifted from a James Joyce poem. I figured if science could borrow from poetry, then I could do the same, and proceeded to plunder texts, grabbing phrases like "strange attractors," "robust, doomed and strange systems" and "lines of least resistance." Naturally, if science was bending, I also had to incorporate other pseudo-sciences, such as alchemy, astronomy, astrology, et cetera. All of this, you understand, to try and make some kind of sense of the world around me. Not that I think for a minute that I'll solve anything, only that I believe, as Leo Tolstoy said: "The unexamined life is not worth living." I guess the other point I'd like to make is that, while I take my poetry seriously, I feel there is a lot of humour as well, albeit a bit on the dark side. I mean, to write about an affair with a married woman, as in the poem "Tango," — 198 —

is pretty serious stuff, but when the narrator says: "That, & that breasts are funny things. When hers grew, her feet disappeared" adds at least a touch of levity to the situation. "Geometry of the Odd" is a useful poem of mine for pointing out other formal strategies that are staples in my work. The line: "No Atlas me. A last. A salt. A slat..." contains anagrams plus a homonym, so that it might read: "A last. Assault." There is a quote from Goethe in italics: "What is within is without & vice versa." I use the ampersand because it is visually interesting, like a coupling hook between train cars. There is the use of factual data, such as, if one was to unravel a lung, there would be enough tissue to cover a tennis court, which I transcribe as: "A simply drawn breath / Terrifies / In its ability to stretch a lung / past the limits of a tennis court." A beautiful fact, and sort of funny, yes or no? There is the notion that history repeats itself and that the media is there to capture the moment ad nauseum: "The same shots repeat over & over again / From every angle & at every speed. / Clearly, the quarterback's ankle snaps. / Clearly, the putt drops from sixty feet. / Clearly, the bullet worms its way through the skull / & out the other side." There is the age-old theme of a journey: "a quest improves upon acquaintance (they say)." This line also serves as an invitation to the reader to be a part of the process. Since I believe that the simile is much overused, I tend to shun it. Since I believe that poetry is alive and active, I tend toward Kenneth Rexroth's advice: "Avoid adjectives, they bleed nouns" and "Insist, always, on the verb." How does it all fit together? Does it all fit together? Can it all fit together? I don't know. In another poem I write: "With Elmer's glue, if at all." I can only travel by my own lights and trust that a few others will want to tag along for the experience, getting what they can out of the poems. To this end I say: here's the poem. If you're interested, check it out.

— 199 —

two poems Geometry of the Odd I don't know whether to kill myself or go bowling. — Judith Fitzgerald Stuck in a surround of woods. What could be Anywhere else on this flat earth. But isn't. Is Here. A place where everything begins & ends in middles strikes as nowhere to a dead-beat heart. For sake of a single disremembered cup I wander missing & never-never-to-return. No Atlas me. A last. A salt. A slat Nailed across a pane from which No face. No figure. No faint recollection. Even allowing the possibility I don't miss something good if I come upon it Won't vanquish the fact. A simply drawn breath Terrifies In its ability to stretch a lung past the limits of a tennis court. What is within is without & vice versa. The fear that issues from a land that calls on ice to produce heat even as it freezes remains A mystery. Or: how the patterns of earthquakes also govern the distribution of incomes in a free-market economy fuels the 2nc* Law of Thermodynamics & slides a state toward increasing disorder. Final cause, remarks: the earth is what it is so that humanity can do what it does. Hardly settling The expression of our failure To orient ourselves in a physical universe has us Pinning butterfly wings to the backs of mountains — 200 —

Only to see them flutter once & vanish. Look up! Trees have stars in their hair & the spines of hanged men slowly coil toward the upper branches. Within the frame of this raptured blue light The same shots repeat over & over again From every angle & at every speed. Clearly, the quarterback's ankle snaps. Clearly, the putt drops from sixty feet. Clearly, the bullet worms its way through the skull & out the other side. There is a certain amount of suggestiveness that is (Clearly) Necessary. Now imagine a human being scaled up twice its size & you imagine a structure whose bones collapse under its own weight. Who cannot not remain foreign among With bare pubes, shaggy tits & an unerring eye For the obvious, cries: "We are all of us robust, strange & Doomed." Suffer the little children? The little children. They do. Suffer. Whereas I wouldn't normal be caught Dead. Yet, a quest improves upon acquaintance (they say) & figures Now that I'm here, I'm here. I'd misrecognize me anywhere.

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Alchemical: The First I have wet lips & know the art of losing old conscience in the depths of a bed. — Charles Baudelaire Odd & in love at worst, at best Fomenting in the fractious teeth of it Who long for a purely vagrant path are nicked as Criminal between heart-of-hearts with minds bent to no good listening. Listen. At base, facts never explain anything without Fantasy to intercourse Blood runs cold & the strict sun directly Withers. Given this frame How can we not not love? Whether in dreams, in bars or huddled in darkness The potential to spark Marks any door a window offering Endless Flights Of stars. Hung up by most improper woods Will you come to me Configures incubus & succubus aroused At the sight of leaded lids now soon to be Laid to rest. Miss libidinal & how Poetry flowers out of joint. Half-hearted belief thirst for variety Invariably leads to bloodshed Must also half-concur confinement binds together Combinations wanting colour, mainly: gold. Whereas to attempt the invisible is to need The courage of an alien A promise, kiss or ring are relics signifying Nothing ----202----

We know Familiarity breeds indifference & flow shifting from smooth to turbulent Breaks all polite observations. As well, what rhymes with reason is Alas & alack Stood up waiting at the altar Without a prayer. The maligned hand (meanwhile) being proffered By lovers & fools alike Fingers the odyssey in a land plagued with hoary hags & demons. It is precisely here, along some fatal descent an innocent mole breaks a trail & bodies seek heat for the sheer Adventure. No regrets, coyote. Faith in the premise that every dream is a repressed burning With a lipstick Sets her mouth A blaze.

---203---

Ian Samuels with JC Wilcke COPPING: The Double Voice and Jazz Ethics Ian L Samuels (ILS) andJC Wilcke (JC) are both saxophonists of the jazz persuasion, and interestingly, in terms of the chronological ordering of the events in their respective artistic careers, musicians first and poets next. Jazz is a major influence in their writing practices, both individually and collaboratively, when they get together to write a piece and blow words. Jazz is an ethics that informs how they interpret and use language. Below are fragments from a recent interview of theirs with a student (let's call him Jim) at the Sun Ra School of Ethics and Epistemology about the notion of jazz ethics. JIM: Jazz musicians spend a lot of time stealing from each other. JC/ILS: What's that got to do with ethics? JIM: Copping licks in jazz is a thievery completely unlike plagiarism. Acting in a manner not unlike the operation of a chop shop for hot cars, jazz musicians cop licks from other players, say, the 1-2-3-5 patterns of Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and maybe one or two sweeping lines from Ornette Coleman's "Broadway Blues," join them by a pattern of arpeggiated chords, and recombine them in an improvisational moment. Fresh paint, a new stereo, some good tires, the fenders from a Camarro and the rear spoiler from a Ferrari, with bucket seats. JC/ILS: But doesn't that kind of recombination happen in any musical genre, any performance? Why are you singling jazz out as an instance of this? JIM: Well, much contemporary music is concerned with signifying itself as "new" music. But how "new" is [insert song title here] by [insert boy/girl band here], which slaps the blazon developed in Romantic poetry listing the merits of a lover's eyes, hair, skin, talent for kissing, et cetera over a generic easy-listening R&B groove? JC/ILS: So maybe it's a difference of degree we're talking about, then; maybe jazz musicians were more willing to throw the canonical sonic expressions against the wall and build with the fragments. JIM: Yeah, something like that, but when you reach a certain point you're really talking about a difference in approach, in the whole ethics of the thing. 204------

JC/ILS: What does that say about poetry, though? Could you expand on that earlier point about Romanticism? JIM: Okay, sure. The Romantic poem is supposedly the most personally expressive, individualistic kind of poem, right? Especially since it was theoretically based on capturing "speech." But the odd thing is that if you feed the Romantic ideal to a group of grade 7 English lit students, what you get isn't "personal" at all—instead you'll get a few standard themes with various permutations: if it's a piece about love, for instance, you're likely to get pretty eyes, I've never met anyone like him/her before, I wanna, I wanna be with you forever. JC/ILS: So the Romantic mode wasn't concerned with "personal" expression so much as it was with standardizing an image of and approach to poetry, and creating a class of poets that could master those templates, inflect them and reliably reproduce them. JIM: Right. So a poem in that sense, in that tradition, manifests itself from a collected set of utterances coded as proper for love poetry recombined and resignified as the voice of the poet peeking onto the pedestal. So there is recombination there: the "speech-based" poem and jazz operate somewhat similarly by drawing from a pool of rehearsed significations and reassembling them. The difference between them, however, is speech-based poetics' inherent desire to generate a gorgeous "personal" voice without recognizing that it, too, cops language from other poems and narratives the writer may have encountered before the time of the writing. The ethics of jazz regards stealin' as a kind of emancipatory practice, and possibly the only way to make things new. Copping is a self-conscious act in jazz ethics. JC/ILS: So are we talking about a more authentic personalization of the work? JIM: No. "Personal" would be as much of an illusion for a poetics of jazz as it is in the "speech-based" poem. What you're recognizing is that you're working with language as a social material, something you're taking, busting up and reshaping, but it still has a history—multiple histories, in fact, depending on who comes to read it—and that history is part of what you're playing off. It can't be purely "personal" or "new" in the sense that it's solely the product of an author, but what you can do is move the pieces you have in an interesting direction and make the "new" take notice of the "old" and vice versa, make them talk to each other. ---205---

JC/ILS: If we accept that, then maybe we could find some parallels between the "copping" that takes place in jazz and what happens in language more generally, not just so-called "literary" language. JIM: Good point. I'm currently living in Japan and enjoying an exposure, and I've realized that all language is like learning jazz: we pick up what we listen to, rehearse it again and again, figure out what works in a given situation, and let it rip in the moment of utterance. Spending days around the office listening to spoken Japanese all day, I learn fragments of phrases here and there, atchi kotchi, cop them, and drop them in moments when they are useful. For a socalled "native" English speaker who began his/her learning of English as a child, the copping process is the same, but goes unnoticed as copping; instead we consider learning language as a process of learning, not stealing phrases and words from a social pool of utterances. JC/ILS: But doesn't that social pool of utterances come with its own restrictions, its own baggage? Doesn't the language need that baggage, that shared mythology, to function? You talked earlier about copping being "emancipatory," but it seems we would want to qualify that a little bit. JIM: Well, sure, language needs its baggage to "function" in a day-to-day setting, but part of the point of writing poetry (or playing music, or painting, or what have you) is to move into the territories beyond day-to-day utility and see what's out there. I'm not saying this is some Utopian field of "play" or that it's emancipatory in any absolute sense. The only way to achieve a purely emancipatory moment would be to hand your reader a blank page and let them make their own damn poem, but even then you'd be handing them a certain size and type of paper. So you can't "free" language entirely and still have language—any more than you can free music entirely from the expectations of its listeners. What you can do is put daily, supposedly utilitarian language in perspective and maybe help to draw attention to all the instances of copping that it can't, or won't, admit to on its own. This got us thinking about copping in our own work. In the following piece, for instance, JC stole several lines from Ron Silliman's book Demo to Ink Consonants keep the vowels from leaking, the aesthetic beauty of the gas bill in handwritten Japanese, ---206---

a catch in my throat allows public access to the vowels I might not be using at any given moment, the currency of this palette of consonants rolled from the back of the throat, whum, tee dum tah, a kiss through my shirt a kiss through the verb to kiss, you're telling me something urgent, but I am counting the syllables as you speak. A kiss through a verb, a kiss through a scarf, kiss the verb now mean this, syntax ambulance you are the void from which to gesture culturally if it were possible to pause pregnancy.1 Let's condemn the thief: JC copped lines 1, 11-12, and the combined words "syntax ambulance" in line 15. Removed from Silliman's text and re-signified in the poem above, do the lines remain Silliman's? Or do they become Wilcke's lines, resonant with the text they come from? An especially interesting question since Silliman is avowedly concerned with breaking the sentence from its normal frameworks of meaning, yet JC has stolen them back into a poem much less concerned with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry-type disjunction, but rather with using the line break to filter a kind of haiku sensibility through an expatriate sense of dislocation. JC: So, I copped that line from Silliman because, while I was reading, it struck me how resonant it was with my own work at the time. It also provided a good kick-off for the language I wanted to appear in that poem. Silliman's text resonated with a text that I hadn't written yet, and within my poem, those copped lines resonate back to Silliman. JIM: Yeah, that's just what I'm talking about! A double gesture, playing the "new" and the "traditional" or "original" off each other while directing the reader's attention to the concerns of language and communication ("a kiss through the verb"...) -*-207--

Okay, Jim, you can relax now. A second example: lan's book Cobra is built almost entirely from fragments of found documents reworked, recast, and re-presented as poems in their own right. Here's one example: Villa Nova (Dream).

A lively talk with the master of the house. Floating face skyward in faith he laid out his kitchen memories: the whole black staff stands in the doorway and listens contentedly to the conversation—an excellent cook sprouts with steel conveniences through the boards—a light untinged by envy falls on three courses of meat—a Creole girl on his left to change the plates. Famines fled his open mouth the length of the painted country.2 There are, strictly speaking, just over twenty words there that aren't directly copped from another source—but does their reorganization represent a "jazz" strategy of the kind we've been discussing with Jim? Well, it does in a different sense from JC's piece—what's being gestured toward here is appropriation of words and phrases forged in an extremely violent clash between the European and African histories in the New World (slavery in ^^-century Brazil), filtered through a kind of phantom narrator who's trying to make sense of a hallucinatory, almost nightmarish (sur)reality generated by those conflicts, to harmonize them into something like a narrative. Ultimately, the narrative never arrives fully formed; the discordant heritage of these phrases, their roots in conflict and engagement with each other have to remain visible. There are two key concepts raised here that explain how jazz ethics is working. The first of these is an idea of double-voicedness3 and how appropriation (of words, sounds, structures etc.) can produce a double-voiced work. The second is the space of discrepant engagement4 that double-voicedness allows us to inhabit. So first, appropriation and the double voice. The word, as Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin discussed, is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other peoples' intentions; it ---208----

is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.5 It's not hard to see how making the word or the sound one's own ties in with jazz, which after all has its origins as an African-American music that made European instruments and musical traditions "its own" by fusing them with rhythms of African descent. Jazz is an ethical strategy of critical revision enacted through a play of (double) voices resonant with antecedent European and African musical ideas and methodologies. It is double-voiced, a mode that re-signifies European and African antecedents in a gesture of creating the "new"—a double gesture that signifies the traditional—jazz's African/European origins—within a single (temporal) moment of utterance. In one such utterance we hear the resonance of the double voice, a voice that doesn't seek to exclude or repress either heritage but rather addresses itself to the confrontation and the play between them. It's this that makes jazz ethics interesting for poetry. The double voice is a navigation chart to what Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, has called "discrepant experience."6 What Said was looking for was a way of dealing with heritages and histories that had existed in (often violent) confrontation; he was theorizing a critical method that could escape the rhetoric of simple opposition/exclusion that characterized so many of those relationships, and instead look in more detail at their engagement with each other, the ways in which they borrowed from and influenced each other even as they fought. Here again jazz, as the musical echo of just the sort of encounter Said is talking about (the European and the African), is instructive. It is an ethics that quite precisely inhabits that critical discourse he's looking for, what we might call a discourse of discrepant engagement—a discourse that "rather than suppressing resonance, dissonance, noise, seeks to remain open to them. Its admission of resonances contends with resolution."7 Jazz ethics reinvents through renaming its antecedents, taking specific utterances copped from a recognizable source (the Silliman), and reorganizing them into a new structure. JC/ILS: So jazz ethics is really the use of appropriation or "copping" to effect a double-voicedness that allows discrepant engagement between conflicted histories, right? JIM: See? Simple, isn't it?

--–209---

Notes 1. From the poem 'Tomograph" in the longer work F(o)urth Mouth by JC Wilcke. 2. Samuels, Ian. Cobra. Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2000. 3. Henry Louis Gates Jr. develops this notion in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xxiii. 4. Nathaniel Mackey coined the term "discrepant engagement" in his book of the same name. As will be discussed later, the term resonates strongly with Edward Said's ideas of "discrepant experience" in Culture and Imperialism. 5. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983. 6. Said. Culture and Imperialism, pp. 31-43. 7. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement p. 19.

-*--210---

Centens by JC Wilcke Brush seeds off sheet prepare to milk with pen insurrection of repository letters wide passive voice invoice; and which octave states the predicate? sloe-eyes sloe-gin satyr, scanner, soapsuds not perfect but a messy juice, mango slurped for rapid breakfast over the kitchen sink peel and pesticide farmer's sticker on the dog's ass, the choking child, the laughing pie. Hook, a needle, a kiss for thigh, international global gastrointestinal libation.

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Ignoble lines, have too gleaming folds over nipples glass grammar booths the black beard herd of cows feet stages frog cloth drips with tea one fine runnel rusting a lip lost lovers in the bathhouse.

---212---

even the wayward assume a native tongue a spider or tiger a bale in the balm a thigh with a driver

---213---

When I made this bowl others called it a helmet a centens a vague mission to think thinking and do doing the circle's razed edge and tongue's ridge white with yeast speak ossan a white washed textbook our dogs hate white people walk walking or talk talking who ate and painted painted eating the sharp tongue are you talking about the moon or looking at otsukisama would you take your car to a mechanic who can't drive would you take your language to a dull tongue the sudden fish the darting tip I'll take the forks home as a souvenir

---214---

In language words may be minced, wasted, due, squandered, savored, cried over, but nevertheless they are on tape, theoretical bricks raining onto the houses, if only they understood Pound's wanderings through Chinese character, Fenollosa's impeccable equestrian, the spin cycle. It's rather considerate of a person's humanity when others around "me" start using words the moment I acquire them.

---215---

Choking sunken sleeves a drifting ship levels of maintenance to language cut unevenly at ends "nape" no one will see me in this evening's wind the hair in the brush "debris" mixed fingerprints there was a body there it was all moments hold lungbreath there are several without gerunds Am I satisfied when I cock shy head at 45 degrees Veiled in purchase in skyscrapers in crumble in earthquakes in Umeda "in" wallets of expression paying the phonic charm fee distraction-shopping the mast rusting, this dot, that comma where those bright, blinking vows sign promise: neck bent at 45 degrees feet balance body on the raised curb who raised it? Whose feet are those? Mine? In these shoes? Or to kiss triple-paned safety window glass creates debris, induces labor and waste not recognized as action discarded mispronounced phatic words veiled in agent-lost objects aching for the comfort of car noise in "my" town buildings I'm not permitted to enter but certainly the yew is good up there ---216---

The most recent weeds in the fists of foreigners or plastic Canadian beavers to appease gift-giving gerunds shifting sky and plastic sea stinking seatmate you can't be polite with hands this big pulling clouds from pill bottles its matter a lyric lick on the verbal pedestal Pronunciation of full "L" "I" understood half but spelled it poorly. The machine that sustains "us" made of pencils and woks, cookies and bellies, fat and thin, hold music, muppets, caution an abdomen stretched and distended with frustrated fluencies, where's page 1.

---217---

Having affairs in foreign counties because of preposition or proposition—it's hard to distinguish on a hot summer's day when "hot" is both metaphor and metonymy with a sweaty little synecdoche between skin and gingham shirt. Mysteries of lunch, can we eat onions, at table when your eye spills your character or characters from that other language the verb "to put" brought it here

---218---

— is the first word in fluency. Lie about your reading level: buy a paper and mumble the words you recognize out loud in public on the bus or train, you can't fix everyone but maybe 2 or 3 people this week can appreciate your specialized foreign services, I learned Japanese in bed. If bp only knew that "H" in Japanese stands for "fuck" then maybe Toyota wouldn't have named it's luxury car "Royal Saloon."

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Monday ponders verbs Japanese too use cans for ashtrays mouth cut in clay face apart from the tongues that shaped the me a lurid pronoun licking gender clean in body's cake-paste plastering form with function: Japanese too use cans twists tongue anew pools of spit runnel lips leak secrets of mouth lip-wrap a new tongue in kuchi ten long breaths before bleat oh umaii jyann and the words keep marching along/the wordskeep marching along/the wordskeepmarchmg a lung a ring a lung gadang gadong a ring a rung gadang gadong

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Involves the body, midflight to the gerund mistakes we don't recognize as action the tongue's launch padding un-entangling snakes of kanji with "Excuse me" sumimasen when the brambles take that you out of you and into body should be an invitation to awayness to enact the disembodiment that language threatens the slur in your words divides a meaning I can't mouth, it's a wonder (we) have Tongues to tongue at all. what's left is residue: dry saliva knots in speech muscles a spilling of the guts or semen vocable trails against the saxophone of the spine.

---221---

These poems write in a world that heard the body sipping the sticky palette of experiential resources collected in subtitles that don't match the mouth. but a body doesn't simply stand in a room without this desk's dirty filth. Citation is the prime index of Citroen concrete to rain-shelter at the "station," in the "malls." Huge quotation marks float on either side of the head "A less quotable body more apt to fit into clothes sewn for smaller chests and hips" "The privilege of native utterance or at least first coinage" Searching for history cheat notes in the neighbour's traditional rooms permanent foreigner, nothing to mean.

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nathalie Stephens Berlin "If I had the strength to drown beneath these walls between these words I could send myself in this envelope And you would know exactly where I am." Suzanne Hancock, The Time Between Forgetting

M'ore Word is want. Knocking hard up against the body. Word is disappearance. The graven image sunk sharply into stone. Word is echo. Breath pulling from lips hollowing out time. So what? Answer me.

Want. To inhabit the interstices. To reach for the in-between places. Touch what doesn't exist. Pull stone from body broken. Mouth wide, temples beating, low groan in the abdomen. That madness. What someone said. Jabes' white sheet of paper. Steiner's trahison. (I never said any of that). Read or write text across genre. Fuck with the potency of pre-configured form. Rail. Or better yet, say nothing, mouth wide, temples beating, fist wedged between teeth. Write it all down. Cross it all out. (What's your blood type?) There is confusion in it. The persistent refusal of delineation. Want something hard to bite into. Something that will break. Take a new form. Spill. What Faust asked for I got. Look inside. See nothing. Look again. I have scripted folly with a fine chisel on my leg bone. Strips of skin piled neatly on the table. You wanted this. ----223----

Language is madness. (Truism.) I speak with cloven tongue the pull between languages. Down. Write it down. I embody trahison. Where does that leave me? Body rent, straddling perversions. I write in two languages, more. The poem emerges in no language at all (the il-language of the poem). The language of torment (rather, the tormented language), the strain of too great a weight (grammar, more grammar) pushing up against the roof of the mouth. So, to the hand rummaging through bone. The echo of teeth knocking together, head blown off the body.

A poem is not (meant to be) a pretty thing. First in a string of betrayals. The book must be unwritten in order to be read. Peel hand from page. Rub ink from skin until it's gone all gone. Pull back the covers. There is nothing there. That absence. The very thing that haunts. That threatens. That betrays. (The very thing you said.) When a word catches in the throat it must do one of two things. It must descend further into the body. Or it must emerge through the mouth. Ejaculate, or something less projectile—drool. If it remains where it is, it will eventually constrict the windpipe altogether, severing said head from body. Breath is an ellipsis. We all live in silence. We all live in silence. There are theologies of madness. There are theologies of violence. There are theologies of desire. Theologies of text. Of interpretation. Of inclination. Of fucking. Of gender. Of want. All of which delineate. All of which circumscribe. All of which impede. Dogma. Expect the unexpected. We build walls and lean against them some of which we pull right down. We produce sexualities and live by them some of which we then refute. We write texts and publish them some of which we forget. We lose ourselves in time. We repeat ourselves, overlap, disappear, emerge, disappear again. Voice is echo. What we hear we only think we hear. As with text. In reading we disappear. Poetry is inscription. "I was here." Blunt knife cutting into wood skin earth and no blood to show for it. Anne Carson: "When [Van Gogh] looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colour to things and he saw that the nails were in pain."

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Is body but pretext? Is the poem what gives it form? The thing that cannot ever be touched. I am reaching for it and I can't feel a thing. Wars. It's the forgetting. The peril of loss. The blooded incantation. Tragedy in a tight fist pummelling. And the sudden remembrance. That hews word from body. Memory is like that. It contorts and convolutes. It bludgeons. It too betrays. A poem is a forgotten thing remembered. Grief-stricken. Jubilant. A suture. Joining history to fabrication. Body to need. Mouth to mouth. No text is sacred. Nothing is ever for real. The earth shifts beneath our feet. We are walking in circles looking again and again at the same thing.

First Person Plural We is I multiplied. / understood collectively. / is the convergence of time person place. The chasm into which all things fall some of which surface at different times all at once or not at all. It is a form of lineage. A kind of history. A procession of deaths trailing across the tongue. March. We march. Beat. We beat. Love. We love. And in between the poem falls into place. Or perhaps is pulled from there. From mite-infested crevices. From pools of stagnant water. From narrownecked vials of poison. A poem is a thing of danger. A meeting place. A refusal. A cry. What reaches the reader is the echo. Of words moving through time-space. Of bodies in heat walking along a rushing river beneath a full moon in summer. Or standing under a stone archway the river stilled by ice in a crystalline city. Somewhere between night and day. A poem is a city under siege. A dismembered body. A slow or sudden death, ffl revient au meme. Poem is place is geography. A travelogue of desire. All the things the body knows and won't divulge. To read is to fetishize. Perhaps the same can be said of writing, pourquoi pas? ----225---

As I write I cross myself out. I move toward nothing. I strive for words that are corporeal. Yet I write in abstraction. This neant, I want to hold it in my hands, push it into my mouth, dissolve (in) it. What is the literary equivalent of absolution? Jabes' white page? An unwritten text? An underlined passage in my copy of your book? See me. (Don't look). These are all concepts. Theories. Fabrication. In Le Journal de Sarah, Jabes writes: "Je ne veux plus etre lue." 7 is a disappearing act. A desire always to be in a new place speaking a different language reading an unfamiliar text. The refutation of lineage, of precepts, antecedents. When I look over my shoulder I see nothing. When I open a door a room vanishes. When I track constellations they reformulate themselves. When I kiss you I find myself alone. When you touch me I am long gone. When you speak my name I don't answer. Because 7 doesn't exist. Or rather, exists only in relation to the wall against which J leans. Without walls, 7 becomes the much sought-after neant. That which it is. The unread book. The unwritten poem. The unseen city. Breath. What is possible but unattempted. Freedom. Imagined or real.

Polysemique Who do you betray when you read? What folly do you engage in when you live by rote? Jeanette Winterson writes: "I am a woman going mad." To which I reply: We are all women going mad. We are both and neither. That is the only credible certainty. Some time last summer I wrote: "There are cities still in need of falling." It is a mistake to believe oneself to be a forgone conclusion, to haunt oneself so. It is just another way of courting danger, of falling face first into the same pile of shit. Emotion is conjecture. A synaptic response to the absence of sound. When you look into the future what do you see? Whose voice do you hear? And do you dare answer back? ---226-----

Things come undone they do.

Many years ago my body left me. I am not the books I write. I am not the house I live in. I am not the name you give me. I am not the people I fuck. I am not the gender you ascribe. I write myself into a hole and I plot my own escape. Words are the prisons we inhabit. The prisons that inhabit us. There's no telling what desires await us, what poems will emerge. That is the trahison of which I speak. The page as I understand it. The poem as I know it. Today. Now. I would have begun with these words of Kafka's: "I consist of nothing but spikes that go into me." I would then have been saying something altogether different. I would have courted you otherwise. It would have changed everything. The lean of the body toward or away from the page. Still, inside the words, it would have been me. More or less.

Read (to) me. I will disappear.

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from Clutch Spill You are leaving and water is coming in through the window. I am writing letters (furious). Snap a rib from my frame and stoke flames. You see right through me. Orange glow, water running across glass. A knife cutting earth, the horizon falling flat, or gnarled roots. What I hold in my hands. We are fucking and someone opens the door. You dream of the bottom of the ocean. Ship carcass, seaweed, loot. The sky is yellow today. Blood in your ears. I am running toward you, skin flapping in the wind. You dream of me in pieces (limbs askew). I pick up a chisel. Carve away. Femur, sternum, clavicle. Sinew draped over a hook. Hands on the table. Wish bone. Licked clean. Hold You are dipping your hands in water, washing dirt from the shore. Heels dug into stone. Someone slips into your bed. You are huddled on the windowsill, pressing your body through a pane of glass. The boy has a hard-on. With your hands you snap it in two. Run in circles laughing. (Laughing). You wake up with mud on your face, a strange smell. Lean up against memory. When all of the bones in your body break, you catch 228--------

yourself with two broken arms, run out into the rain on stilts. Stuttering, me, me. You count yourself backwards. One. One. There is more. The dog barks, woof, is dead. You pull out his teeth and give them to the boy. You break off a finger, wedge the window open. Slip a piece of glass into your shoe. (What it means to run). A hand covers your eyes. There is water, you are washed away, plentiful. The abundance of you. More, and again. You bite off a piece of your tongue. (What you do not say breathe).

Fictional You are the Marquis de Sade, Robin Hood, Chagall, Frida Kahlo, lago. Hesitant. You are going to say Abraham, Mohammed, Seinfeld, stop yourself, edging the fertile crescent (oasis or moon). Shifting desert. (In your mouth you build castles of sand). History stitched across your brow. (Frankenstein: what I might say, holding Shelley's hand, Mary; or, perhaps, Woody Allen). Somebody else claims Jesus (wafer, wine). On his knees in boystown (scripting passion). Nomadic. You warn against literature. Tempest of words. Show me scars. How you wrap wire into your arms and watch them bleed. (Another word for Jewess please). When Nosferatu dances, his bones crack. (Evidence against). Adolph dances with him. (Fictional: evidence for).

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What Lilith knew: Evil is a point of view. Water crushes stone. The little match girl is real.

You are standing beside Faust, playing it cool. (You are next in line). Someone is taking your picture (landscape as metaphor). Imaging descent. The things you might say: When Sarah's hips cracked open, the rivers wept. (Incredulous). Gestapo as trope (Filigree, the bleeding poet). History is incremental. (Flint, fission: rooms full of shoes, spectacles).

When the door opens, you are next to nothing (fractions of yourself). Concrete and bone. You are telling stories. Rush of wind through your teeth (someone scratching to get in). (for Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay)

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Anne Stone Writing the Eye (a game of cat's cradle) 1) My writing practice begins with the eye.

1) My writing practice begins with the eye. (I'm extremely near-sighted.) If the eyeball is elongated and the lens is rounded, distant objects are indistinct, because they're focused in front of the retina instead of on it. My prose is the same, myopic, it gathers on whatever happens to be close to hand. I can see my own hands clearly, but across the street, a stranger is removed by distance, made strange. An indistinct blur, he crosses the street, moves towards me.

1) My writing practice begins with the eye. (I'm extremely far-sighted.) If the eyeball is foreshortened and the lens is flattened, you can see distant objects clearly, but the objects which are closest to you are not clear, because they're focused behind the retina instead of on it. Prose can be the same, foreshortened, it can seethe up from under the most remote of surfaces. The short of paper I am holding in my hands is smudged by proximity, illegible. But tin stranger's hands exist with the precision of a line drawing. He forms a gun o! 231-------

his hand, holds it to his temple and pulls.

1) I am practicing myopia, hyperopia. 2) I am practicing reading Robbe-Grillet through what is found there. 3) I glance up from the keyboard to see an 8 1 /2 x 14 inch sheet of paper on the wall.

1) Near-far / near-far. 2) On page 44 of Robbe-Grillet's book, Jealousy, I find a photograph of a little girl. It unsettles me. The image is faded. It seems to have been taken some time in the mid-70s. An old polaroid. Blanched out. Was it placed there? The shape her hand takes. Her mouth as she eats a hotdog. She looks to be eleven years old. In the text, the photograph is placed next to the word "t ." Is it deliberate? Whose picture is this? How did it come to be here? How do I read the ---232-----

shape of her mouth, in this book, out of this book. Should I try to find this little girl? (I could get a job at the library, find out who last checked the book out.) I return the book. I leave the picture where I found it. I never forget the picture. 3) I am walking up St-Joseph and a man hands me an 8 1 /2 x 14 poster of a little girl. He tells me he is looking for this little girl, that he will never stop looking for her, in alley wrays, in fields. He will always be looking for this one little girl. He grabs his crotch and tells me about monsters. Forms a gun of his hand, places it against his temple and pulls.

1) When I was younger, I was temporarily blinded in one eye. The oculist trained a beam of light into my pupil. As the light penetrated to the back of the eye, I saw the shape of the blood clot which lay under the iris. It looked a lot like a rhinoceros. I saw the shape of the tiny capillaries, too, which were illuminated and projected over the room. My right arm felt numb and my leg began to tremble. The inside of my body had overtaken the outside. Sometimes, when I am looking at the poster on my wall, a ray of light will find this precise, this ocular an angle. 2) The girl in the polaroid looked to be about eleven years old. I mentally age the picture, shifting her features forward twenty years. (Just like on America's Most Wanted.) Sometimes, I find myself looking for her on metro platforms as trains whiz by. Sometimes, I look for her in strangers on the street. On the back of the CIBC bill, where missing children are posted. In newspaper articles. In the rare photo that accompanies an obit. Myopia, hyperopia. The features of strangers are smudged by her proximity. It's as if the photograph has been inscribed on a contact lens. Her features overlay every face I see. I scrutinize my own face in impromptu mirrors, purchase tube-steaks at the Provi-soir. 3) One day, I see a little girl's photo on the front page of the newspaper. The story presents the topography of dismemberment. Maps are offered up as sidebars, showing street names, blueprints of place. Utilitarian boxes, bold black squares, 233------

mark places that limbs have been found. An industrial silhouette dominates the spread. Four column inches wide, a backhoe appears against the backdrop of the bluff, its metal scoop heavy with rocks.

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from The Tourniquet Vanish When things went badly, Emily had a much worse story to comfort me. If I'd scraped my knee, she'd broken her leg. If I had a fever of a hundred and two, she'd had one of a hundred and eight. Her body was an archive of times she'd been concussed, contused, abraded and scarred. Her right hip bone had been replaced with an alloy prosthetic and the bones in that leg reinforced with long metal pins. I would climb into her lap as softly, she whispered lullabies, each of which ended with the same flat admission. They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but if something didn't kill my Auntie Em, it didn't particularly inspire her respect, either. Once, as I watched her pare a potato, the knife slipped and slit open her thumb. Her mouth pursed and then slowly, as she stared at the small pool of blood, her expression became bland. More so than usual. It was as if the knife had disappointed her with its tiny endeavor at pain. "When I was a girl," her stories always began. "When I was a girl," she began, "our house caught on fire." Her account was told in the voice of someone colour-blind. Monochromatic and flat. If there is a physical seat to the soul, when Auntie Em talked, the whole of it gathered just under the surface of our eyes. It was the only feature we shared, our eyes, which were an identical shade of grey. Together, we stared dispassionately at the flames that had consumed her childhood. As absently, her fingers toyed with my hair, I pretended it was not her childhood home but our house burning down. I closed my eyes to imagine the three of us, Auntie Em, my uncle and me, holding hands. The house burning down around us. The next morning, when our neighbours gathered by the ashen heap, dawn would break over something resembling a dressmaker's dummy, half-finished, poised on a narrow metal leg. Aunt Em's prosthetic frame, like a phoenix (or flamingo), would slouch forth from the ashes and be reborn.

My uncle kept me safe. He went down into the basement of our rental and adjusted the hot water tank so it could never rise to a temperature that might accidentally scald a child's skin. He had seen the burned bodies of children at Wellesley and the sight, I think, never left him. He cut dowels of wood to size, and placed these each night in the tracks of the sliding doors, so they couldn't be forced open from outside. And when I left the house, he or Emily always

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knew where I was and when I would return. And my uncle taught me to be wary of strangers and that strangers can sometimes bear a rudimentary resemblance to the people we know. But it was Em who told me not to tie the string of my hat around my neck, where a stranger could grab hold and use it to strangle me. To never wear a ring on my finger, because the finger itself would be cut off. And who promised, should I disappear from her at the mall, not to put my poster up around the Loop. Em believed that these lampposts, with their wind and rain-eaten posters of runaways, were used as a kind of mail-order catalogue by paedophiles. It was Emily, too, who explained how strangers first become the people we know best and only then, evanesce once more into their previous forms. An incalculable distance arises. What begins as an operation by proxy, small stolen intimacies, the tiniest of rents, grows over time into an irreparable breach. A friend, an older and much wiser friend, a friend of the family friend, offers you a bite of his quince, for instance. At first, Auntie Em explains, you might not notice how he retrieves the core gingerly, between finger and thumb, touching only the base and the stem. Bringing the core to his mouth, his tongue traces, in nicks and dents, each tooth's impression. The negative shape of your mouth. In time, in time, he becomes bold. Each unremarkable license he grants himself summing in an invisible margin until, looking into your eyes, he brings your core to his mouth and licks, eyes soft slits as he does so. This, you will tell yourself, is the smallest of rents and easily fixed, if only we could go back, go back, go back. Honest. But the intimacy once shared is irreconcilable with the stranger before you, the one whose eyes dart anxiously between the handkerchief balled in your mouth and the door he locks behind him as he enters the room. This stranger, Emily tells me, will never look you in the eyes. Not once. Though the former friend, the one you remember, looked you in the eyes often and with what seemed like pleasure. While once, your discomfort was something to be relieved, salved with the balm of kindness, kisses, something sweet to drink, to this stranger, your mewling sobs will only cease to be an ambient annoyance when they become a threat. The stranger, Auntie Em tells me, is afraid, and that at the core of that fear is an anger and disregard nothing of you can overcome. He will swallow you with the cool proficiency of a rendering plant and spit out something no longer recognizable. Not to you. Not to those who love you. Not even to God. Not to anyone unblessed with a forensic eye for detail. ---236---

Daily, the newspaper offers up a topography of dismemberment. Maps appear as sidebars, showing street names, the blueprints of place. Utilitarian boxes, bold black squares, mark places where the girl's teeth are found. An industrial silhouette dominates the spread. Four column inches wide, a backhoe appears, metal scoop heavy with rocks. I carefully attend the voices I hear on the nightly news. These voices are immaculate, giving nothing of themselves away. They are as thin as the milk we drink, prepared from a powder and stretched to last much longer than the instructions intend. Nightly, I practice this sceptic tone. If I can get the intonation just so, assume the same flat timbre, I will simply bottom out. My uncle, when he speaks, gives himself away. All of himself. The thickness of voice, the wondering tone. The "Ah's" and "heh's?" muttered at the end of each sentence, tucking words in as gently as tired children. His voice is as wet and vulnerable as the inside of his mouth. The voices of the news can't intimate an apology, but frame its shape in cold syllables. I want this distance. I want to assume this remote an angle. It is a distance that these voices, incapable of promise, nonetheless assure me exists.

It will take years for the irony to be understood. I will not be dismembered. I will not be. I will not be drugged. I will not be drugged and my hair will not be roughly shorn as sheep are shorn, only to mewl sadly in their crowd, no longer able to recognize one another by smell alone. My drugged and shaved body will not be sewn inside of a suitcase with the leavings of my own hair. And this suitcase, dead heavy with what remains, will not be heaved into the trunk of an '82 Volvo and transported behind an industrial building, where, next to a dumpster, it will not be burned. It won't be necessary, because I am being groomed. Groomed by accident almost, by the accident of a series of men. The kind of men who care for girls with the haphazard concern of second-door-down neighbours. "Good girl," they whisper in tandem, "now, there, that's a good girl." Years from now, I will look back and see how, inadvertantly, I have been made. The realization will be slow. It will not come until long after my use has begun to fade. It will come when I am no longer able to perform the role I've been made for. The realization will lap at the edges of uselessness.

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When Aunt Emily warns me about going under quickly, like the others, I imagine myself standing in the shadows of the alleyway. My body assumes the thinness of glass, and then paper, and in the end, I flutter and scud across the asphalt, dozens of tiny paper squares, each bearing my height and weight and a picture of me at some other, happier, time.

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Michael Turner Uses, Not Muses Why I am being asked to contribute to a poetics anthology is beyond me. I have never considered myself a poet, nor do I aspire to be one. My relationship to poetry has always been disingenuous: I use it to achieve my own ends, playing off its various reputations as a cultural form as opposed to licking its face value. What's more, I have never met a poet I could trust. Anyone who says they're a poet is immediately suspect in my books. I'm not sure why this is (as a child, I was never abused by a poet, and I am usually more generous when listening to a poet's poetry than those who heckle them at readings). I guess what scares me most about many of the poets in this country is their jocundity, their willingness to accept unchecked baggage, their belief that poetry can get you out of this world. To this day, certain borders refuse entry to people calling themselves poets. And rather than call that into question, take a stand on something as ridiculous as a job title, I would prefer instead to move on, go unnoticed, continue my subterfuge. My ambivalence towards poetry, now that I am forced to defend it, comes about through a general mistrust of generic distinctions. As a writer, I like to combine forms; not just literary forms, but all representational forms. I believe that form in-and-of-itself is shaped by (and carries with it) certain suppositions, and my writing likes to exercise those suppositions (see the "Preface" to American Whiskey Bar). In that sense, I am a sociological writer, one who gravitates towards ideas and concepts, not the 'perfect' line or the ultimate sentence. Although I can recognize the craft in Anne Carson's poems, it doesn't mean I like her work. A common response to that is: "Oh, but she's doing something really interesting—contemporizing antiquity." To which I say: "Yeah, but there was no middle class in ancient Syria, so what Dr. Carson's doing is just as kitschy as Von Gloeden taking photos of 19th-century Sicilian boys, putting laurels in their hair, getting them to pose naked in front of Roman columns." What Carson and Von Gloeden have in common, then, is their willingness to pander to the fetishistic impulses of their readers and viewers, those who don't take into account the complexities of political economy, history, language, etc., and how those things affect a work. Although fetishists make great supporters of literature and art (without them there would be no avant-garde), they do little to enhance the dialogue. But I have learned a great deal from poets. Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing was an early influence, and it was through poets such as Gerald Creede, Jeft Derksen, Deanna Fergusan and Dorothy Lusk that I came to recognize how language itself is ideologically saturated. However, the problem I ----239----

had with KSW was its unwillingness to question the generic structure that carried its work—namely, most of the poets associated with the school wrote poetry, and that was that. For someone such as myself, someone who was interested in working beyond the poem, who was more interested in a conceptual project that conflated poetry with ethnography, there was little support. Part of this had to do with my earlier work being mistaken for 'work writing/ which, given KSW's beginnings (for a linear history, see the "Introduction" to Writing Class, New Star Books, 2000), was fast becoming Quebec to an increasingly anglo English-Canada. If pressed, I would admit to having written one book of poetry, and that was Kingsway. The idea was to write in reaction to the matrices that have come to dominate the world we live in (economics, politics, history, language, technology, class, gender, sexuality, race, nationalism, CanLit—all these constructions contribute to the master matrix), and the ideal place for me to do that was my own backyard, the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kensington/Mount Pleasant. Because it is here that this magnificent and much-maligned thoroughfare called Kingsway skews the grid-like streets and avenues that form my neighbourhood and those around it. Anything that goes against the grid is of interest to me, and Kingsway is just that. The poems in Kingsway are single stanza blocks, much like the decaying city blocks that run from 7th & Main to the entrance of New Westminster. As well, the language and meter of these poems is deliberately dissonant and jerky. The idea, here, was to replicate the driving experience, which, along with thinking and reading and writing, are the four experiences I wanted to work with in order to demo what I was then calling "my poetics." The last section of the book, "Kingsway A Re: Development Project," was an attempt to situate lines from local poetries in the landscape, employ them as titles, points of departure, then write from those titles. I have always felt that the more interesting writing in Vancouver comes from communities, not individuals. KSW is one such community, so was TISH. Poets like Gerry Gilbert and Maxine Gadd (contemporaries of TISH poets such as George Bowering, Fred Wah, and Daphne Marlatt) are, to my mind, Vancouver's better historians. After Kingsway I published a chapbook called Survivial: A Strobic Guide. Around that time I was commissioned by Viacom Canada to write a long poem set to a silent short film of my choice. I'm going to finish off with a brief description of both projects. Survivial: A Strobic Guide (1997) was my response to McClelland & Stewart's twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)—an edition, I might add, that contains the same defunct addresses in the "Resources" section as the original House of Anansi publication. What I did with Survivial was strobe the 64 epigrams in

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Survival—that is, expose the epigrams to a strobe light (my own metaphor for the contemporary experience)—and reconfigure what I saw into new poems, poems that ultimately spoke out against the construction of a national literature, a project I have always been suspicious of. The Viacom commission was another matter. Here, I took a super-8mm, heterosexual porno loop from the late-1960s and used it to write Heirs To A Felt Fortune (now available on video). But rather than animate what I was seeing on screen, I began with the three questions I often ask myself when viewing porn: Where do these people come from? What are they thinking about while they're performing? And where do they go once they're done? Heirs To A Felt Fortune is my most excessive work to date, one that takes the highest ideal of poetry (the lyric) and applies it to the lowest form of cinema (the porno loop). Much of what I have to say about poetry and my uses for it can be found in Kingsway, Survivial, Heirs To A Felt Fortune, and the "Preface" to American Whiskey Bar. If I were to add one more thing, I would say that the most contested site in the world today is a poem's meaning—the most contested poems being the Bible and the Koran. As the United States takes greater and greater steps towards becoming a theocracy, biblical interpreters (and who are the most convincing interpreters of poems but poets themselves!) are becoming more and more powerful. The same thesis, I believe, can be applied to the Islamic world. Two big reasons why I'm so ambivalent about poetry, and why I'm so suspicious of poets.

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from Survivial: A Strobic Guide

"...listing/ to see..." " ...the wrong thing../'

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her wind makes us The wilderness her tongue stones/ and cannot give

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in this country. We are all to any nation, / I hurl the north/ and like the frost/ rending

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really inside/ themselves all roll/ we say settlers, towing to where the world is logical

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barbarous;/ a tameless death/ A captive out, a friend feather/ and welcome us as ours. They are my character

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poetry by a tone the bush resisted:/ Alive, it must be a human point of view. Cruelty Unless / Through the desperate we stare / abruptly the mastered world. The punishment

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taste/ in slaughter/ eat to one another. Secretly sentimental. Only suffer,/ to enjoy

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Steve Venright My Meteoric Rise to Obscurity—A Treatise On the Merits of Lexiconjury, Deliriomancy and Icelandic Breakfast Foods Now It Can Be Told I was born under Virgo, the sign of service and physical love. Eschewing the more charitable vocations such a confluence of attributes may have foretokened, I opted to spend my time playing with words. Long before I became the unheard-of writer whose titles draw a blank the world over, I was an ardent young self-publisher in the tradition of William Blake. When I was six or seven I produced my first work, a four-page saddlestitch holograph edition of one entitled The Story of Elsie, Bessie and Geraldine the Cows. It was an instant success, and my satisfaction with the magic of literary invention set me on the course of poverty and obscurity to which I have kept unswervingly ever since. In adolescence I began to publish small xerox editions of my own poetry (only when I moved to Toronto at the age of twenty did I realize there was an active small press community creating work in similar and more versatile ways, with new friends of mine such as Stuart Ross and jwcurry being among the most imaginative young proponents). By age seventeen, writing had become a ritual via which I could delve into unknown psychic territory—territory which, I hoped frightfully, might lie even beyond mind. And it was then, after stumbling upon my own type of automatic writing, that I discovered the Surrealists. I fell in love immediately—with their fervid derangements, their blasphemous gestures, their rigourous morality, their humour noir, I'amourfou and beaute convulsive, their squabbles and diatribes, their wild forays into the unconscious, their fierce clinical intellects and rampaging sensuous imaginations, their esoteric but inclusive communal games, their respect for chance, their exultation in dreams and hallucinations, and their thirst for revolution. Whether I was a fit specimen or not, I had found my species, and—having improbably obtained a copy of Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism at a bookstore in my homeland of Sarnia—I had received my directives. Yet, in the more than two decades elapsed since that irradiating encounter which led me to read in short succession works by Lautreamont, Desnos, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, and Artaud, among others, I have never referred to myself or my work as truly Surrealist. And that may not be a very good concluding sentence for this section, but I think you'll agree it would have been better than this one.

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The Vulgar Thrill of Poetic Expression Writing is a blast. There's a cumulative neurochemical charge that builds to maximal concentration, saturating the language centre with pure meaningless energy. Its release can be effected by touching pen to paper, or setting fingers to keyboard. Each charge has its own emotional signature, eliciting mental impressions which then draw forth words ready to 'explain' this interior experience—like an animated neurochemical Rorschach test. Young authors are typically advised to write about what they know. I've always been interested in writing about what I don't know. Horizontal Experiments in the Linguistic Distillation of Dreamy Delirium I can only write while lying down. I open my eyes just long enough to scrawl down a stream of words, then close them to await the next. My goal is to interfere as little as possible with the emergence of the text. To dream while awake and translate the vision into words—or simply to dream words onto the page—is what I seem to be attempting (but maybe that's only sometimes, or maybe I'm wrong). As soon as the vision becomes forced, the spell is broken and I have to backtrack to regain admittance. By that time the dream may have given up on me. In Praise of Nightmares "Our dreams are a second life," asserts Nerval in the first sentence of his novella Aurelia, It's a wonderful opening phrase—and a surprisingly good pick-up line—but it bears only an illusory relation to what follows here. I've always loved dreams—even, and sometimes especially, nightmares. What a privilege it is to awaken in anguished horror from some somnolent misadventure of the most gothic, grisly, and garish constitution to realize that its consequences extend only mnemonically into this dimension. Your day only gets better when it starts with not getting gored by horned ogres from the business district who've stolen your Claudine Longet Japanese import CDs. And yet you've had the experience—often hyperlucidly—of living through the grand terror of that oneiric scenario! Of course, on the other hand, waking from a wish-fulfillment dream into a world seemingly run by the ecclesiastical offspring of P.T. Barnum & Margaret Thatcher can be disheartening. Regardless, I always manage to carry certain delicious qualities of those ultravivid, metasensory experiences into my waking world, enriching it and reminding me that, in some respects, I'm only truly awake when I'm asleep. How do dreams inform my approach to writing? Well, as I mention previously in this tract, one of my goals is to somehow directly translate dreams into words. I'm aware that the results might be unimpressive to readers other ----250----

than myself, but the process would still be fascinating. And to hell with readers, anyway (present company excluded). Sleeping Fits, Insomniac Propaganda, and a Superfluous Inventory Every Western cult of exploration had its sacrament: for the Romantics it was nature; for the Symbolists it was hashish and opium; for the Beats it was speed, both chemical and physical; for the Neuronauts (a term of convenience I'm using for investigators as diverse as Huxley, Lilly and Leary) it was psychedelics such as mescaline; for the Heads it was LSD, sex and meditation; for the Surrealists, during a certain phase, it was trance, dream and sleep itself: They live only for these moments of oblivion when, all lights extinguished, they speak without knowing what they say, like drowning men. Every day these moments become more numerous. Every day they want to spend more time sleeping. Their words, recorded, intoxicate them. Everywhere, anywhere, they fall asleep... —Aragon, line Vague de reves During this 'time of the sleeping fits/ Rene Crevel and Robert Desnos were the supreme practitioners of somnography and somniloquy, apparently writing and speaking while asleep. Breton eventually called a halt to these sessions—which had by then grown into a succession of deranged slumber parties—because of their increasingly dangerous quality. Desnos had gone after Eluard with a knife, and a group of other participants almost sleepwalked itself into suicide by hanging, to be intercepted just in time by Breton. While they lasted, though, the sleeping fits must have been a source of great fascination and wonder. My own "Manifesto of Torpor Vigilism" begins with a phrase which came to me in my sleep: "Life, being by some ingenious property denied to all but the living..." Unfortunately, it ends there as well, as I seem currently incapable of writing any sort of proficient propaganda while awake (the present documet—published, appropriately enough, by Insomniac Press—being no exception). Someone who had little difficulty delivering the verbal goods while asleep was Dion McGregor. For several years during the sixties, his roommate and songwriting partner Michael Barr recorded McGregor's loquacious nocturnal transmissions—a selection of which were transcribed and released in book form as The Dream World of Dion McGregor (Bernard Geis Associates, 1964). An eponymous vinyl l.p. was released by Decca at the same time, to be followed thirty-five years later by Dion McGregor Dreams Again (Tzadik, 1999). A second sequel—The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor—will soon be released by my own Torpor Vigil Industries label. ----251----

The outlandish sleeptalks of McGregor—he speaks from within his dreams—are by turns, and sometimes simultaneously, poignant, absurd, bizarre, hilarious, macabre, lewd, maniacal, ingenious, musical, pathetic and terrifying. As poetic documents of unconscious generation, they are incomparable. His name belongs in my personal ledger of Inspirational Forces— Mainly Non-Literary Category—between Mad Magazine circa 1971 and the Merry Pranksters; between Shane MacGowan and Thelonius Monk; between John Lilly and Monty Python; between Frida Kahlo and Gustave Moreau; between Richard Kirk and Emo Phillips; between Josep Maria Jujol and Astor Piazzolla; between the International Bureau of Recordist Investigation and Genesis P-Orridge; between Highway 401 and Man Ray; between the Goons and Odilon Redon; between General Idea and Wilhelm Reich; between Antoni Gaudi and Johnny Rotten; between Buckminster Fuller and Mark Ryden; between the Four Horsemen and Erik Satie; between Charles Fort and SCTV; between the flying lemurs of Madagascar and the self-transforming machine elves of tryptamine hyperspace; between Max Ernst and Yma Sumac; between Brian Eno and Survival Research Laboratories; between the Elora Gorge and Yves Tanguy; between Marcel Duchamp and Dorothea Tanning; between Martin Denny and the Tasmanian Devil; between Aleister Crowley and the Toronto Maple Leafs; between Cheval the Mailman and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who died the day after I placed his name here); between Leonora Carrington and Jacques Vache'; between Luis Bunuel and Van der Graaf Generator; between Hieronymus Bosch and Remedies Varo; between Arnold Bocklin and Sandy Warner; between Gato Barbieri and Andy Williams; between Babaji and Jim Woodring. Arrogant Little Section Too Short to Have a Title "The mere ambition to create a poem is enough to kill it," wrote Michaux. The world is full of dead poems penned by the ambitious, and that shouldn't concern us. There are better things to be concerned about, and I have little interest in creating 'poems/ living or dead. I will, however, take the odd snapshot of lightning, for example. How to Cheat at Poetry As founder of the now defunct neurotech supplier Alter Sublime (a name stolen from one of Dewdney's books), I've had opportunities to experiment with a variety of 'brain machines' and other bio-affective tools. I have concluded that mild cranial electrostimulation can enhance certain cerebral processes involved in writing. I have also determined to my satisfaction that pulsed light and sound sessions on a superior device such as the DAVID Paradise can be beneficial as a prelude to writing, particularly when the 252--------

machine has been programmed to induce a brainwave state in the mid-theta range—the frequency domain of vigilant torpor. A third approach to modulation of this sort is isolation in a flotation tank. In that timeless chamber, you can drift in amniotic blackness, free of gravity and external sensory signals, relaxed beyond belief and ready to entertain the interior world (however spectacular or bland). The Ever-Present Threat of Expanding Consciousness Psychedelics, whether botanical or synthetic in origin, are substances which can potentially lead to the expansion of consciousness and the temporary dissolution of constrictive perceptual and psychological constructs. I have no interest in the recreational use of chemicals and have managed for the most part to steer clear of popular drugs such as caffeine, nicotine, sugar, alcohol, and television. What draws me to psychedelics—though it's rare that I actually ingest any—is the same thing that draws me to poetry: a hunger for beauty, a compelling desire to encounter the Other, and a fascination about what lies beneath the skin of thought. A craving for the outlandish and hilarious may also be part of the attraction. To encapsulate my attitude regarding psychedelics, having barely touched upon the subject, I give you this line from Marco Vassi's The Stoned Apocalypse: "He had never taken LSD, a fact I found curious in a man who was supposedly involved in understanding the intricacies of the human mind." Neuralchemy 101 According to Auden, there's an Icelandic proverb that goes: "Only those who have it can splash the skyr about." I've been to Iceland and I've eaten and enjoyed skyr (pron. sheer), a tasty breakfast gloop similar to yoghurt. But that's beside the point. The point is that, as the Auden-quoted proverb, apocryphal or not, suggests, one cannot milk a horse with a sledgehammer. In fact, one cannot milk a horse, regardless of the implement one brandishes (colts and fillies excepted). No, what you need if you want to get milk is a milk-producing animal such as a cow or a goat or some other kind of uddered ungulate. And what you need if you want poetry is a poetry-producing gland. In the case of the human poet, that gland is the pituitary, a small but industrious pharmaceutical organ servicing the entire brain (and the mind, too, in its way) twenty-four hours a day. Yes, the sooner you realize you're a chemical creature, the sooner you'll be able to begin modulating the intrinsic current of prelinguistic molecular fuel. In time you may become a master of your own endocrinal currents, a self-prescribing yogic apothecary—a true 'neuralchemist/ Then will you be able to surf the deliquescing waves of your own consciousness (or at least wade through its streams). Then will you be able to pick up your pen and ----253 25----

transpose pure unsullied vorticular delirium with confidence. Then and only then will you be able to authentically splash the skyr about! On the Dangers of Being a Religious Poet—A Caution for Boys and Girls Imagine what it must have been like to be Christopher Smart, a deliriomantic of the first order, albeit one afflicted by a strain of religious dogma. He was such a receiver/generator, was so full of the holy shit, that he had to drop to his knees in public several times a day to vent his mad glory in prayer. When they locked him up (with his cat Jeoffry, guilty by association) he flooded innumerable pages with words. Yes, words—like the little things you're looking at right now, except his were better. The Living Language as Agent of Ascension A thirst for the infinite. A longing for the absolute. Lautreamont banging out sentences on the keys of a piano, the eyes of Maldoror blazing in his head. Rimbaud and his sad ecstatic synaesthesia; the poet as seer in the unchaining of the senses. Christopher Smart, again, and that virtuous multi-talented cat of his, Jeoffry the angeltiger; the two of them channeling ontological thunder from a god much holier than the usual bearded sourpusses propped up on clouds by guilty Western romantics. Leonora Carrington in her hospital prison, down below everything in this world, below rape and war, below incarcerated love, reflecting Twentieth Century hell in shards of exploded mind—a sorceress in the underworld who heals herself and emerges the triumphant and beautiful alchemist. Baudelaire and his hospital prison where the soul cries to be "Anywhere! Just so long as it is out of the world!" John Uri Lloyd's alchemical hollow earth odyssey. Michael Dean's transcendant textual gardens and lawns. The poignant Terra erotica of Nabokov as revealed in Ada. Joyce's ultramythic polyverse and its endless recorso. Dewdney's concordat proviso ascendant. Nichol's alphabetic hagiography. The transdimensional emancipation pirates of Burroughs. Coleridge's pleasure dome. Nerval's ivory tower. A lust for freedom and ascent. Short Discourse on the Manufacture of Reality 'There's no such thing as reality—there's only the ones who know this, and the ones who don't who get manipulated by them." —Terence McKenna (from a talk called "Taxonomy of Illusion") What I call Corporate Reality is the vast pervasive illusion manufactured by our dominator society to perpetuate a homogenous culture of obsessive consumerism. Despite the thrilling fashions and trends it feeds us through the various media it directs, I find it unspeakably dull. We've allowed our critical and perceptual faculties to be filtered and diluted by its contrivances. It's time ----254----

to decondition ourselves and rediscover the imaginative possibilities of consciousness freed from the specious stimuli fabricated by control-oriented corporate, political and religious institutions. What's called for is a new currency of creative thought, vision, and emotion to override the insipid mass addiction to products and surfaces and vicarious lifestyles. It's okay to buy stuff, but not if you have to sell your soul to do it. Something better awaits you. Something...oh, forget it: I'm starting to sound like a Marxist minister. Besides, I wouldn't want to convert you before you get a chance to purchase some copies of my new book Spiral Agitator from Coach House Books. Come to think of it, I've got an assortment of T-shirts and CDs for sale, too—and you could always buy a few paintings or prints from me. Visit the official Torpor Vigil Industries website for the latest merchandise!

Secrets of the Occult Science of Torpor Vigilism (A Brief Lexical Introduction) deliriomancy A visionary technique for divining the logos. A kind of intoxication of seeing, often leading to illumination of a hyper sensory nature. Rational delirium, akin to Dali's paranoiac-critical method and Rimbaud's deregelement de tons les sens. It is metabaroque and may be tantric or parapsychotic. To stare at a mandala (or maybe a cabbage) while listening to the nuevo-tango of Astor Piazzolla is a deliriomantic act. But then, just about any act could be if approached in the right way (with or without a sacrament). Applied synaesthesia. lexicon jury A magical linguistic art, the practise of which enables the adept to materialize words out of thin air. The surprising results of this process, which is revealed only by direct initiation or accident, can be used for oracular, incantatory conversational or poetic purposes. William Shakespeare, James Joyce and Lewis Carroll are exemplars of sophisticated lexiconjury in the Western world. Speaking-in-tongues is a laudable art brut style of lexiconjury. Terence McKenna, an inspired lexiconjuror himself, says this: "I don't believe that the world is made of quarks and electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language." neuralchemy The art of modulating and transmuting mental states by shamanic, tantric, mechanical or chemical means. A way of provoking or catalyzing metaconscious states. neureality "What passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish ----255----

invented by not very inventive minds." (Herman Orff in Russell Hoban's The Medusa Frequency}. Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and is subject to change without notification. Why not take control of it yourself to escape being victimized by television, the government, religious institutions, your grocer's aesthetician, and anything else that purports to have the market cornered on 'what's real.' Don't leave the downloading of your perceptual software to others, however confident they may appear. Quantum physics shows us that the observer affects the observed, so take a quantum leap and start wilfully affecting the world with your imaginative powers. After all, as Andre Breton noted, "The imaginary is what tends to become real." obliterature A new, yet curiously archaic, mode of language-play constituting a distinct school of anti-literary scribal behaviour. The movement you've been waiting for. As Pere Ubu might say, "Merdre!" transmorpholution The exalted revolution of form and consciousness, signalling the initial ascent towards the transmutopian era, during which a new currency of imagination and desire, sensuality and cognitive luminescence begins to develop within the individual, supplanting, fixation by fixation, the old addictions and delusions. Gradually the community becomes aware of itself as a flourishing teleneural force, at once organic, cerebral and dynamic. Intuitive revelation will be the prime facilitator of this transition. Bear in mind these words of Christopher Dewdney: "The distance between noetic consciousness & metaconsciousness is revelation." transmutopianism A movement arising from the conviction that the human species is capable of transforming itself in accordance with an inherent ontological vision of ecstatic intent. This metamorphosis will herald the emergence of a strange and marvellous new era of life on Earth, or thereabouts. turbulation A deliriomantic state of turbulent revelation, a vigilant torpor An approach to overriding mental conditioning via revery, trance and hypnogogic states. In the sanctity of distractionless repose, a condition of alert languor and mesmeric concentration can be attained—an ideal mindscape for the imagination. This is the womb of direct apprehension and spontaneous invention. It exists outside of time and space. Vigilant torpor can be phantasmic and luxuriantly ecstatic. It can also make one prone to telepathy and—by luck or virtuosity—travel outside the body. As a generalization, it can be said that its signature brainwave frequency range is theta. Debussy's "Prelude a 1' apres-midi d'un faune" and the Legion of Green Men's "Extended Shadows" are two splendid manifestations of vigilant torpor in musical form. ----256----

from Spiral Agitator Spiragitalation New Moisturizing Horse™ from the Devil®. It comes in the mail and it won't leave your walls hairy or your arteries unburnished. There's only one way to skin a cat. Why bother when you can dance the night away in several different languages while your babies sit bitterly at home under the viscous glaze of New Oysterizing Quartz™ from El Drivel®. It hums in the pail and it won't weave your dolls scary, or your archery embellished. There are plenty of other fish in the ocean. Why split hairs when you can drive like a millionaire through the wonders of the ages while your discarded lovers scorn you beneath the vicious gaze of New Roisterizing Vortex™ from McDribble®. It thrums in the hail and it won't heave your squalls contrary, or your aviary intaglioed. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Don't settle for miracles when you can get eaten alive in every colour of the rainbow while your little lost sheep curse the day you were born below the vicus clays of New Bowdlerizing Coils™ from Sri Dabble®. Unlike inferior products of a similar nature it kills you instantly, freeing the soul to travel ever outward beyond the constraints of day-to-day physicality to twirl through the realm beyond death like a pirouetting roller-derby gorgon with a broken condom full of crystal meth up her ass. There's nothing you can't become, so don't even bother not becoming everything. Kiss your gurus goodbye and pin a note to your blazer: SPIRAL AGITATION COMPLETE—ANOTHER SATISFIED CUSTOMER.

What Happened Joe was eaten by a tuna. Marietta was convinced by a spermatozoa. Clarence was indoctrinated by a curtain. Sally was bitten by a jack-in-the-box. Mory was trounced by a gram of saliva. Tina was capsized by a porcupine. Salvador was perforated by a weather balloon. Ursula was basted by a porthole. Nikolai was reconstituted by a bat. Grace was hurtled by a steam engine. Darren was laminated by a milkjug. Teresa was suctioned by a wheatfield. Uri was impressed by a squid. ---257----

Renee was misplaced by a cloudburst. Gudbrandur was ploughed by a recipe for marzipan. Wendy was castrated by a daydream. Vincent was summoned by a wolf. Maureen was purged by a type of ship called an ocean liner. Kamahl was infiltrated by a vestibule. Lena was deleted by a meadow. Jim was reimbursed by a falling ocelot. Astrud was catapulted by a fragrance. Boris was yanked by a glyptodon. Doreen was pilfered by a sundial. Clive was reconfigured by a trampoline. Indira was courted by a propeller. Lance was lanced by a lance. Veronica was crimped by a taxidermed stork. Jeremy was exorcised by a gearbox. Serena was orchestrated by a continental shelf. Guido was pummelled by a kaleidoscope. Fatima was pursued by a confessional. Theodore was detonated by a vaccination. Deborah was lubricated by a chihuahua. Patrick was inculcated by a rickshaw. Aurelia was magnified by a rip. Steven was agitated by a spiral. Kimberly was ratified by a celery stalk. Kurt was harpooned by a fire alarm. Mauve was pigeonholed by a cathedral. Derek was improved by a moustache. Sabina was martyred by a snowflake. Avery was lectured by a goalpost. Temperance was expunged by a century. Sebastian was imagined by a girdle. Jill was stampeded by a sprocket. Vladimir was mummified by a cricket match. Tammy was approved by a centipede.

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The Sepulchral Gazebo Build an engine with words. Let it make you speak. There's a bear in a dress at the top of the stairs. A candleflame flickers, casts its granular light upon the deserted deck of a whaling ship. Neuro-accretions in soft tryptamine sleep. Wherever the stage disappears in blackness. A caboose snowed under. You ripen at will and I like it. Nothing develops short of this widening diaphanous summer squall. Choral reefs ring the tomb, and abominate the residual typhoon. Toxic libations murmuring enveined through your bio Venetian flood ways. But in the morning she is everything neolithic and savoury. A quavering aquarian harem in the quarry. A quorum of slavering Pre-Raphaelites relinquishing diction for a prime ordeal latent with lysergic appeal. Ultimately you get two staircases out of it, but initially there's just the fog. And you are the one who has been pumped full of ghosts. Their feigned tincture. Every hourdaze coming through the pipe, like a suntarnished egg tumbling from its chute into the ignorant and diffidently gluttonous pond below. The city, on the other hand, grows soft and porous within the storm. I cry before your dumptrucks and sausages and skyscrapers. I have been dead all these years and you never once noticed. It's a pathetic little cart without wheels, and it wants a good nailing, yet you risk your life for it, Father, down in the tube. Ah, well, it ends in a jubilant embrace when you come up alive and all soft with age. I can't particularize the sensations, they're from yet another realm and my permit does not extend (mnemonically) to this tremendous emotional zone. Diffuse portability. Air bludgeon. Vernacular slope. Flossy chisel. Gown rampart. Molten negligence. Curve pummel. Your slick damp stare growing across me like mould. I look at the world as if through slats of closed Venetian blinds. Every time I think of you I get a shock. Sparks fly from my Horus eye, spray from my crown in a luminous froth: brain waves crashing on cranial shores. On obsessive nights this stroboscopic cogitation hypnotizes passers-by on the street outside my room. They're all running away to join the circuits. Watch them disappear into the electrogel.

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Everyone I've ever loved has left for the space stations. All that remains to me is a dead man with an accordion. Whenever the subway train rumbles past beneath the apartment, it shifts him just enough that he plays a single note of Quarantine's "Rigor Mortis in D Flat." If the trains would pass twice a second, he'd be more alive than I am. There's a note stuck to the fridge door. Its crayon letters have melted to a coppery olive green string of spectreglyphs: PREPARE THE MEAT OF THY DOG Deliriant cataleptic. I am a bleakness. In streams like these, motions turn up which cannot be replaced. One of us is dead, I can't tell which, but we reconnect here. Generate terrific monuments made of coloured steam. In hail we storm the edifices of a scream more incredible than the bursting of a thousand hearts amplified through vacufazers at full speed. Untimely script from the loom of oneirica. Own an area in a nano era. A molecular tremendum. Open the Gaudi folds and release the thing.

Someone to Three For The person in charge of dispelling notions will be off duty during the hours of greatest morphic resonance, in order to provoke the gods. He taught his skin to crawl. Next he thought his nearest kin could scrawl on tin with a tentacle, and in this he was mistaken, though such an act would not have been impossible. Tactically, he was the proverbial dodo feather stuck between the crocodile's teeth. His friends all thought he was psychologically damaged from trying to please them, and indeed his behaviour bore all the earmarks of a cart-horse trained to suck ankles. A minister was no good to him. A president, male or female, would have been of little use. What he needed was a good oldfashioned kick in the stomach, and this he would have received had the car doors not been locked. But such was his luck. He could charm a snake from a cat's vagina just by snoring. He could steer a tank with his diction even if you numbed his tongue with a lethartonic unguent. And yet even the slightest breeze seemed to send him into a blazing legislative fury. He called everything names, and when he ran out of names he called them numbers, and when he ran out of numbers he called the police. They gave him a series of classified numbers in exchange for a suitable amount of disinformation, and off he went again, railing spools of numerals at countless items, some of which he had to hallucinate in order to satisfy the quota he'd been granted. In the end he expired with a single number on his tongue, the number of duality—2—and it was this number which served as the only designation on his tombstone. ---260----

A sad footnote: the engraver (some say a Taoist, some say a student of the occult) rendered the number as a horizontal line overlain by a broken line (the "yang" and "yin" of heathen theosophy). Around the year 2,000 AD, some vandals scorched a circle around the lines, reducing the binary epitaph to a mockery of the vulgar hedonistic pictogram of orthodox latterday hippiedom: a "happy face" with deadened eyes and slack smile. Morose day. A skink rolled across his grave in the form of a pentacle.

The Gated Now (Three Excepts) She screams herself to sleep every night in a white tidepool on the outskirts of town. During the day she's a receptionist for a mock pharmaceutical company. It's called Fine Persian Drugs. Her only living uncle is famous for being able to contact the gods. No one knows this (not even I) but he once made love with a dolphin. The dolphin spoke of this communion to her friends, who were always amused by her sexual exploits with lower life forms.

And this is the part I can't stand to watch. I always close my eyes. It's horrible to see that poor orangutan (even if it is only someone in a costume) get blasted with that powerdrill through the top of the skull. Oh, the look on its face— and that gory porridge! I know it's only a dream but still I can't stand it.

A sustained blear cascading down the terraced glottal dales. Overnight a probability of isolated mercurial contagions blossoming intermittently into patches of sustained libidinal envelopment. White-furred mammals occurring eidetically across much of the southern frontier, heralding even more hysterical visions by mid-week. Transpersonal delusions developing right under our noses in the form of a crusty appealing frost—and these crystals are real, in case you're thinking of licking them. Otherwise, the usual epidermal saturations, spinning reptile discs and rashes of domestic overfastidiousness to be expected at least until the weekend when hedge nymphs with blowdarts retake the suburban matrix. Volunteer officers will again be patrolling the countryside in an attempt to break up any instance of wildlife copulation. Sticks and nets will be used, mace if necessary, little toothpicks and sticky rods for the fornicating insects, plumbing apparatus to shove down holes on hunches, laboratory-grown mucous membranes, terrier whips, whippet bats, ----261----

bat radios, radio scarecrows, electronic lightning, vegetal moulds, slingshot dildos, parakeet hammers, glass taffeta feathers onions blood keys intestinal sacs glue hot water bottles woodchips.

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Sheri-D Wilson FIRST WORDS Age eleven I was a clumpy beanpole of a knobby-kneed kid stubbing my toes on gopher holes, in the sub-zero Canadian Prairies looking for a way out-of-town I received a string of Zululand beads from my ballet teacher yellow-green beads strung between mysterious seeds yellow-green, yellow-green, yellow-green— I held the yellow-green Zulu beads strung between mysterious seeds in my soft white hands, nails gnawed to the half moon—Zululand I imagined the hands of the women who strung them, and us, together—thought African Mother Mary I inhaled the beads, thought I could breathe the dust of Zululand and the women's hands in the yellow-green Zulu beads strung between mysterious seeds I held them to my ear to see if I could hear the words of the women, the songs of the women, the whispers— beads of conch shell filled with secret messages, from women-sisters with exotic names who lived in a far off warm place with zebras and snakes and monkeys and elephants and giraffes and hyenas and drumming and dancing and colourful jewelry jangling in the heat and African dust rising, somewhere across an infinite sea, stop the spinning globe, pinpoint Zululand for me—I'll build a raft and float from Alberta to Africa in 24 hours I thought— I'm going there. I took the yellow-green beads strung between mysterious seeds to school, for show and for tell —I liked the way they felt on the bare skin of my neck— "they made their trek all the way from Zululand, South Africa," I said "can you hear their drums and their dancing feet?" my Social Studies teacher, didn't skip a beat taught me a word I had never heard, before—apartheid couldn't believe the meaning of the word could actually exist in the flesh he showed me a short black and white film as proof everything came tumbling down around and jarred me into a silence I had never heard before, crab-apple stone in my throat ----263----

the silence shocked my insides till my bones rattled cold white only, bus stops and passports and slavery plagued me raw I couldn't believe what I saw Weeks later my English teacher asked me to write a poem about something that moved me I remembered the word apartheid, how it startle-eyed my vision the incision, the stark collision—assignment—homework—school prison age eleven, I sat at the kidney-shaped kitchen table in our house on Crocus Road, and wrote my first poem—of protest—of sadness—of humanity of longing—of hatred—of love—of spiritual insanity—of anger—of rage Zulu words my ballet teacher taught me blazed across the page, as I scribbled the pain that cried from deep inside while my mother prepared meatloaf for dinner I wrote about apartheid— something ignited, a voice exploded, words loaded themselves and shot across the blank pages like wild prairie fire as the words gripped me, and gashed me, a strange way to pray, epiphanies pyre inside the head of poetry, imagination play, pictures crack teapots in two after that nothing ever looked the same I have no reason for why I write except one, I started . . .

In 2001 I was invited to read my poems at Poetry Africa in Zululand the yellow-green beads strung between mysterious seeds returned to their homeland, around my neck like freedom songs, prayers on the city bus a Zulu woman sits beside me tells me the Zulu words my ballet teacher taught me aren't Zulu words at all—she click-talked in her mother-tongue and I was reminded of my first words so long ago, and how poetry has a way of telling us things if we listen

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author bios John Barlow's Latest Bio: Born within Royal Canadian Air Force preserves of the northerly province of New Brunswick, JB has lived or spent happy weeks in half the provinces of Canada, growing up in Windsor ON and residing most of his adulthood in Toronto. Two trade books, ASHINEoVSUN and Safe Telepathy (Exile Editions), one CD/booklet The UFO's Of South Toronto, (Balmer Press) and several hundred micro editions and magazine credits later I gotta say... Lover of 19th Century poetry, early 20tn Century French, 1960s-70s American, and 1980s-2000s Canadian. Few other interests. Dana Bath is originally from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She received her MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University in 2000. Her book of short stories, What Might Have Been Rain, was published by Conundrum Press in 1998, and DC Books released her first novel, Plenty of Harm in God, in 2001. She has lived, studied and worked around Canada, Europe and Asia and now lives in Montreal, where she teaches English and is working on a second novel. derek beaulieu lives in Calgary where he is the editor/publisher of housepress (www.housepress.ca)—a micropress devoted to radical forms of poetry and poetics. He is the managing editor of dANDelion magazine and an editor at endNote magazine. With Neil Hennessy he is part of the "Trans-Canada Research Team," a group dedicated to "pataphysical research of language and linguistics." His work has appeared in numerous chapbooks—the most recent being [ I (BookThug, 2002)—and in Open Letter, filling Station, (orange), The Queen Street Quarterly and The Capilano Review, beaulieu is currently completing his MA at the University of Calgary. His first book of poetry will be released by Coach House Books in spring 2003. Robert Budde teaches creative writing at the University of Northern British Columbia. He has published three books (two poetry—Catch as Catch and traffick, one novel—Misshapen], and has been a finalist for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the McNally-Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year. In 1995, Budde completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. His new novel, The Dying Poem, is forthcoming Fall 2002 from Coach House Books. Check out his online literary journal called stonestone (http://stonestone.unbc.ca). Stephen Cain is the author of dyslexicon (Coach House, 1999) and Torontology (ECW, 2001), as well as numerous chapbooks and broadsides. His sound poet265--------

ry can be heard on Carnivocal (Red Deer, 1999) and his visual poetry has appeared in such magazines as Rampike, Torque, and Essex. He operates the micropress Kitsch in Ink and is a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly. Natalee Caple is the author of two books of fiction: The Heart is its Own Reason (Insomniac Press, 1998) and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World (House of Anansi, 1999), and one book of poetry: A More Tender Ocean (Coach House Press, 2000). She is a literary editor at The Queen Street Quarterly. With Michelle Berry, Caple is currently editing a book for Doubleday, Canada, of interviews and new fiction by 17 young authors on the impact of culture and technology in the 1990s on new fiction. Her work is taught at the University of Ohio in the Creative Writing program. Natalee Caple lives in Toronto with consort Christian Bok. Margaret Christakos is a Toronto-based poet, fiction writer, and mother of three young children. She grew up in Sudbury and went to art school at York University, then grad school at OISE. She has published five collections of poetry: Not Egypt (Coach House Press, 1989), Other Words for Grace (The Mercury Press, 1994), The Moment Coming (ECW Press, 1998), Wipe Under A Love (The Mansfield Press, 2000), and Excessive Love Prosthesis (Coach House Books, 2002). Her first novel, Charisma (Pedlar Press, 2000) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award in 2001. Christakos has organized Poetry College, a one-day poetry festival along Toronto's College Street; taught creative writing, from 1991 to 1996 at the Ontario College of Art and Design; and worked for many years as an editor and production coordinator. She regards Ondaatje, Marlatt, Nichol, Brossard, Scott and Moure as in-formative influences. Her present writing circulates among subjectivity, bisexuality, work, mothering, technology and love. Mark Cochrane is a Canadian poet. Wayde Compton is a Vancouver writer. His first book 49"* Parallel Psalm (Advance Editions, 1999), a poetic history of the black presence in British Columbia from 1858 to now, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry Nation (Vehicule Press, 1998), and Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley and Sons, 2000). His current projects include Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), a "turntable poem" titled The Reinventing Wheel, and a novel about numbers.

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Jeff Derksen's books include Down Time and Dwell. His critical writing on poetry, visual art, urbanism and architecture has been published in North America and Europe. He edited "Disgust & Overdetermination: a poetics issue" of Open Letter (10/1 Winter 1998). He currently lives in New York, where he is associated with the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Tess Fragoulis was born in Heraklion, Crete, and grew up in Montreal where she lives and writes. She has written for television and newspapers, and has published widely in literary journals. Fragoulis' first book, a collection entitled Stories to Hide from Your Mother (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997) was nominated for the QSPELL First Book Award in 1998. One of the stories has been adapted for the Showcase series, Bliss. Her first novel, Ariadne's Dream (Thistledown Press) was published in Fall 2001. She is currently working on a novel set in 1920s/30s Greece and Asia Minor; developing a documentary on the history and future of the bouzouki; and editing Musings: an anthology of GreekCanadian literature, to be released in Spring 2004 by Vehicule Press. Michael Holmes was born in Toronto in 1966, but he was raised in the suburb of Brampton. He has published four books of poetry, including James I Wanted to Ask You and 21 Hotels. Holmes edited the Insomniac anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry, The Last Word, and co-edited, with Lynn Crosbie, Plush. He is also the author of two works of pop culture non-fiction. Since the mid-'90s he has edited more than 50 different titles by new and emerging writers under his own imprint A misFit Book, with both ECW Press and Insomniac Press. His first novel, Watermelon Row, was published in the spring of 2000 by Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, and he has just completed his fourth book of poetry. Holmes has also written cultural criticism for magazines and newspapers across the country. Adeena Karasick is a poet/cultural theorist and performance and videopoem artist; and the award-winning author of five books of poetry and poetic theory: The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, Spain), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Memewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992). Dedicated to language-centered writing, feminist and cultural concerns, her articles, reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural /semiotic theory have been published worldwide. Adeena is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at St. John's University in New York.

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Catherine Kidd is the author of Bestial Rooms (Thomas Allen Publishers), a forthcoming novel about a young mother and reluctant zoologist who attempts to describe the negative shape of her amnesia by filling in the stories peripheral to it. She is also the author of Everything I know about Love I learned from Taxidermy (conundrum press), a collection of performance-stories with soundscape by collaborator dj Jack Beets. Cat and Jack's word/sound works often focus on the relationship between the body and memory, and how to free the mythical beasts who prowl and tumble in the basement of ourselves. Their newest CD/book, Sea Peach, was recently released through Wired on Words and conundrum press. Ryan Knighton is a Vancouver writer and new media artist. He is the author of Swing in the Hollow (Anvil Press, 2001) and co-author, with George Bowering, of Cars (Coach House Press, 2002). He is a past editor of The Capilano Review and currently teaches literature, creative and other writing at Capilano College. Jason Le Heup and Chris Walker are the editors of Judy, an ongoing experimental publishing project undertaken in 1997. As members of The Bubblechunk Collective they have published a number of critical texts including the controversial Celebrity & The Defiant Sign: A Patsy Cline Poetics. Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, freelance critic, and independent curator currently living in Colborne, Ontario. His most recent books are Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001). David McGimpsey was born and raised in Montreal. He is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent being Hamburger Valley, California (ECW Press). He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and is the author of the critical study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press) which was awarded the Popular Culture Association's Award (The Ray & Pat Browne Award) for Best Scholarly Study of 2000. He currently teaches creative writing at Concordia University rob mclennan is a writer, critic, visual artist, editor/publisher of above/ground press & STANZAS magazine, editor of the cauldron books series (Broken Jaw Press), and runs span-o (small press action network, Ottawa). He has published poetry, fiction and critical writing across Canada, the United States, India, Australia, the UK and Czech Republic. In 1999, he won the Canadian Authors Association/Air Canada Award for Most

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Promising Writer (in any genre) in Canada under the age of 30. The author of over forty poetry chapbooks, and six full poetry collections, including The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999) and bagne, or Criteria for

Heaven (Broken Jaw Press, 2000), both of which were shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award for best book of poetry in Ottawa-Carleton. He has a number of new publications this year, including paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press) and the chapbooks voice-over 1.0 + 1.5 (camenae press, Hull), the other side of the mouth (BookThug, Toronto), and a translation: stones and ice (greenboathouse books, Victoria). He keeps telling people in bars that he is finishing a novel, a collection of essays, and working on a longpoem tentatively titled the Ottawa City Project. He lives and breathes in Ottawa, Ontario, and can be reached via www.track0.com/rob_mclennan. Shane Rhodes has published poetry, essays and reviews in magazines, journals and newspapers across Canada. He has been an editor with The Fiddlehead, filling Station and Qwerty. Shane won the Alfred G. Bailey Award and the Alberta Book Award for Poetry for his first collection, The Wireless Room. His second book, Holding Pattern, was published in Spring 2002 by NeWest Press. Ray Robertson is a novelist from Southwestern Ontario where his first novel, Home Movies (1997), is set. He graduated from the University of Toronto with High Distinction in Philosophy and has made Toronto his home since 1985, but lived in Texas for several years where he completed much of his second novel, Heroes (2000). He is a frequent book reviewer for the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail and can often be seen on TVO's Imprint. Robertson's most recent novel, Moody Pood, was published in 2002 by Doubleday. Stan Rogal was born in Vancouver but has lived in Toronto for quite some time now and actually likes it (except for the lousy politics, which can't really be complained about 'cause the same is everywhere). He has published seven books of poems (with two others to appear in 2003) along with two books of short stories and two novels (a third to see the light of day in Fall 2002). He is also a produced playwright and in 2002 had two staged readings as well as plays in both the Toronto Fringe and SummerWorks Festivals. For ten years he hosted the popular Idler Pub Reading Series. Currently he is working on a new collection of poems as well as a new novel. Ian Samuels studies English literature at the University of Calgary, where he is currently completing a Master's degree in Creative Writing. He is a former editor of filling Station magazine and currently a staff member at the Banff269--------

Calgary International Writers Festival. His first book, Cabra (Red Deer Press), explored the strange and fascinating topographies of myth that often emerge from attempts to represent and appropriate the history of a place—in this case, nineteenth-century Brazil. His current work-in-progress is Iconnotations, an excursion into the entirely different territories of myth that inform key elements of North American popular culture. nathalie Stephens is truly bilingual and writes in both English and French. She is the author of 6 books and 3 chapbooks, including I'embrasure (TROIS, 2002), All Boy (housepress, 2001), Somewhere Running (Arsenal Pulp, 2000) and UNDERGROUND (TROIS, 1999) which was shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Salon du livre de Toronto in 2000. A frequent contributor to literary print journals, her work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Carnal Nation (Arsenal Pulp, 2000) and Written in the Skin (Insomniac, 1998). nathalie lives in Guelph, Ontario. Anne Stone is based in Montreal and Vancouver. Her first novel, jacks: a gothic gospel, is both formally and typographically experimental, conveying aspects of the story through the book's design. Her most recent novel, Hush, exists at the intersection of the body, language and identity. She is currently working on a novel about disappearance and, having been recorded on police surveillance cameras, collaborating with the visual artist, Margot Leigh Butler, the two are writing an AD HOC FILM SCRIPT (for when you've already been watched & listened to). Michael Turner was born and raised in Vancouver. He worked in the West Coast fishing industry while attending the University of Victoria, where he studied Anthropology. In addition to book writing, he has also worked as a musician, as well as an art critic and event promoter. His most recent project is a screenplay co-written with artist Stan Douglas for a DV installation entitled A Journey Into Fear, which premiered at the 2001 Istanbul Biennial. He is also editor of Advance Editions, an imprint he co-founded with Arsenal Pulp Press in 1999. Steve Venright has been called "Toronto's prime purveyor of non-chemically altered states" (Eye Weekly). He is the author of four books of poetry in prose, including Straunge Wunder (Tortoiseshell & Black, 1996) and Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000). He has also had over seventy poems published in various magazines and anthologies, or as broadsides, postcards and booklets produced by assorted small presses. As a visual artist, he has produced photographs, drawings, paintings and 'variegraphs' that have appeared in 270--------

numerous books, magazines, galleries and cafes. In the late twentieth century, he began operation of Alter Sublime Neurotechnologies, specializing in pulsed light & sound devices and cranial electrostimulators. Its offshoot was the Hallucinatorium—a sort of hyperspatial sideshow that toured raves and nightclubs in Toronto, Montreal and parts of NY State (with rogue appearances in British Columbia and Nova Scotia). As founder and principal strategist of Torpor Vigil Industries, he recently established the TVI Mobile Reality Inspection Lab to check the quality of reality at industrial, residential and governmental sites in the Greater Toronto Area. The year 2000 saw the first CD release from the audio recordings department of TVI: a double album of lavish Cabaroque songs by composer/musician Samuel Andreyev entitled Swallows. It was followed in 2002 by Samuel's second CD, Songs of Elsewhere. Forthcoming discs include The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor: Outrageous Recordings of the World's Most Renowned Sleeptalker and A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario (a double CD of expansive soundscapes featuring author Christopher Dewdney reading his eponymous multi-book poem in its entirety). Steve Venright is currently working on a long mindless poem called The Gated Now. JC Wilcke is a writer, teacher, and translator-in-training currently living in Japan. Born in Alberta, JC Wilcke continues to be active in the Calgary writing community. His work appears in various publications, including Fiddlehead, dANDelion, filling Station, endnote and Phu Online, as well as several chapbooks. His first book of poetry, My Good Work, appeared in Spring 2002 from Red Deer Press. Sheri-D Wilson is an international artist known for her jazzy, erotic and witty writing and performance style. She has four collections of published poetry: Bulls Wliip & Lambs Wool (Petarade Press), Swerve (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993), Girl's Guide to Giving Head (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996) and The Sweet Taste of Lightning (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999). Her recently released CD, sweet taste of lightning (Swerve Sound, 2000) is accompanied by two videopoems produced for BRAVO! TV. Her new collection of poetry, Between Lovers, will be launched in Fall 2002 by Arsenal Pulp Press. Her live performance/readings include: The World Poetry Bout 2002 (Taos), Poetry Africa 2001 (Durban), Shakespeare and Co. (Paris), The Vancouver International Writers Festival, Bumbershoot (Seattle), Harbourfront Reading Series (Toronto), Spoken Word Festival (Montreal), PanCanadian Wordfest (Calgary/Banff), Brainwash Reading Series (San Francisco) and The Small Press Festival (New York).

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related (and recommended) reading And Other Stories. Ed. George Bowering. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001. Carnivocal: A Celebration of Sound Poetry (CD). Eds. Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie. Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2000. evergreen: six new poets. Ed. rob mclennan. Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2002. Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. cauldron books #4. Ed. rob mclennan. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2003. Impure: Reinventing the Word. The theory, practice and oral history of spoken word in Montreal. Eds. Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely. Montreal: Conundrum Press, 2001. The IV. Lounge Reader. Ed. Paul Vermeersch. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001. The Last Word: An Insomniac Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Ed. Michael Holmes. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1995. The New Long Poem Anthology. Second edition. Ed. Sharon Thesen. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001. The Notebooks. Eds. Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple. Toronto: Doubleday, 2002. You & Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing. Eds. Andy Brown and rob mclennan. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2001. Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. Eds. Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999. Written in the Skin: A Poetic Response to AIDS. Ed. rob mclennan. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1998.

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acknowledgements Stephen Cain's poem "WAITING" originally appeared as an above/ground press broadsheet. Natalee Caple's poems are reprinted by permission of Coach House Books, from A More Tender Ocean (2000). rob mclennan's poem "Juliet is the name of a wound" originally appeared as an above/ground press broadsheet. The excerpt from Ray Robertson's novel, Heroes, is reprinted by permission of Dundurn Press (2000).

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