Earth Spell

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The opening lines of “With the Earth of the Garden Still on Them”

My hands with the earth of the garden still on them,
dirt worked under the nails, into the creases of knuckle, palm,
life line, heart line. Sullen smell of diesel exhaust.

move from a horticultural activity ingrained into the very palmistry of the hand to stench that is of another organic chemistry that of hydrocarbons. This poet, she is an urban gardener attuned to diversity. See the anaphoric stroll down a street in “June Elegy” which takes in the views offered by various yards.

The yard that has room in its heart for
one rosebush.
The yard with slim yellow irises.
The yard with gravel.
The yard with the wrought-iron fence,
box hedge; the gate snapping shut.
[…]
The yard with columbine and columbine and columbine.
[…]
The yard with garbage cans.
The yard with tricycles.
With sunlight.
Trash.
The yard with snow-in-summer, honey locust,
star-of-Bethlehem, periwinkle,
in bloom.

Rhea Tregebov (alive)

And so for day 1532
22.02.2011

Posted in Gardens, Poetry | Leave a comment

Recursive Remarks on the Recursive

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The interpolated is not the recursive.

Faas: Is there any modern music which you feel moves in directions you follow in your poetry?

Creeley: Well, sure, Cage is fascinating to me, for example. I’ve been fascinated by re-qualifications of senses of “serial order.” I was reading a text called The Psychology of Communication, by George A. Miller. For example, the human situation has difficulty regaining the context if there is something interpolated, like: “That man, whom you saw yesterday, is my father.” “That man is my father” is the basic statement — “whom you saw yesterday,” is the element that’s being inserted. This is also applicable to computer structure. If you keep putting statements into the basic statement, after about three or four such insertions, the hearer or witness gets very, very confused. The human attention apparently is not recursive and tends to be always where it is, so the more there is interpolated in that fashion the more difficult it is for the human to regain locus. And Miller points out that we can usually pick up where we left off in a simply physical context. Painting a fence. for instance, we know where we stopped because there is the new paint, physically it is. Poetry obviously is a way to regain a situation in the recursive that is to remind us where we are constantly by a structure. Now I am fascinated by what happens when we aren’t so reminded, when we break and move into different patterns to locate the experience of being somewhere, and that’s what I find extraordinary with Cage: the attempt to requalify the experience of serial order, which to me is really crucial.

From Ekbert Faas, Towards A New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews

Fine. But the interpolated is not necessarily the recursive. I point to narratology and the term “metalepsis” where it describes a crossing of narrative levels. The interpolated is a mere insertion. A recursive insertion involves levels. A series with curves.

But the trick, for the reader, is to distinguish mere insertion from the recursive. In Creeley’s remarks we have a whole bunch of material interpolated between mentions of Cage and “serial order”. Just how recursive the remarks about regaining locus are remains to be judged.

Presentation order at the surface may not reflect order at the base. The basic may be the perceiving in temporal yesterday (“That man”). It may be the kernel. The fact that the man “is my father” may be an addition. Next element in a series. Grammatical embedding aside.

And so for day 1531
21.02.2011

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Coming Out of the War

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Teacraft: A Treasury of Romance, Rituals & Recipes by Charles and Violet Schaffer (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Press, 1975)

Our authors offer us the reminiscence of a character dubbed “Our Man” about the time some thirty years ago [1940s] at a boarding house, The Pink House on Waverly Place in Kowloon.

“Afternoon tea was more to my taste. The elegant service and leisurely civility on the veranda in fine weather and in the livingroom when weather was bad agreed with me.

“To this ritual I unwittingly contributed an American revolution. Following a lifetime of profligacy, I innocently spread my bread with both butter and jam. At first my fellow lodgers looked askance. They spread one or the other on their bread, never both!

“Soon they were imitating my extravagance, first to see whether they liked it and then to enjoy the extravagance at dinner.

“Mrs Mather [the keeper of the boarding house] was utterly dismayed by this ruinous turn of events. It threatened to throw her budget off balance, she protested, and it probably did.

I am reminded of the story told by Jane Rule about the ham and the pan.

There is a story about a young woman who always cut a generous slice off a ham before cooking it. When asked why she did it, she said, “My mother always did it.” Piqued for a better reason, she asked her mother why she had done it. “My mother always did it.” The grandmother, fortunately still alive, was finally able to explain, “I never had a pan big enough.”

Quirks.

And so for day 1530
20.02.2011

Posted in Food Writing | Leave a comment

In the land of “attar of carexhaust catcorpse and cookinggrease”

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Francois Lachance

How not to love a poem that begins with the word “Dawndrizzle” and ends with a series of other compound words or kennings?

Slumbers now slumtrack unstinks cooling
waiting brief for milkmaid mornstar and worldrise

In the middle there is a striking image of female potency.

bigthewed Saxonwives stepping over buttrivers
waddling back wienerladen to suckle smallfry

Got to take a look for yourself at this rather exclusive excluding enclave “a ghetto gotten for goyim” as exposed in Anglosaxon Street. Earle Birney (1904 – 1995). The poem appeared in David and other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1942). Not a street I would want to live on where the mindless procreators sit on their stoops “swearing hatedeeds”

I am left with a lexical quandry.

Alongside in lanenooks carling and leman
caterwaul and clip careless of Saxonry
with moonglow and haste and a higher heartbeat

Trying to understand “carling and leman”. leman = lover. carling = timbers in a ship sustaining the deck. Could we have here a misprint for “darling”?

And so for day 1529
19.02.2011

Posted in Poetry | Tagged | Leave a comment

Liquidities Equivalencies

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Francois Lachance

BookThug has a conversation between Chantal Neveu and Nathanaël to which is appended this note

It was no doubt foolhardy on our part to have structured our conversation around such an untranslatable term as fuites; it is at once flight, escape, leakage, puncture and drain, and none of the available equivalencies in English carries the same degree of polysemic, never mind acoustic resonance. (N)

Comes to mind the term as used in the work of Deleuze and Guattari but here flight takes on dimensions other than the line. Other than the line.

Brian Massumi warns the reader in “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments” A Thousand Plateaus that

FLIGHT/ESCAPE. Both words translate fuite, which has a different range of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.

Tempus fugit.

And so for day 1528
18.02.2011

Posted in Translations | Leave a comment

Dialogue des Courgettes

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The third of the garden poems “Zucchini” in A Gathering Instinct by Betsy Warland.

you admire
the zucchini’s proliferation
i think
it incapable of discretion

I like how the observations in dialogue almost an imbroglio is peppered on both sides with “i”. promiscuous i.

And so for day 1527
17.02.2011

Posted in Poetry | Leave a comment

Behold the Fan

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Janine Beichman. Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry

Discussions on what form we should translate tanka into have focused until now on tanka in its printed forms. One argument for example, is that, because tanka are usually printed in one line, English translations should be one line too. But calligraphic versions show that a tanka poem (and the same goes for haiku) has traditionally been seen as convertible into myriad visual shapes. In fact, if we take the calligraphic versions as our models, then there are an infinity of ways to divide our lines and an infinity of ways to indent them. Why should we invent for ourselves a consistency that Japanese poets have never felt obliged to maintain? Why not take advantage of the expressive possibilities offered by modern English poetry’s variety of lineation, spacing, punctuation, and capitalization?

Brings to mind the work to bring the 19th century envelope writing to light — see Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. It is an invitation to think the materiality of the writing process. Holland Cotter in the New York Times review of The Gorgeous Nothings speculates

It’s also plausible to think that, for Dickinson, writing on recycled envelopes had practical advantages, material and psychological. It probably appealed to her waste-not New England sensibility. It also meant that she didn’t have to face the equivalent of a blank canvas. Her chosen paper already carried words, familiar names and addresses. It was stained with life, with postmarked dates and the dust of distant places. From that resonant content, she could generate new content, just as she had always generated poetry from the immediate facts of the physical world.

I do like that expression “stained with life” almost belongs in a tanka preferably written on a fan.

And so for day 1526
16.02.2011

Posted in Poetry, Translations | Leave a comment

Illusive Allusions

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Francois Lachance

The intertextual is not merely interstitial. It sometimes runs interference.

I like the central image in Rhea Tregebov “Vienna, November 1983” in no one we know and how it connects with the haunting mention at the close of the poem of a locale (Mauthausen) that was the site of a concentration camp — mere mention of the name undercuts the quotidian contentedness evoked by cream in coffee.

Allowing herself cream; cream marbles
the good coffee, turns it from liquid
into something extraordinary, something
like a body.

Through enumeration and allusion (pearls as eyes) the poem comes to the closing mention of Mauthausen. I think this is where for me it fails — I bring too much to the reading. I bring my previous reading of the Shakespeare and the T.S. Eliot. They register for me in the singular number which for Tregebov is positioned as a multitude.

Ariel’s song from The Tempest

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Eliot’s The Waste Land

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Cream does pearl in coffee when the last drops drop. The image though is not caught at the point the cream is poured but in the swirl when it is allowed into the good coffee. Notwithstanding the meddlesome allusions, to connect a simple cup of coffee with a concentration camp is audacious.

But who drinks the coffee?

What is enumeration and allusion is recapitulation.

The beginning of the poem:

Most, people her age, allow themselves …
a certain sentimentality now. Those
are pearls. The five foxes circle her neck,
their squared noses pointing down dark
with a polished sheen dark as the wood
building the walls of the café; nothing
[…]

The ending:

[…] the good coffee, turns it from liquid
into something extraordinary, something
like a body. All their rings, the light,
voicing that soft gold, extraordinary
how little the sizes varied, the human hand
human, the light living, once, nothing. And those
are pearls, those everlastingly mild eyes
that were their eyes, dark as the wood building
the walls that were their eyes. Mauthausen.

Ever so easy, distracted by coffee, to miss the repeated (but differently segmented) “dark as the wood building walls”. An architectural trick overriding the allusions.

And so for day 1525
15.02.2011

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sunlight buttered on the grass.

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Francois Lachance

In a poem where the speaker repeatedly mentions an inability to remember the names of things, there comes this splendid evocation of roses that turns for all its colour and specificity upon the mention of names.

Do the roses bloom? I hope so: how I love roses!
        Bunches of roses on
The dining table, Georg Arends, big and silver-
        pink with sharply
Bent-back petals so the petals make a point: no
        other rose does that:
or Variegata di Bologna, streaked and freaked
        in raspberries and cream,

The feast is limited to two types of roses but seems in its precision to invoke a whole gamut of hybrids. And later in The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler one finds a similar abundance conveyed by a repetition with variation: “Sunlight buttered on the grass” will some lines later be reprised “Light freshly buttered on the grass.” Same effect. Different wording. Once would be showing off. Twice is the mark of a master.

And so for day 1524
14.02.2011

Posted in Poetry | Leave a comment

Radish Pyrotechnics

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Rhea Tregebov. “The fire under control” in no one we know.

This is a poem that begins with the collection and consumption of vegetables (such as peppers and rhubarb and of course radishes) and moves on to consider fire that is not to be dug up.

Radishes figure a peevish,
proletarian vegetable.
When you bite them, they bite back.

This seems likes a simple innocent remark about the pungent taste of radishes. However, by poem’s end we are aware that the fire under control is radioactive — after Chernobyl. The burn burns deeper.

And so for day 1523
13.02.2011

Posted in Food Writing, Poetry | Leave a comment