BERNEVAL

She is a master of ekphrasis. Take her poem “Giocometti’s Dog” in the collection of the same name. She has contrived to open by posing a set of negations (what this particular sculpture of an animal cannot) and turns in mid poem to reanimate the beast (“Giacometti’s Dog is coming back / as a jackal”) and concludes with bravura:

He’s not your doggie-in-the-window.
He’s not racing into a burning house or taking your shirt
between his teeth and swimming to the beach.
He’s looking out for Number One,
he’s doing the dog paddle and making it
to shore in this dog-eat-dog world.

The twists and turns of this particular poem are more complex and varied than I describe here. Suffice it to say that the skill displayed in these lines appears years later in a poem with a slightly different tone but an equally suggestive ending that leads one to think about species survival. In Domain of Perfect Affection there is a poem describing the aftermath of a forest fire in New Mexico. “The Dome Fire” adopts quotation from the words of a guide on a trip through Yellowstone to leave the poem to conclude on the hovering image of succession. The blackened Yellowstone gives way to

Rose and turquoise saturated mountain phlox
          and larkspur    It begins with the wildflowers
          she said and then the world comes back

She, by the way, borrowing another’s words to recount the aftermath, to record the transformation of the blackened and scorched place, is the poet Robin Becker.

And so for day 1079
26.11.2009

Allan Cooper in Gabriel’s Wing has a poem in honour of Seamus Heaney. It is a fine meditation entitled “Potatoes”. After stanzas describing potatoes in all their concrete earthiness, the poem turns to a search for one word equally nourishing. It concludes with a geopolitical perspective.

A thin strand
leading all the way back to the Incas
rises in our planting.

The poem has approached this knowledge via a set of questions. The lines immediately preceding the conclusion ask “And what of the one word / we’ve longed for all our days? / What will we do when we find it?”

Another strand, different heritage: according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the children’s counting-out rhyme that begins one potato, two potato was first recorded in 1885 in Canada. (Also attested by A Dictionary of English Folklore.) I don’t believe that Cooper had these words quite in mind: “One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more. One bad spud!” But something tells me that Heaney would love to be counted: rot or not.

And so for day 1078
25.11.2009

He approaches this spot via negative theology.

We are lonely for where we are.

Tim Lilburn in “How to be here?” in Poetry and Knowing goes on

Poetry helps us cope. Poetry is where we go when we want to know the world as lover. You read a poem or write one, guessing at the difficult, oblique interiority of something, but the undertaking ultimately seems incomplete, ersatz. The inevitable disappointment all poems bring motions toward the hard work of standing in helpless awe before things. “The praise of the psalms is a lament,” the old men and women of the desert used to say. Poetry in its incompleteness awakens a mourning over the easy union with the world that seems lost. Poetry is a knowing to this extent: it brings us to this apposite discomfiting.

Even with out the enumeration of shortcomings, even without the intercession of poetry, the statement “We are lonely for where we are” resonates. Where we are is not an easy place to attain.

There is almost two — the one we that is lonely, the other we that is. And there is that magical moment when the being is the moment of longing. When all is arrested.

Of course there may be a tiny displacement between being lonely for and longing.

And so for day 1076
23.11.2009

What kind of beast?

Part of the excitement inside this species of meditative act [poetic attention] is linguistic; it’s the excitement of a tool which has hatched the illicit desire to behave like an animal.

from Don McKay’s contribution to Poetry and Knowing edited by Tim Lilburn. And in the same collection, Patrick Friesen suggests that “Perhaps, learning to write poetry is like learning to dream.” And Roo Borson explicitly links the two: “Writing is dreaming.”

Now to muse a while even dream what type of animal hatches…

And so for day 1075
22.11.2009

Robert Bringhurst in “Poetry and Thinking” in Thinking and Singing edited by Tim Lilburn.

But not to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition.

One way of answering that music [poetry as a music we lean to see, to feel, to hear, to smell and then to think and then to answer] is to sing. Humans, like birds, are able to make songs and pass them on. Human songs, like birdsongs, are part nature and part culture: part genetic predilection, part cultural inheritance or training, part individual inflection or creation. These are the three parts of mimesis. If the proportion of individual creation in human song is greater than in birdsong, that’s no cause for pride, though it may be very good cause for excitement. What it means is that nature and culture both are at greater risk from us than they are from the birds.

This tripartite taxonomy cries out for a folding onto another spot in Thinking and Singing. In the same book in an essay by Zan Zwicky “Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation”

That is: I think all, or at least many, of us are aware of primary-process-structured thought, at least from time to time. As I observed at the outset, its products marble our daily waking life in the form of slips of the tongue, and jokes — which, unlike dreams, do not tolerate much in the way of secondary process translation. They also apparently visit us when we’re tired, or moved, or, often, when we are confronted with certain kinds of spatial problems whose solutions may strike us as evident but difficult to reconstruct in words.

Zwicky’s invocation of spatial problems makes me wonder if the mechanisms of dream work as identified by Freud (displacement and condensation) can be mapped onto the three parts of mimesis as identified by Bringhurst. It is evident that any attribution of causation be it genetics, cultural training, individual creation can be displaced and ascribed to one or both of the other two. In other words one or two of the three parts can be repressed in interpretations.

Condensation (one dream object standing for several associations and ideas) would involve some sort of fusion of the three parts. This is where Bringhurst’s formulation of mimesis as an answer to the music of poetry may serve as an anchor point to the mapping we are projecting. The parts of mimesis respond through a sort of condensation to the various sensory modalities that guide our apprehension of the world, its music and its poetry.

And of course Freud identifies other processes in dream work. So there may be other ways to absorb the parts of mimesis into a practice of interpretation.

And so for day 1073
20.11.2009