BERNEVAL

From “Misreckoning“, a renga by Gillian Sze and Alison Strumberger which appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, one of the middle stanzas

Slow hands tick over each surface,
Mother’s silver, Father’s atlas, Lover’s jawline.
Every hour chases its tail.

The incongruence of the objects is softened by the sounds. One doesn’t quite care how the poets arrived here and yet …

This particular stanza in this particular renga made me search out their set of other renga and epistolary work, Redrafting Winter

And so for day 2630
24.02.2014

Someone else has been (mis)quoting from memory:

Robert Stam
Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics

One is reminded of Bakhtin’s three spasms — birth, orgasm, and death — and of Yeat’s “god of love” who “pitched his tent/ near the place of excrement.”

I had always thought it was “in the place of excrement”. But the concluding stanza of Yeat’s “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” has no trace of tent except in the rhymes:

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

This search was triggered by John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet where the birth scene cuts across three stanzas and culminates in a sense of pride:

[…] Kin,
gather. My world is strange
and merciful, ingrown months, blessing a swelling trance.

[19]
So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you & hate
off with you. Ages! Useless. Below my waist
he has me in Hell’s vise.
Stalling. He let go. Come back: brace
me somewhere. No. No. Yes! everything down
hardens I press with horrible joy down
my back cracks like a wrist
shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late

[20]
hide me forever I work thrust I must free
now I all muscles & bones concentrate
what is living from dying?
Simon I must leave you so untidy
Monster you are killing me Be sure
I’ll have you later Women do endure
I can can no longer
and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me

[21]
drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!

A scene and sentiment worthy of Crazy Jane.

And so for day 2629
23.02.2014

Thomas King
77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin

A kind of erasure is at work and so form and content mesh.

34

Let us now discuss
  missing and
  murdered
  aboriginal women.

Let us now discuss
  murdered
  aboriginal women.

Let us now discuss
  aboriginal women.

Let us now discuss.

Not sure that I am quoting this whole poem. Not even sure the CBC gets it right either.
https://www.cbc.ca/books/read-work-from-thomas-king-s-first-poetry-collection-77-fragments-of-a-familiar-ruin-1.5306406

By the logic of the poem, the last line to disappear should leave white space. A void. But no way to measure its duration either in time or on the page.

The only way out is to retrace steps, uncomplicate the erasure, focus on specifics. From an agreement to discuss. Begin again.

Or else entropy wins.

And so for day 2628
22.02.2014

For every child who saw the wet colour dry to dull …

Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.
Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

Seamus Heaney
“The Gravel Walks”
in The Spirit Level

… and knew what a redipping would produce.

And so for day 2626
20.02.2014

Lola Lemire Tostevin
from Double Standards
as reproduced in Sp/elles

do not be deceived by appearances
I am not a woman   I am a poem

[…]

do not be deceived by appearances
I am not a woman    I am a sequence
dismembered    each organ fastened
to a verb    the mouth to speak
the ear to hear    the eye to see
saw to and fro the contours of my
topic    the red raw of lips that
spread to read mine    the voice
that travels the long curves and
turns of the poem’s socket    as it
locks it    to bear in mind

Gwen Benaway
from “Fuck Your Fear”
Holy Wild

a body is a paragraph,
a poem waiting to be written.

a body is a story,
a character in an imagined world.

a body is a grave,
a dead space between lovers.

a body is a promise,
a gift of histories colliding.

And so for day 2624
18.02.2014

The poet posits. The poem conducts.

For him, death will lie
Open like a newspaper in a dream,
A paper he ransacks his apartment for,
And when he lays his hands on it at last,
As he smooths the crinkled page to read,
He will simply spread before his face
Not a page but, oddly a black comet,
Or rather a rococo ornament in empty space
Hanging intriguingly before his eyes,

And the enjambement jumps to another stanza. And note that in this stanza there are no full stops.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg
“A Monument in Utopia”
A Gilded Lapse of Time

And so for day 2623
17.02.2014

Chris Banks
“Narrative Versus Lyric”
The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory

Beginning versus end…

A narrative poem leaves a trail of crumbs
in a fairy tale. A lyric poem introduces
a swan, its neck bowed low, feather-soft,
to eat them. […]
When
the night is over, the drunk narrative poem
admits the lyric poem’s flowers are lovely.
The lyric poem says it has always secretly
loved the narrative poem’s honesty. They
fall into each other’s arms. A child is born.

Somewhere in the middle …

A narrative poem takes no prisoners.
A lyric poem says the only prison is longing.

The child of course exists in the space of longing that is the poem.

And so for day 2622
16.02.2014