Where did I hear about Eve Joseph’s remarkable Griffin Prize-winning book of prose poems, Quarrels? Did someone in Yvonne Blomer’s poetry workshop, the one I was part of back in January and February, mention it? I think so. However I learned of this book, I’m grateful that I did.
Quarrels is a collection of prose poems. It’s divided into three sections. The first half consists of strange and magical fragments that consider a panoply of stories and situations from many different perspectives. The next quarter is a series of ekphrastic poems that respond to photographs taken by Diane Arbus in the 1950s and early 1960s. The last quarter considers (I think) the death of Joseph’s father.
The poems amaze me, because they don’t make literal sense, but they make absolute emotional sense. One of the first poems in the book, “We met at a birthday party,” contains this sentence: “The illogical must have a logic have a logic of its own you said.” In her blurb on the back cover, Roo Borson suggests that sentence captures the entire book, and I think she’s right; the logic of these poems is unique, strange, illogical but entirely felt and true.
I wish I could write like this. Maybe everyone who writes, or tries to, feels the same way.
I forgot that I’m teaching Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters this week, so I reread it this morning. It’s wonderful and deserves all the accolades it’s received, although I might like Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing better, despite its darkness, perhaps because I took my students to see the NAC production 35 years ago. Plays can be hard to visualize when you read them. Even though I have a theatre degree, I find that’s sometimes the case, and I acknowledge that with my students. A play is like a blueprint; the production is the building. My solution is to get them to do a table reading, if only for a few minutes. Despite their shyness and lack of experience, they start to get a feeling for what the play might be like when it’s up on its feet. I’ll try that again this week. Wish us luck!
I’m teaching my colleague Medrie Purdham’s book Little Housewolf this week, so I spent a couple of hours this afternoon rereading it. It’s such a delight, this exploration of the small and the domestic, of family and relationships. Looking back through the book, I see poems about a hinge, a slight burn on a woman’s foot, a painted turtle, insects, a baby tooth, a thimble, mug shots from the nineteenth century, a cup of herbal tea, a misheard word, Lego, a child’s bath. Even the ekphrastic poems tend to consider miniatures or similar images, like newspaper clippings. Well, those are the ostensible subjects, but the poems themselves reach far beyond those objects or images. “The Thimble’s Bucket List,” for instance, which is probably my favourite, is really (I think) about dreams, ambitions, desires for accomplishments unlikely to be realized: “To play a shell game with two others and a pearl,” “To stand empty in a crosswind, whiffling,” “To jamb the torturer’s tong like a stone in the beak.” The exception, the desire that’s within the thimble’s reach, brings us back to earth, to another small domestic object, a Dorset-wheel button:
No, instead, to work.
To settle into detail. To work a Dorset-wheel button, spoked with a hundred stitches. To keep revisiting the centre. To be touched again, again, again, again, again.
What the thimble really wants is connection, labour, a focus on the specific and the concrete, and the beautiful–not unlike the poems in this appropriately short and lovely book, which brings so much into its ambit. Every time I read Little Housewolf, I am checking references, tracking down allusions. This time, I found myself searching for “sheep may safely graze” (a lyric from a Bach aria, written by Salomon Franck), “stars will never harm you” (I couldn’t find that one, but it must be something; I’m going to have to ask), and “the war of the / Romantics” (a dispute among composers in nineteenth-century Germany), among other things I couldn’t place and/or hadn’t heard of before. There are others, but I uncovered them on earlier excursions through Little Housewolf. There’s an entire world in these poems. Their focus on small things does not mean they’re not ambitious or even global in their embrace.
I don’t think I’ve ever quoted a cover blurb in this blog, but my colleague Michael Trussler’s description of the language Purdham employs in this book is too appropriate not to include here: “Listen, you can almost overhear the individual words murmuring gratitude at suddenly finding themselves appearing on the same page together.” Yes, the linguistic surprises, the absolute accuracy and felicity of the diction–wow. Would that I could write like that.
When I was working on my PhD, I read a lot about social aesthetics/social practice/relational aesthetics. From what I learned, literary work that involves that kind of practice is relatively rare. I could be wrong, but I think that’s because the amount of skill and experience that’s required to write well, as I’ve been learning for 15 years or so, is pretty daunting.
That’s what makes Ariel Gordon’s TreeTalk project so fascinating. This book is the result of a 2017 relational aesthetics project in which people wrote poems and tied them to an elm tree on Sherbrook Street in Winnipeg. Some of the poems here are Gordon’s; others are contributions from passersby, who wrote on paper tags and tied them to the tree’s branches; others are found texts about Ulmus Americana–that’s the botanical name of the American elm species–mostly from Plants of the Western Boreal Forest & Aspen Parkland (a field guide that I really like). The book also includes sepia-toned illustrations by Natalie Baird. As an object, it’s quite lovely, and the poems are lovely, too. I particularly enjoyed the parodies of Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem that compares trees to poetry.
Elm trees are also lovely. I had never seen one–not that I knew of, although there are a few on Wellington Street in Ottawa, right near the Parliament Buildings, that have somehow escaped the scourge of Dutch elm disease, and I had walked by them without knowing what they were–until we stopped in Winnipeg on our trip west to Regina. Winnipeg (and I only know this from reading Gordon’s 2019 book of essays, Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests, which is another book worth checking out) has trouble keeping up with the number of elm trees affected, and infected, by DED, which is a serious problem, because when sick trees are not removed, the disease spreads to healthy trees. Regina is lucky, because our DED problem is manageable. We lose maybe half a dozen trees every year, but at that rate, the city is able to quickly deal with them. It’s still a shame, and elm trees are no longer being planted here because of fears that DED will lay waste to the entire population of trees. Still, in the neighbourhood where I live, the streets are lined with elms, which leads to mornings when I see this when I leave to walk to work:
In the summer, the streets become almost like tunnels of green leaves. I often think of these trees as memories of my parents’ childhoods in the 1930s and 1940s, before DED destroyed Ontario’s elms (or most of them).
Anyway, TreeTalk is wonderful–definitely worth reading. And, as a bonus, the publisher, At Bay Press, included a handwritten note to me on handmade paper. Pretty cool.
I finished rereading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies last night. It’s the third time I’ve read it, and the second time I’ve taught it. I think it’s incredible: smart, bold, strange, experimental. What makes it those things? Well, the way it brings prose and poetry together, for one thing. The position of its narrator, Mashkawaji: they are at the bottom of a lake (I’m guessing Rice Lake, near Peterborough, but I could be wrong), frozen, decomposed, but also able to experience and/or remember the lives of their friends. The fact that it presents a collective experience, rather than the story of a single individual. Its focus on Indigenous resistance and resurgence, which isn’t surprising if you’ve read Simpson’s theoretical work. The way it uses Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibway language, without explanations or apologies. The way it uses plural English pronouns to convey what it might be like to experience the world through a language which, like Anishinaabemowin, doesn’t use gendered pronouns. The chapter in which geese consider what it means to migrate, which becomes an allegory (I think) for what forms Indigenous resistance and resurgence might take. The final chapter’s focus on communal experience. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that Mashkawaji is the narrator of those last two chapters, and I don’t think that it matters, because Noopiming isn’t just Mashkawaji’s story. In fact, we need to pay close attention to the text if we’re going to going to learn how they ended up in the lake. (Hint: it’s not a happy story.) The mix of tenderness and biting satire. It’s all quite amazing.
And, yes, it’s difficult because it’s strange. I know that my students have never read anything like it, and I walk them through the text, slowly, encouraging them not to try to domesticate its strangeness by thinking of it as a ghost story, for instance, or a dream narrative. Those interpretations might fit parts of the text, but by seeing it through those frames, we end up whittling away the features that make Noopiming so radical. Let the strange be strange: that’s my motto. Don’t make the strange be normal. That creates distortions.
That word in the title, Noopiming, means something like “in the bush” in Anishinaabemowin. That word, and the reference to White Ladies, and Simpson’s geographical location in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario), and the note in the novel’s acknowledgements, indicate that in part this book is a response to the writing of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two English sisters who were settlers nearby in the 1830s and wrote famous memoirs about the experience. The land where they homesteaded belonged to the Anishinaabe, Simpson’s ancestors. I’m not sure why I’m using the past tense in that sentence; it still does belong to the Anishinaabe. One way to think about Noopiming is to consider it a response to their accounts of homesteading, their easy acceptance of their right to the land–and by extension the easy acceptance we settlers have in relation to our right to the land we occupy.
This is likely the last time I’ll get to teach Noopiming, and I’m sad about that, but I’m also happy I’ve had a chance to read and reread it, and to introduce students to it. And, maybe to introduce readers of this blog to it, too.
