Sunday, April 27, 2008

we ourselves were the language.

little seed pods left on a plant, the river valley last week.

little burrs like barbed-wire stars. river valley, last week.

So, I met someone at the bookstore the other day. First I encountered her whilst flipping through an anthology of 'New European Poets' and seeing her name come up as both translator & author a number of times... Then when perusing the literary magazines, a whole article and interview with her! & thus I became acquainted with Miss Valzhyna Mort and her new book of poems, Factory of Tears.

So yes, Valhynia Martynava is a Belarusian poet and translator, now living in New York City, who plays the accordion when she is not writing poems that get stuck in my throat & melt into something that tastes halfway between borshch & tears. She writes about her grandmother, the political tumult of her home country, loneliness & lustiness, & perhaps most compelling to me, language. She writes in Belarusian -- a bold & significant move, for where she comes from, the language is drowned out by Russian, pushed into the cracks in the floors at the homes, whispered in the countryside by 'the peasants'. But she is passionate about reviving her language, still in the same danger of being silenced as it was under the Soviets, & there she is, reclaiming it, winning prizes for her readings all over Europe. (You should listen to this video of her reading even if you don't understand a word of any Slavic language -- pretend it's music. Her style is really powerful.)

And it's the lines from 'Belarusian I' that haunt me the most. In this poem written from the voice of her grandmother, she writes:

when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again

(Valzhyna Mort, translated Joseph Cortese)

& it's such a tribute to how poetry persists, poetry in Eastern Europe is flourishing. Grown from a long line of dissident poets that used words as their only weapons, their new descendants in Ukraine and Belarus and Russia that have inherited this dedication to employing potency of poems in their new revolutions... & I've heard poetry readings in Kyiv can be standing-room-only, now. (Would that could happen here!)

But yes, Valzhyna. I love.

* * *

Also, I love this song: Fierce Little Lark by Shearwater, recorded live for a Daytrotter Session. That tremulous resonance in his voice is chilling & so lovely I could weep. Such sparse cryptic words, all choky in the throat:

we lay at the waterline... & fish with our fingers, & breathe in the night, so wild, so humble & storied... but all for a lie! all for a lie, oh all for a lie, i told you...

the fierce little lark has his eye upon you... the poplars are swinging so wild, & the wasp at the window, the spoon in your hand... & dog who is always watching... but all for a lie! all for a lie, oh all for a lie, i told you...

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

macadamia!

stencil on a bus bench, 75th-ish ave and 109th st. especially for bryna.

sigh. darned gravity! on the footbridge in hawrelak, going over the river to laurier park.


This is pure silly, & also rather interesting to me, in terms of etymology. In this little sketch by the absurdist comedians The Vestibules, they list off words that they take great joy in pronouncing & repeating, e.g// bulbous! bouffant! blubber! macadamia! gazeeeebo. (Just go listen and be filled with glee... I love it when people have such fun with language) & while enjoying this (& subsequently infecting myself with a rather powerful earworm) I was also struck by the number of words they used that were derived from Latin, and how few came from the Germanic substrate of English.

A little bit of checking with my etymology dictionary confirmed my suspicions (from the Latin suspectionem, suspectio, via Old French suspeçun) -- funny words in English seem often to be Latin-based. In fact, their only funny word that was part of Middle or Old English and therefore most likely Germanic was blubber (from blober, a bubble). The rest are direct borrowings (mukluk and iglu from Inuktitut, beluga from Russia), words of unknown but likely Scottish dialect with Gaelic influence (shindig, hullaballoo), a few more directly French (bouffant and gabardine) and then the whole plethora (also from the Latin, inspired by Greek) of Latin-via-French: superfluous, tuberculosis, foible, ploy, plethora, spatula, gazebo, galoshes...

So this makes me wonder -- what is it that makes French and Latin-derived words funny to English speakers, even if these words are a pretty regular part of our language. Why aren't our old Germanic words funny? Is it that they are so basic, less superfluous (from the Latin superfluere, 'overflow') like house and anger and hunger and sleep? Do these old words have fewer syllables?

I can understand why the more direct borrowing like 'mukluk' and 'beluga' sound amusing, because they contain sound patterns not found commonly in English. But for the Latinate words, they have been in English a long time and have mutated much more to fit English sound patterns, they are undeniably 'English' words. So it can't be the foreign-ness aspect, I don't think.

Do they lack the 'u' and 'oy' sounds that for some reason, sound amusing? The psychology of why words sound funny or grating has always fascinated me... Like how certain words I cannot stand to hear. I hate the words 'torque' and 'torso', I flinch when I hear them. Yet 'tornado' and 'torment' don't bother me.

I am sure somehow has done some research on this. But anyway, I have been wondering (while I should be working. Sigh.)

* * *

On a slightly related note, I've also been reading a lot lately about phonosemantics and sound symbolism -- the idea that basically morphemes are not the smallest meaningful units in a language, but the phonemes, the basic sounds, have meanings as well. That perhaps, unlike Saussure's arbitrary sign, the sounds of the words themselves have meaning.

Onomatopoeia is one type of sound symbolism, clustering (e.g. words in a language with similar meanings contain similar sounds) and iconity (e.g. looking at words are that also have similar meanings, and looking for regular changes in sound to accompany semantic distinctions) One linguist, Margaret Magnus, makes an interesting case for iconicity, in the words step, and stamp, and tamp and tramp. To sum it up, she feels that 'mp' makes a word more 'intense', as in step vs. stamp, and the r in tramp extends the tamp action which refers to one bounded location as opposed to one that is extended over space/time. Anyway, she has a fascinating webpage that is worth a look. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, however... There's a neuroscientist too, Ramachandran, who discusses sounds as metaphors for images, and cross-modal synaesthesia... and I need to track down John Mitchell's book 'Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments'... It would be very interesting to see what he says, because this is something Iam always aware of when writing... in poetry I think we are most definitely aware of the inherent phonosemantics of our language, even subconsciously, as poem-making is really just about figuring out the recipes for phrases, combining the word that best captures meaning and essence with the words that taste the best when said together.

Anyway. I was supposed to be doing work? Yes, I was. More on all this later, I will finish my half-formed thoughts.

PS: Gourd is a really funny word. But it has to be said 'goooooooooourd' for maximum funny.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

only our feet all the more surely trample our earth.

spring melt, river valley path, april 8th/08

aster skeletons, river valley, april 8th/08


Living in this province makes my brain hurt. This is not a new revelation, but it has been hurting extra much since the whole first-nuclear-power-plant-in-Alberta business appeared last year. Actually, it would still hurt even if I lived in anywhere else, because the very fact that a lot of people think it's a really good idea to build a nuclear power plant outside of Peace River has a lot of impact beyond provincial borders. The fact they want to build one enough to make my brain hurt, but it's not only that it is some misguided attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions (which does not work anyway!), it's to help power the oilsands! So we can get all the oil out of the ground faster & destroy the atmosphere & the boreal forest even sooner, & as a bonus, increase the health hazards with upping the already high carcinogen levels that are popping up all over Northern Alberta. Super.

I can never get over these sorts of decisions. Sometimes I would just like to ask the people who make these decisions if they like their children or their grandchildren very much. Most people would say they do, & yet this kind of myopic, linear stupidity abounds. Seven generations? More like a month, a week.



* * *



Ko man dosi mamulite, par muzigu dzivošanu
Izplaukst zelta abelite un ka rita migla skan
Ko tas dos tev mamulite, ka tavs delinš nenomirst,

Atbildes nav
Tikai kajas drošak savu zemi min…



What will you give to me mother dear, for eternal life
The little golden apple tree blooms, and rings out like morning mist
What does it give to you mother dear, that your little son doesn't die
There is no reply
Only our feet all the more surely trample our earth



This is Joanna Macy's story about her creation and use of the Elm Dance, set to the Latvian folksong above.



* * *



This was inspired by the work of the musical group Kitka (along with the super-amazing Ukrainian avant-garde folk musician Mariana Sadovska); for their production of Rusalki -- Songs Between Worlds, they travelled to villages in Northeastern Ukraine to collect songs about the rusalky, the spirits of the earth/water/seasons (generally a creative force), but also associated with untimely death. As noted in this article here, these villages where the rusalky song tradition is the strongest also happen to be some of the hardest hit by the Chornobyl disaster twenty-two years ago. I have always been in awe of the rusalky songs, & haunted by the tradition of the Provedu Rusalok, & this coinciding of resilient songs & resilient earth somehow encourages me a little.



And so, I write things. (Not finished yet, as usual)




i)

on the shores of lac cardinal
a black moth flutters, over
the water, in the leaves of red poplars
& slick as a sturgeon she is down
in the shadows, singing under the ice –

i live at the bottom of the river
with indigenous sorrows growing
in my belly, soft earth in my fists
singing my way into the fields,
green thursday, first thunder –

ten years from now, a sky
glows with the eerie exhale of neon,
phosphorescent mushroom stalks
rising above the lake, electron spores
crashing & flowing on their way north –

there where the earth lies oil-black,
where you strip away the strata, peel
back the skin & pillage for plasma, suck
greedy at the bitumen pooling
under tar-black grass –

but i am still there, braiding
strands of mosses, sealing the cracks
& coaxing the beaks of crocuses out
from the moist nests, underground
birds with wide mouths searching for the sun –


ii)

i am not sure what they call
me here, but i think
they know me.

i didn’t stow away in a
seed packet, sewn in the hemline
of your baba’s coat –

i was always here,
autochthonous little song,
a thought, a green-ness

rusalka-rusalochka,
zelenka-zemlyanynochka,
from the pripyat’ to the peace;

did you know they
still sing to me, even in
chornobyl, those hearts strong

around the wormwood &
i send the black grasses creeping
back over the concrete

& oy vilitala halka! the jackdaws are
circling, clawing at the resonant
black earth beneath their feet

iii)

& here you are,
with your addiction,
province with the finest caviar;

& it’s never enough
when you know there’s more,
so slit the belly of the fish

dig in that curved knife
& scoop out the black-gold,
split a million atoms

because you think it will help.

o chorna voda!

& i will rustle along
the lakeshore, your children
are playing there

with thyroids like brittle
snailshells, cracked calcium
dissolving into a cooling pond;

frogs float dissolute and distended
in the swamp, silent throats bulging
up like moons, something’s wrong,

something is very wrong.

o chorne zillia!

& i am keening in the hollows,
deflated balloon of a crow’s chest,
blackened antlers of a moose.

o chorno byl’.

iv)

you’re the man in
a little house in a little town
by lac cardinal
& your wife strokes her belly,
baby’ll be with you soon

& you are waiting
for what they told you
would be the trickle-down
but if you listened beyond
the reactor’s humming

you’d hear it’s only
water torture, dripping flash
of that vast black-gold
endlessly running out.

& one night i’ll have to
come to you, come to your
window & its foggy breathmarks,
a baby in my arms, croaking
out a pulse;

later, at the hospital,
your daughter arrives, her
throat swollen, unsinging
& you remember that reflection,
crumbling into ash & earth

& if you listen, i’ll
be singing to her, i’ll tell her
you’ll all be gone soon,
& she will become the earth
without you

o chorna voda, chorne zillia
vona zi mnoyu


she’s a white swallow now
she’s the last green shoot
pushing its way through the
asphalt, she’s a quiet, growing
earth you’ll never see





* * *



notes:



rusalka-rusalochka -- a rusalka

zelene-zemlianynochka -- green dweller of the earth

oy vilitala halka -- the jackdaw alit

chorna voda -- black water

chorna zillia -- black grasses

chorno byl -- black stalks, the mugwort plant (often translated as wormwood) -- in Ukrainian belief, sometimes seen as a plant that keeps the rusalky away

vona zi mnoyu -- she's with me



-- lac cardinal is the proposed site of the nuclear power plant.

-- chernobyl fallout apparently caused genetic defects in swallows, one of which caused albinism

-- chernobyl heart is a degenerative cardiac condition contracted by many children living in the area hardest hit by the explosion

Sunday, April 13, 2008

skin & earth

skeletons of growing things from last year, some sort of aster. river valley, april 8th/08

new moss under the snow, river valley, april 8th/08.

i have a lot of poems living in the form of poem-cocoon-fragments right now. my thesis is a little bit draining right now & prevents other things from getting written all at once... but i made another vesnianka; this is probably my favourite sort of ukrainian folk song = sympathetic magic for growing things! (of course, formatwise, this is not really a vesnianka, there's no refrain or anything, but it was spontaneous, & in the spirit of things, growing things should not be constrained by a framework. so, yes.)

skin & earth
i wish
my skin gave birth
like the earth’s,

to tulips unfurling
from bulbs, curled
like fetal sparrows

ready to push their
reddish beaks hungrily
through the ridges

of my collarbones,
soft freckled soil
of my chest.

april grit
under my fingernails
sprouts cedary mosses,

a bliss of juniper berries
like crow’s eyes,
birthmarks on my cheeks.

i wish
spring let me wake
with pasqueflowers

pushing purple bells
up through the soft
pulp of my heart.
* * *

last april's vesnianka-bits

Sunday, April 06, 2008

til you get to the core

self-portrait (upside-down) in a puddle, a few weeks ago, 112st & 80th ave, i think.

I interrupt my thesis-writing to post this: the little film for the song Wanderlust, by Björk.

I am leaving this harbour
Giving urban a farewell
Its habitants seem too keen on God
I cannot stomach their rights and wrong
I have lost my origin
And I don't want to find it again
Rather sailing into nature's laws
And be held by ocean's paws

Oh, Björk, how you delight & terrify me! Travelling downriver on the backs of lovely felted musk oxen in what looks to be Greenland, escaping your stagnant harbour only to find there is an old mud-woman in your packsack, who wants to wrestle... because she is all the self, all the ancestors you wished to leave behind... & the river spirit, rising up in front of you, mountainous, looking like a Southeast Asian lion dancer, carving new channels with its brilliant paws, guiding you into... & oh the ending! Snapping at the straps of my heart. Because this is all magic, & I - I just get it. Beautiful.

Wanderlust
Relentlessly craving wanderlust
Peel off the layers
Until you get to the core


Tuesday, April 01, 2008

the space in between, part II.

the puddle universe two fridays ago, an alley (near 112th st & 82 ave, i think)

puddle-world-tree, 112th st & about 78th ave. it's not there anymore, of course. such temporary portals...
I should be working on my thesis, but instead I am reading about Simone Weil, listening to Orkiestra Sw. Mikolaja, & knitting a sock, (almost all at once). Besides thinking about my thesis too much*, I am thinking about words, & language in general, about connection & expression... & spaces in between. Tangentially spurred on I think by Michael-Jackson-the-existential-anthropologist's writing about embodiment, I've also been writing in my notebook about Weil's concept of 'metaxu' -- that which separates and connects at the same instance -- in relation to how I think about language, and words, poems specifically.

Anyway, this bit is nice:

"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love." -- Simone Weil, in 'Gravity and Grace'.

I wish I could have tea with her.

* * *

*I am even having incredibly transparent dreams lately about my thesis. In one, my mother & I were in a little village somewhere, called Acornshe. (cf. Shäwshe, aka Dalton Post, I'm sure of it.) & I was showing her the significance of the linguistic landscape, and rambling about matrices & indexicality & symbolic power, as there were signs in a mixture of Southern Tutchone & English.

(If dreams are for sorting and recycling thoughts, I hope this means the writing will flow more smoothly.)

I has also had another one about showing my mother a caribou-skin drum, but this one was less straightforwardly thesis-y & I am still unravelling all the levels.