more semi-baked poems.

i)

waves of waxwings
wind & disperse
across treetops,
the beating of their wings
like windblown snow;

embroidering the city sky
with a swooping language,
fluid black flecks, woven

& moving over a
page of whiteness,

confusing me as to
the syntax
of the deceased.

your baba was, they say, she
was a good cook, good mother
good dancer she was so good
but
i can’t say it like that,
this was,
this were,
when she still
is;

realis, irrealis.
dead is not alive,
but that doesn’t negate the
fact you existed. it
proves it.

so death is not was;
death is just forgetfulness.

like the waxwings migrate, repeat
their soft sreeeeing call
over and over --
they’ve flown
for as long as they can remember,
they will fly as long as those wings
breed memory.

i cannot use the past
perfective for someone
who is still living for me,
for dying did not render you
not my grandmother.

ii)

& i want to believe in the semantics
of small miracles,
like faces in birchbark,
a voice heard in my sleep.

like the lone bird
who came to us, came to me
in a dream sealed by the
tail of the bird in flight, gold wax
dripping into my eyes,

the light in her face, her soft hands
when she said,
ty duzhe dobre, oh, you are doing so good!

there is no was. she is ever
my grandmother, not irrealis.

but real & migrating
like small birds
that come in a waxwing cloud,
alight suddenly, embroider

themselves dark into the pale
sky of the heart, then
move on.

"Ich bin meine eigene Frau..."

the infamous listen bird. (which is not actually advertising for Listen Records.)

Last weekend I had the good fortune of seeing a beautiful play at the Citadel – ‘I Am My Own Wife’ by Doug Wright, performed by John Ulyatt. It was one of those one-person-playing-multiple-character-shows that I find so engaging & truly amazing. To watch someone change characters by the subtlest, yet most crucial gesture, – the tilt of the head, the heaviness of a footfall, all before speaking. It was brilliant, as was the set design, with all the vintage furniture suspended from the ceiling in the dark recesses of the stage, at times softly illuminated...

The story was very compelling as well – it was based on Doug Wright’s own interviews with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, directly inspired by her taped oral histories that he researched in the early 1990s. In short, Charlotte was an East German transvestite who led a tumultous and colourful life as a furniture collector and antique museum curator, surviving an abusive father, as well as both WW2 and the Cold War... I do not want to give too much away here – her story should really be seen, experienced if possible (the play is over now, but the script is published and quite easy to find at a University library, I’m sure) so I should just say that her life story is definitely compelling and unbelievable.

One of the recurrent issues in the play is the ‘truth’ of Charlotte’s stories; the narrator (Doug himself) and other characters continually return to this problem, distressed because they cannot match her memories with the documented facts. The play deals beautifully with this issue, I think, and through Charlotte he reveals something very crucial about the practice of collecting oral histories, and the intrinsic truth present in any individual’s recollections of her life.

I will paraphrase Charlotte herself in saying that we must accept her stories and she herself accepted each piece of furniture that she found -- unperfected, unadorned, untainted by polish or authoritative voice, simply as is. Her stories are truths in that they are her ‘telling of herself’, her own perception and mediation of the story of her life, and they are thus full of truth, in all their complexity and contradiction. She preserved her stories, collected them like her furniture, memories illuminated in ornate clusters, suspended, arranged, sometimes tangled, but all there, all part of her life. She presented her stories just as she pulled old antiques out of a box, randomly, out of linear order. Is a shiny repainted cabinet a more truthful cabinet than one covered in scratched and fading stains? I would think it is almost less so, because then we are not seeing any record of its experience, that is being hidden from us for the sake of appearances.

If we want to actually understand Charlotte’s life, it is better to go to her memories and personal experiences, rather than Stasi files or German talk show hosts. Bryna and I discussed this in depth after the play, and we both see this play as being supportive the value of plural histories, and oral history as an important research method. Whether or not one even believes in a definitive, objective truth, this play eloquently shows us that finding one grand ‘truth’ matters little in coming to deeply understand one person’s life experiences and motivations. ‘I Am My Own Wife’ is Charlotte’s truth, and also Doug’s truth as the mediator between her words and the audience. His writing is reflexive, but never overpowering, and he conveys their relationship simply and eloquently.

One of my favourite bits:

[Charlotte]: …This table, he is over one hundred years old. If I could, I would take an old gramophone needle and run it along the surface of the wood. To hear the music of the voices. All that was said…

I am so glad I got to see it. I remember Audrey telling me about it after she saw it first in New York City two years ago, how amazing it was. Mostly I recalled her mention of the ‘lion picture’ but I shall not reveal that secret now.

***

Last Wednesday I also got to hear Wade Davis speak – (or, rather, orate documentary-style!) He seems to be traipsing across the country with some lovely photography in tow, and I very much enjoyed what he had to say. (I also covet his National Geographic explorer-in-residence position. I would like to take over when he retires....) He mostly touched on subjects he has covered in his newest book, ‘Light at the Edge of the World’ and an upcoming documentary, and while I wished in many cases he could go into depth about what he was mentioning, I was just glad to hear these subjects discussed.

He talked mostly on the incredible importance of biodiversity / cultural diversity and the (hopeful!) persistence and adaptability of culture. I was especially happy that he mentioned language endangerment and the connection of language to cognitive system. He spoke so passionately about the respect needed for multiple systems of knowledge, for indigenous worldviews to be valued on the same level as industrial/Western scientific knowledge, that I wanted to run up and give him a hug.

His discussion of sacred geography and examples of Quechua communities in Peru also interested me – I was not so aware of the exact symbolism of the layout of Macchu Picchu. I am so enthralled with the image of the Urubamba river (below the city) being the earthly parallel of the Milky Way, the glacier of the sky. It makes perfect sense now, really... His descriptions of the village pilgrimages, especially the one where the whole community runs up and down the sacred peaks surrounding the village in a ritual, mappable pattern to rebalance the feminine energy of the earth goddess Pachamama was so beautiful, and especially provocative considering my obsession with landscape and toponymy right now. I am hoping to write a paper soon for my northern language issues class that somehow deals with landscape and its place in unifying community and asserting group and individual identities (through language).

Davis's book Light at the Edge of the World (which contains many of the same photos!) is waiting for me at the library and I am excited. I am taking full advantage of my not-sleeping to read & read & read...

den' narodzhennia.

This is my grandmother. She would be 91 today. I think she's in her mid-twenties in this picture... already a long way from the cowshed down by the river.

She loved to dance. She taught me to waltz on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor at her house, she told me of hiking through winter fields in the darkness just to get to the dances, the vechirnytsy, in her youth.

I never knew her when she was this age, of course, but this is how I like to think of her now: free to dance all the time now, waltzing & curtsying so whimsically & elegantly in the perpetual-summer grasses somewhere not far away...

"Mother, may I go out dancing? Yes, my darling daughter... "

quelques mots...

I was recently thinking (due to discussion about oral history) about how life has no linear plot.

Of course, being in an industrialized society we have conceptualized time in a line, chopped it into quantities, conceptualized it in little manufactured calendar-boxes and threw out our cyclic sundials in order to keep track of stuff, keep track of our “progress” – thereby shaping our thoughts to make it seem as if it does have a set plot.

But really, even past-present-future are so hazy in actuality; things happen from all directions, the past floats up, or we do go ‘back in time’ & get mired in the past just as we also sometimes get ahead of ourselves & fall into the future. Thoughts and memories and emotions of the distant past and distant future influence us at all times, at random, things happening in tangents, never going only forward. It’s not always just the direct moments of cause-&-effect, one at a time, plotted out on a little triangular diagram from grade seven language arts...

& our lives are never organized thematically. Sometimes everything does happen at once & every action becomes tangled in multiple plot-strands, each string informing every other string of action in the knot. It’s impossible.

This is also why I like to write poems. (& really have insurmountable trouble making stories...)

For poems also have no linear time, no insistent plot.

I like being able to deal with one moment, or a series of moments all entangled but in any particular order. I like to deal with the emotion & the memory. I don’t necessarily like to concoct what will happen next.

& I’ve been reading much Nicole Brossard lately. She is a fantastically amazingly delicious Quebecois author who is sadly overlooked, I think, in favour of Anglo authors such as Margaret Atwood, Brossard eclipses her in all manner of everything, especially in the sheer beauty of each line. I have never been terribly shaken by an Atwood sentence, I’ve never really wanted to quote her. Her phrases are very edgy & functional & powerful, yes, but nowhere near as purely poetic as a Brossard clause. When I read Atwood, I can see she is psychologically interested in stories, but I wonder how much she loves language. Brossard, however – even her language is filled with details about the delicacy of pronouns, the heady rush of verbs. “Certain words ignite me.” I am currently reading Hier, or en anglais, "Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon" which is so intricate & gorgeous & lush. Four character-strands told in interwoven musings, swift short chapters. So wrenchingly good. It made me miss my bus stop...

I also finished her short book Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochaine roman, ("She would be the first sentence of my next novel"). It’s a lecture she gave on writing, & she says something I really like:

«La vie n’est pas un histoire, elle est un émotion qui donne lieu à une aventure dans la langue.»
"Life is not a story, it is an emotion that gives rise to an adventure in language.''

I think that very much summarizes poetry for me, & even as much as the reason why I am ultimately writing. I truly do not see my life as a narrative, although certainly I am aware of a great many patterns and recurrences and the overarching laws of causes and effects – despite all this, I feel like I live through a mass of collected experiences and feelings that come from all directions, all origins in the past/present/future, and it is this wholism I want to convey in my poems.

As Brossard also writes in Elle serait...

« Je suis un femme du present... J’aime sentir que le monde peut converger, se défuire et se reconstituer en moi dans le temps court du poéme... » "I am a woman of the present. I like to feel that the world can converge, deconstruct and then reconstitute itself within me in the short time of a poem. "

This makes me happy, because her words encourage me on my writing, and the possibilities of a particular project of mine... I don’t have to have conventional dialogue! Or chapters! Or linear plot! & what I write might still even make sense to people other than myself... Her words inspire me to experiment with forms.... I’d been working on a short ‘novella’ since August, which is not really a novel at all, & is not really prose either... it’s a poem with chapters, I’d say... & it got very frustrating & fragmentary so I left it alone for a few months... because I couldn’t make things happen in it. & I thought things were supposed to happen. But Brossard’s ideas make much sense to me & have provoked me to continue it... because maybe I can make something readable & meaningful out of little themes & images in this little haphazard web... a collage with threads of characters... I too don’t want to be caught in the ‘subject-verb-object’ schema Brossard speaks of. I like using second-person narration, & switching point of view often, to focus on different significant details like changing camera lenses.

I like tangents. That is the moral of the story.

So go read Nicole Brossard. She is easy to find en francais (mais oui) et en anglais, et aussi en les deux a la meme temps!