a confession and a poem for a sunday

Often when people find out that I’m an English major they will ask me whether I have a favourite author or period. I almost never answer the same way. Sometimes I will just respond by citing whichever poet it is that I pulled off my bookshelf the night before and have sitting on my bedside table. Other times, because I so often get swept away by poets, I will simply cite whoever, of the many authors I am studying at any given time, has my greatest affections at that moment. I like this game because it keeps me from getting bored with the question or my response to it and it keeps me from focussing too much on any one author or period. But the truth is, there is one poet who I think I could call my favourite. He is the poet who first made me love poetry and he is also the one who I always find myself turning back to whenever I feel wearied by my studies. And, it never fails, everytime I return to his work I still love it as much as ever. He is Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I think, more than anything else, it is the form of his poetry that has captivated me all these years. His experimental metre, his manufactured words… ah yes. Hopkins. The reason I bring him up is that I have decided to post a poem which I think appears at first glance, and I think you will agree, somewhat lacking in content. But it is a poem whose metre I have thought much about. When I wrote it, it was meant to be a kind of experiment and I think there may still be some merit in that.
Although I have not marked in accented syllables and feet as Hopkins so often did, I would like to make one comment on the rhythm of the piece. I think the metre will probably reveal itself quickly as you read and, as such, you will probably be inclined to hear the word ‘Memory’ (line 3) as a two-syllable word because that will make the third line, like the ones before and after it, iambic tetrametre (weak-strong, w-s, w-s, w-s). But please remember that ‘Memory’ can be read two ways, and if you read it as three syllables – mem – or – y – the line changes quite a bit, and i think the poem does also. First, the variable quality of the word itself and the interruption that it may or may not bring to the metre gives a little more depth to the surface reading of the poem (ie. the poem is centred around a night interrupted by memories [or personified, Memory] and the word may or may not be an interruption in the form of the poem – perhaps the word itself and the possibilities of reading it in two ways [one of which resolves a problem of metre] gives the reader hope that perhaps the speaker, like the reader, may find a way to stop Memory’s interruption). But also – and this is my more sincere hope (although I fear I was not quite successful) – I wanted the poem to invite a second, more philological reading (and maybe this will be more apparent to those of you who have been kept up at night wrestling with some linguistic composition that will simply not resolve itself). In this second reading, the word Memory may not only be capitalized to personify it, but also to draw attention to its identity as a word. In this sense, the poem becomes a meditation on some of the difficulties that one faces in the composition process, on a distinction that i began to draw out in my last posting between mere reflection and art. I guess, as it regards this distinction, I probably should tease out some of the implications of the dreaming that I represent here where dreaming is illustrated as ignorant but also not entirely futile. But I will leave that for another day, and conclude by saying, simply, that I wanted to capture, through my experiments with form in this juvenile little poem, a glimpse of the frustrating liminal space that I often find myself in when I try write poetry or when I find myself inspired by poetic thoughts or images but utterly defied in my attempts to capture them on the page in something like a poem. So…

Memory

The night has come
but as of yet I do not sleep
for Memory saw me lie alone
and came and wrapped his arms around
He filled with kisses full my mind,
but not my mouth.
His touch – elusive as the wind!

O, fly Man fly,
and let me least have dreams tonight,
(You do not know how longingly I look upon them)
when I forget no one is here
and relish in my ignorance,
cherish an hour of innocence
so sweet – without an empty mouth,
a captive tongue, a lost embrace…

and when I wake,
the sun shall be my comfort, for
daylight is poison to Your veins.

But sadly now You torment me,
and I just lie indignantly.

writing bannatyne

people who have visited the bannatyne house where i live will know how wonderfully atypical it is. the tangible details of this place are only the beginning: six young women, five guitars, four-years of tenancy, three lived floors, two separate staircases leading to the second floor, one bathroom, a million shoes. but as we have layered year upon year of experience in this place something else has been steadily growing in each of us: a sensation of something unquantifiable about our experience here, of something terribly profound that has been moving each of us. but that “something” consistently eludes our best efforts at articulation or understanding.
i wonder sometimes, if we had known at the beginning what this experience would become for each of us, would we have lived differently or made better efforts to record this time spent at the crossroads of bannatyne and juno? perhaps we would have been more deliberate about self-consciously trying to understand what this experience was meaning to us over the course of our time here.

but these thoughts have only really begun to emerge as we consciously and deliberately approach the end of our time here, as we approach the moment when bannatyne will crossover completely into history and cease to be quotidien, when we will no longer experience it as present.

there is a line in the first poem of dionne brand’s thirsty (i included it in the first post on this blog) that captures something about the way i feel about this:

how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

we have often said that one of us should write a book about this place, about what we’ve experienced here. i think i have often felt this imperative stronger than my roommates, perhaps for the same reason that this question of brand’s resonates so strongly with me.
i am anticipating the experience of this place as history. often i forget that we always have and always will exist in the space where history is created. but i also often forget that the intimacy we experience with history is not our life. i fear that the recognition of that distinction is at times what distinguishes art from mere reflection.

a couple of weeks ago, on a pleasant friday afternoon, i went to a performance at the university of winnipeg entitled “A Taste of Montreal”. it was here that i was introduced to the poet robyn sarah. the poetry she read was written in a deliberate attempt to reflect on and artistically reconstruct an experience that she had had in her youth, an experience that was grounded in both a particular space and a particular time, not unlike my experience here at bannatyne. the kind of dialectic that i observed in her poetry between representation and creativity was made possible, i think, only by the distance that had been gained between the moment of performance and the moment of the youthful experience. she suggested at the beginning that the artistic endeavour she was about to engage in would look something like “dragging the past kicking and screaming into the present to make something new.” i guess she meant for there to be a kind of synergy between the representation of the past and its re-creation in the present, although whether it was intentional or unavoidable or both i’m not entirely certain. nonetheless, the representation of the past in the creative work of the present necessarily interacted to produce something greater than either would have been on its own.

i spoke to her briefly afterwards about some of her poetry and some of my own ideas and she was as inspirational to me as her poetry had been. what follows is one of the poems that she read at u of w – a poem which, when i heard it, i thought could almost have been written about our house. i guess i’m posting it now in place of the poems that i will not be writing about this place for quite some time.

Into the Nineties

Thin is the veneer
of newness on this renovated house
built early in the century. The floors
are sanded to the quick.
They will not take
another sanding. Now that the
glossy finish, rolled on slick,
has flaked away in spots,
and winter dryness cracks the weaker boards
so that they catch the foot and splinter off,
we see: it is an old floor.
No help for it.

And in the night
the banging in the pipes,
and the slow seep
of dust, out from between
the mortared bricks
of one old wall laid bare
for elegance…

So snows the old,
spreading its sediment
on all our furnishings, a
fine grime.

for we who still twilight in this west

i often refer to myself as an occasional poet. this is because i only occasionally write poetry and when i do it is generally to commemorate emergent occasions. what follows is one of these occasional poems.

reflections on east & west: to a goodly lady
(for my brother who always was and probably still is “the best in the west”)

oh lordy child, she said, you don’t need more.
what do you think a second scoop is for?
but that boy could never figure out why
he had to take those scoops one at a time.

I
listen,
the crashing of the bowl on the floor,
the scrambling to clean it up, the child’s
muffled tears for the loss.

the aunt
stares in wonder at this little child
who cannot seem to understand this simple
imperative
to patience.
the child just cries on the floor
still caught in the moment and now even more
for what it no longer has to offer.
the mother gently sighs, ambivalent, because this child
cannot understand proportion
but she, small soul, is hungry too,
yet bursting with short love
in a long, dark universe
she cannot fathom.

oh mother,
he could not know how differently
he could have done what he did not do.
but there are human possibilities
in stories of this hue
when heard in silent places,
in unrefractive darkness.

II
crystal in the window.
i came here to see the light change
colour. first red
then blue
then difference cease
it is no longer light transformed
no longer i pursue
i cannot see, but myself am seen,
kaleidescope of light, my eye.
the evidence of sun
explored in seeing
as vibrant crystal finds its home,
by light,
in me.

III
dull, flat february
without a taste of light.
we starve without the sun.
but simple thought is food
and we learn patience here
static with the memory of that goodly lady, who sparkled
in simplicity.
and who better to teach?
if there be one more qualified,
chasing the sun by night,
she’s landed in the east.
far from we who twilight in this west
and beg the moon for silent secrets
on how the sun will rise,
unknowing that a twinkle here
has made these quiet
eyes
wise.

the background

following in the footsteps of bpNichol, dionne brand, and so many other of the canadian avant-garde poets that i’ve been studying this semester, this blog will have many beginnings. here is another:

i was first introducted to the idea of a liminal space by a shakespeare professor at the university of regina in my second year of university. we were studying a midsummer night’s dream and he had suggested to me that almost the entire play exists in a liminal space. it begins (with Theseus):

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace: four happy days bring in
Another moon; but, O! methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes; she lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

and she responds:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Indeed, almost the entire play unfolds in this liminal space – the four days of waiting and anticipating the marriage(s) that is(/are) to come. This holds both for the characters that we observe on stage and ourselves in the audience who understand, from the first moment of the play, what we are to expect from it.

But what I found most fascinating was how the idea of a liminal space is both illustrated and vivified in the fairy-world moments of the play. In that world, it is as if time completely stops for the characters. The lovers move into a space where it seems as if no time elapses at all. From the time they go into the forest until the time when they wake up, many things take place, and yet, upon waking, none have a sense or recollection of what happened. At that time, I tried to capture my sense of the liminal with some words about a dream. I called it then “still motion” and I hold now that such is the essence of liminality:

she danced in the delight of her own thoughts,
still motion, perfect movement; life without
contradiction.

lines moving among lines; into another
proclaiming what is not as that which is.

a moment without questions or realizations
everything passes without passing
existing without ever coming to be
infinite and nothing

the dance simply is what it is,
and is not; and it cannot be any other way.

that is its perfection. . .

so, the liminal space: the place where everything happens in the time between now and the moment we anticipate; or perhaps, the place that makes that future moment possible (or sometimes impossible)

as regards the title, the stillness is meant to capture the feeling we have while in the liminal space that we’re making no progress towards our goal. the motion is all that happens in the meantime, which we are so often unconscious of.

anyway, since that time, i’ve been fascinated with liminal spaces. they are beautiful, they are educational. . . they are often frustrating. but they are ubiquitous and unavoidable.
and with this blog i intend to seek out, write into, and exist in liminal spaces. that is the liminal spaces project – a project to make conspicuous the inconspicuous things in liminal spaces and in so-doing, make myself and hopefully others less uncomfortable to exist in them.

i guess it’s fitting that i have begun this project during advent.

the foreword

although i’ve been contemplating the creation of a blog for quite a long time, in part just because i really like the idea of blogs, i was convinced that the perfectionist in me would make it impossible to write in a space like this.
and while it is true that i am an eternal revisionist, i read something today that taught me that there may be a point where revision borders on immorality.

from Huxley’s forward to brave new world :

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one’s middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth – all this is surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book – and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

I begin this blog with hope that people might be able to find some trace of merit admidst the many faults this blog will possess (and although i acknowledge my long sentences, grevious faults though they may be, i suspect they are also unavoidable and i will show no remorse for them).

what inspired this project

Dionne Brand’s Thirsty

I

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed